Dan Snow travels back in time to a seething Manhattan, New York in the throes of the industrial revolution. Millions fled persecution, poverty and famine in Europe in the 19th century in search of the Promised Land. When they arrived what they found was even worse than what they'd left behind.
New York was a city consumed by filth and corruption, its massive immigrant population crammed together in the slums of Lower Manhattan. Dan succumbs to some of the deadly disease-carrying parasites that thrived in the filthy, overcrowded tenement buildings. He has a go at cooking with some cutting edge 19th century ingredients - clothes dye and floor cleaner - added to disguise reeking fetid meat. And he marvels at some of the incredible feats of engineering that transformed not just the city, but the world.
New York was a city consumed by filth and corruption, its massive immigrant population crammed together in the slums of Lower Manhattan. Dan succumbs to some of the deadly disease-carrying parasites that thrived in the filthy, overcrowded tenement buildings. He has a go at cooking with some cutting edge 19th century ingredients - clothes dye and floor cleaner - added to disguise reeking fetid meat. And he marvels at some of the incredible feats of engineering that transformed not just the city, but the world.
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00:00New York, famed throughout the world as a beacon of opportunity, HQ of capitalism.
00:13The gleaming, brash, technological marvel where anything is possible and everything
00:18has its price.
00:20New York City is the ultimate embodiment of the American dream, but for the millions of
00:25poor immigrants that arrived here in the 19th century, it was more of a nightmare.
00:33A hundred and fifty years ago, New York covered only the southern tip of the island of Manhattan.
00:39In the throes of its industrial revolution, the city had become one of the most disgusting
00:44and filthy places on earth.
00:47New York was a corrupt frontier city where poor immigrants were ruthlessly exploited
00:52by fat cat bosses and greedy landlords, all driven by the pursuit of filthy money.
01:00The Big Apple was rotten to its core, but it was the fight against filth, the struggle
01:05against grime and crime that would shape almost every aspect of this city.
01:11I'm going to explore what New York was like at its very worst.
01:16I'll meet the parasites that preyed on its citizens.
01:19Ooh, ow, that bit me.
01:21And I'll get my hands dirty to find out just how close this city came to drowning in a
01:27sea of its own detritus.
01:29What the heck is this?
01:30You tell me.
01:31Is that urine?
01:32I think that could be urine.
01:34Yet out of its nightmare of filth, New York's iconic skyline would be forged.
01:40In just 100 years, the city's population shot up by a staggering 1,000%.
01:47And to survive and continue to prosper, New York had to clean up its act.
01:54Pioneering reformers and inventors would lead the fight with momentous engineering projects
01:59and many revolutionary ideas.
02:02The electric light bulb.
02:03From the world's first commercial power station to the earliest automobiles.
02:09Swinging around.
02:10But it's only now in the 21st century that we're beginning to realise that New York's
02:16battle to transform itself into a modern city would come at a price.
02:31New York.
02:32Today, it's home to more than 8 million people.
02:35The biggest and richest city in the United States.
02:42Built within easy reach of the Atlantic trade routes, for nearly 400 years, New York has
02:47been the bridge between Europe and North America.
02:52New York's success has always been based on trade.
02:55This is a wonderful natural harbour here, where ships from around the world can anchor
02:58safely.
02:59Then you have the city on Manhattan Island, and to the left there is the Hudson River
03:02which reaches deep into the heart of the continent.
03:06This is the gateway to North America.
03:08The link between the new world and the old.
03:15Early in the 19th century, New York was being transformed by the Industrial Revolution.
03:21Its shores were lined with factories and workshops.
03:26Uptown the city's elite lived in some of the grandest townhouses in America.
03:31New York was a city where serious money could be made.
03:37It had quickly become a magnet for millions of European immigrants, all drawn here to
03:42make their fortunes in the land of opportunity.
03:51It was the start of one of the biggest mass migrations in history, as people fled abject
03:56poverty, religious and ethnic persecution.
04:02The first to arrive in great numbers were the Irish, as they fled the Great Potato Famine
04:06of the 1840s.
04:08Over 650,000 Irish would come to New York.
04:13Many of these migrants were destitute before they left, and they were unable to survive
04:17the terrible conditions on board.
04:19As many as a third of them died.
04:23Despite the horrific death toll on some of the ships at its peak in 1845, up to 1,000
04:28immigrants a day were landing in New York.
04:33But for many of the survivors, the worst was yet to come.
04:38And this is where many of those poor immigrants ended up.
04:40It's now an area just between Chinatown and Little Italy in lower Manhattan.
04:45Back then it was known as the Five Points, because it was the intersection of five big
04:49roads.
04:50Then it was a terrible, infamous slum.
04:53Over 5,000 people packed into buildings with no central heating, no running water, and
04:58no sewers.
05:03The streets of the Five Points were piled high with all manner of rubbish and animal
05:07waste.
05:08And in New York's cold winters, this toxic mix would freeze.
05:14And this is how bad it could get.
05:18In the winter, layer upon layer of frozen muck would pile up, until in some streets
05:23it was a metre and a half deep.
05:27New Yorkers fondly called this Corporation Pudding.
05:29It was a terrible mixture of human and animal excrement, waste products from slaughterhouses,
05:35breweries and tanneries, and of course just all the muck and mud from the streets.
05:39For months at a time during the winter, this would have clogged the streets.
05:45It wasn't only disgusting streets newly-arrived immigrants had to contend with.
05:51The tenements they had to live in were just as bad.
05:55Vast swathes of New York slums were owned by many of the wealthiest families in America,
06:00and they were making a fortune from the poor immigrants.
06:05Far from escaping the deprivations and social injustices of Europe, these recently-arrived
06:09immigrants found they were in a city that was dirtier and even more unfair.
06:16Employed by the landlords, it was the job of runners to hustle freshly-arrived immigrants
06:20into the tenements, where they would be fleeced to pay an extortionate rent.
06:31Now a museum, this is one of the last tenement blocks in the city that has remained pretty
06:35much unchanged since the 19th century.
06:41These rooms might feel quite nice and spacious, and when they were built, they were.
06:45With so many immigrants arriving, building large six-storey tenement buildings seemed
06:50like the perfect solution to the problem of how to house this expanding population.
06:55But with so many new immigrants arriving, demand rapidly outstripped supply, and the
07:03slum landlords spotted the chance to make some filthy money.
07:08Rents shot up, and some apartments like this could have had two families living in them.
07:12There could easily have been a dozen people in here.
07:15These tiny apartments rapidly degenerated as more and more people were piled in.
07:25With the landlords charging such high rents, soon these apartments were more than just
07:30rooms. They'd also have to double up as a workplace.
07:35This room would have been a sweatshop. There'd have been five or six people in here making
07:39clothes, shoes, and hats, and at night it just would have been a cramped dormitory.
07:45No running water, no bathrooms, and just three stinking privies shared by hundreds.
07:50This place was more than unhygienic.
07:56And as if that wasn't enough, there were reports of some immigrants keeping their animals
08:00in their apartments.
08:03These corridors would have been filled with a dizzying array of smells and the discordant
08:07hubbub of languages from all over the world. And, of course, this melting pot was also
08:11the perfect breeding ground for disease.
08:17Overcrowded and filthy, early in the 19th century, New York's slums were ravaged by
08:22a series of devastating epidemics.
08:25But the city's elite were often reluctant to act until they themselves were threatened.
08:31In 1832, an outbreak of cholera, a deadly waterborne bacterium, had spread through the
08:37slums and infected the whole city.
08:40So many people died that bodies piled up in the streets, and it was said that anyone with
08:44a horse was drafted to help move them.
08:48Over 3,500 New Yorkers, both rich and poor, died in the epidemic.
08:55But it wasn't just disease that was devastating New York. At around the same time, 50 acres
09:02of the city were destroyed in an inferno. Fire and deadly disease were threatening its
09:08industrial expansion.
09:10New York needed to invest heavily to secure a plentiful supply of this, fresh water.
09:18Back in the 19th century, people would have killed to have this much fresh water to deliver
09:22reliably into the heart of New York City.
09:25That's because Manhattan was very marshy. It was very hard to dig wells that would produce
09:30anything other than brackish water. So lots of people had to rely on a very few wells.
09:34It also meant that porous soil meant that all the human and animal waste would seep
09:39down and pollute the fresh water. That's how disease spread. That's how people got cholera
09:44and epidemics broke out.
09:48In 1837, the city embarked on America's biggest ever engineering project, to get millions
09:55and millions of gallons of fresh water into New York every day.
10:00And this is where they got it from. They dammed the Croton River north of New York.
10:06This dam was actually built in 1906. The original is now submerged under the reservoir.
10:11But that reservoir was still big enough to hold hundreds of millions of gallons of fresh
10:17water. You get a sense of the size of this operation from over here.
10:28It's just vast. It shows the amount of water that a modern city needs to survive and prosper.
10:39To get all this water to New York City, 41 miles away, they built an equally impressive
10:44aqueduct.
10:47Large parts of the aqueduct survive right to the present day and there's a big stretch
10:52of it right here underneath my feet. And over here is where I get in.
10:58The Croton Aqueduct served New York for over a century. It was finally decommissioned in
11:031955, which means I can get inside it.
11:09New York's first aqueduct would take more than five years to build. It cost over $14
11:14million, which means at the time it was the most expensive construction project in America.
11:25Took around 4,000 workers, mostly Irish, to build this tunnel. Eight foot high and over
11:30seven feet wide. And it loses exactly 13 1â4 inches for every mile that it travels. And
11:37that means that the gravity brings the water from the reservoir, which is up there, right
11:42the way down there towards New York City, 41 miles away. 35 million gallons a day. And
11:50it took 22 hours to make that journey.
11:55When it was completed in 1842, you could ride in a boat all the way to New York in this
12:00tunnel.
12:07So this was the last section to be built, channeling the water up this seven foot iron
12:13pipe right across the last obstacle before the city, the Harlem River. Right, this should
12:23be the place to get a sense of the scale.
12:31This is the High Bridge, a truly epic piece of 19th century engineering, spanning a quarter
12:40of a mile and rising 100 feet above the river.
12:45The Croton Aqueduct marked the city's first major step towards modernity. When the water
12:53started flowing, New Yorkers rejoiced with a festival of connection, which included special
12:59drinks, songs and a huge procession.
13:03One New York diarist wrote that nothing is talked about or thought about in New York
13:07City but Croton water.
13:11The Croton Aqueduct would bring fresh water and a fresh problem for the city. The first
13:18to benefit from the new water system were the rich. They now had even easier ways to
13:22keep clean.
13:25It was really good news for plumbers who got to install 6,000 indoor bathrooms for
13:30the people of New York.
13:33The Croton Aqueduct also proved to be good news for a whole host of other industries,
13:37manufacturing things like taps, toiletries and of course, toilets.
13:42It was also very good news for one New Yorker called Joseph Gacy, who in 1857 invented toilet
13:49paper, which gave the filthy rich something else to flush down their new toilets with
13:55all that Croton water.
14:00With 6,000 homes now connected up to the Croton Aqueduct, that was a lot of waste water that
14:10was produced, especially when all those toilets got flushed. Much of it ended up on the streets
14:14and flooding the basements of nice houses like this.
14:19The solution was to build some of these, sewers. And they did, building some of New York's
14:26first.
14:26Trouble is, these are very expensive. The landlords in the slum areas couldn't or wouldn't
14:33pay for them and that left the residents of those areas wallowing in their own filth.
14:41Although the Croton Aqueduct did bring fresh water into the slums, there the rich landlords
14:47refused to pay for indoor plumbing or even connect to the sewage system.
14:52The poor were left with stinking privies that would flood into the streets.
14:56In fact, with ever more immigrants arriving all the time, the slums became even filthier,
15:02which for some new arrivals, was heaven.
15:08The slum landlords weren't the only ones feeding off the poor immigrants.
15:19In the bowels of New York's Museum of Natural History, Louis Sorkin has been pursuing his
15:24passion for the insects that thrived in 19th century New York, like these blood-sucking
15:29bed bugs.
15:31There's one.
15:33I can see it.
15:35These are adult bed bugs.
15:37Ah, it just bit me straight away.
15:42It'll take a few minutes to fill up on blood.
15:44Millions of bed bugs would have hitched a ride across the Atlantic with unsuspecting
15:49immigrants.
15:50Although they didn't transmit disease, their painful bites can easily become infected.
15:57This one's pretty full already.
15:59This one's full already.
16:00See? And that one's full already.
16:03They're full on my blood.
16:05Look at that little one.
16:06It's swollen to about three times its size, all red.
16:08Yeah, that can actually go to three to five times its volume, filling with blood.
16:13Bugs have a bad reputation, don't they?
16:16That's true.
16:17Many people just don't like them.
16:19But once you get to know them, they grow on you.
16:22Well, they grow on me quite literally.
16:23In fact, look at that guy.
16:24He's gone completely red now.
16:26Uh-huh, that's true.
16:27So I'm not getting disease from these guys.
16:30But which ones that would have been in New York in the 19th century do spread disease?
16:34Well, body lice.
16:35Have you got some of those?
16:36Yes, I do.
16:38I thought you might.
16:40Body lice proved to be fatal in the slums.
16:43They carried typhus, a particularly nasty disease.
16:46Its symptoms include a rash, delirium and a fever so debilitating that more than half
16:51of those infected die within two weeks of being bitten.
16:55These are human body lice.
16:57And what conditions do these need to sort of breed in and prosper?
17:01Usually it's just overcrowding.
17:03When you get many people all stuck, you know, in very crowded conditions,
17:07the lice will crawl from one person to another to another.
17:11If they were infesting your clothing, which is normally what happens,
17:14then you could have 50,000, 70,000 lice could be there.
17:20The typhus bacteria live in the guts of the lice.
17:23But surprisingly, it's not their bites that actually transmit the disease.
17:29Although it looks pretty dangerous, it's not the biting into the human
17:32that's spreading the disease. It's actually what's coming out of the other end.
17:35Yes, that's correct.
17:37The blood is taken up, but the disease organisms develop inside the gut of the louse
17:43and then defecation occurs and the disease organisms are now in that
17:48and the person scratches it into the wound.
17:51New York's poor were unaware that they were giving themselves typhus
17:54as they scratched the infected excrement of the lice into their fresh bite wounds.
18:02In the mid-1850s, the city not only lacked the scientific knowledge,
18:06but it saw little financial incentive to do anything about its disease-ridden slums.
18:13For every immigrant that died, there would be a new arrival,
18:16hungry for work and a place to live.
18:21New Yorkers were being decimated by wave after wave of disease.
18:26In fact, more New Yorkers were dying than were being born.
18:29And if it wasn't for all the immigration, said one city inspector,
18:32the city would soon become depopulated.
18:37In fact, in many parts of New York, the death rate was twice the American average.
18:41Then, in 1852, one young doctor decided it was time to get to grips
18:47with the city's endemic filth and epidemic injustice.
18:57Dr Stephen Smith was horrified to discover many of his typhus patients
19:01had something else in common.
19:03They all lived at the same address, in the same stinking tenement building.
19:11Inside, Smith was appalled to see so many diseased people
19:14crammed into one disgusting building.
19:17He wrote...
19:34Enraged by what he'd witnessed,
19:36Smith stormed off to confront the slum landlord.
19:40By consulting the tax records, Smith tracked the slumlord down.
19:44He turned up the amount of considerable wealth and influence.
19:47Despite Smith's angry protests, the landlord initially refused point-blank
19:52to improve conditions for the residents.
19:55Smith started campaigning to legally force New York's wealthy landlords
20:00to clean up their slums.
20:02But he soon discovered that getting the law changed was not enough.
20:06New York's entire system of government was beset by sleaze.
20:11And one place symbolised this more than any other.
20:15This was the New York County Courthouse.
20:18It was supposed to be devoted to the administration
20:21of fair and impartial justice,
20:23but, in fact, it became a symbol of filthy corruption.
20:28This courthouse, grand though it is,
20:32at the time cost New York's taxpayers a staggering $12 million,
20:36almost twice the amount that the USA paid Russia
20:40for Alaska a few years later.
20:45The man in charge, William Boss Tweed,
20:48headed the infamously corrupt Tammany Hall political machine
20:52and was stealing millions of dollars from the city.
20:55Corruption was endemic, and it was thanks to men like Boss Tweed
20:59that these guys were being left to clean the streets.
21:06Even though New Yorkers were paying for basic services like street cleaning,
21:10a large proportion of the cash was just being pocketed,
21:13which left large parts of the city looking like a rubbish dump.
21:17So, the only people that could be trusted were those who would do it for free.
21:21In slum areas like this, pigs were eating tonnes of rubbish every year.
21:26Boss Tweed and his mates estimated to embezzle around $200 million.
21:31That's well over a billion dollars today.
21:34And that's just greed.
21:38And, of course, there was a lot of money involved.
21:41There was a lot of money involved.
21:43There was a lot of money involved.
21:45And that's just greed.
21:49Faced with corrupt politicians and filthy rich landlords,
21:53for a decade, Dr Stephen Smith's campaign to improve the lives of New York's poorest
21:58had got nowhere.
22:00Then, in 1865, there were reports that a fresh outbreak of cholera,
22:05a deadly waterborne disease, was on its way from Europe.
22:10Smith knew that the epidemic would take hold in the slums
22:13and spread like wildfire across the city.
22:22Smith had already spelled out the dangers in a damning report published earlier that year.
22:28An original copy of it is kept here in the library of the New York Academy of Medicine.
22:33This is it. It's the 1865 Citizens' Association Report on the Sanitary Condition of the City.
22:40It lists, ward by ward, everything that is filthy about New York City,
22:44from rotting horses in the streets to sewage in the drinking water.
22:50In the front of the book, there's a letter signed by lots of prominent reformers,
22:54including, look here, Stephen Smith.
22:56And they advocate strongly that the city should introduce
22:59the kind of sanitation system that London had.
23:02This could not be more pressing, say these reformers,
23:04because the total number of deaths in the city of New York during the year of 1863
23:08was 25,196.
23:11That is equal to one death in every 35 of the inhabitants,
23:16and that was an unacceptably high number.
23:20For the first time, the authorities were forced to recognise just how filthy New York had become.
23:25They also produced these maps that covered the whole city,
23:28going into every single property in incredible detail.
23:32This is the infamous Five Points area,
23:35and there's a key down the left-hand side here that labels stables and privies and private dwellings.
23:41One of the most important symbols down here on the left-hand side is the black square.
23:44These are privies in an extremely offensive condition.
23:48I've spotted one block over here, right next to the brewery and the Mariner's Church,
23:52where there are several privies in extremely offensive condition.
23:55That is a block where you would not have wanted to get caught short.
24:00The report and the imminent arrival of cholera finally frightened the city into action.
24:06It established America's first independent board of health,
24:10and gave Dr Stephen Smith a job of vital importance,
24:14stopping cholera from decimating New York again.
24:24Smith's solution was simple.
24:27He wanted to clear out the slums.
24:29I've come to this 19th century tenement building,
24:31because behind this door there's an apartment that apparently hasn't been cleaned for 50 years.
24:36It's going to give me a sense of just how much filth Smith had to deal with.
24:45Wow.
24:48Oh, it smells unbelievable.
24:52The elderly lady, who has lived here for 60 years, suffers from depression.
24:57She was found collapsed on the floor and taken to hospital.
25:05Clearly this is one old woman's apartment that hasn't been cleaned since the 1960s.
25:10When you come in here, you realise that we humans fight a never-ending battle against our own waste,
25:14and in modern cities we're winning that battle.
25:17This is a reminder that that filth can overwhelm us and ultimately destroy us.
25:24And you get a real sense in here of the kind of conditions that Smith would have been dealing with.
25:29New York in the 19th century was a city that was labouring under tonnes of filth,
25:34accumulated mess for years like this.
25:38With the imminent arrival of cholera, under Smith's control,
25:42the Metropolitan Board of Health set about mobilising an army of cleaners
25:46to deal with the grips with the city's grime.
25:49You got your mask on? Yep.
25:51All right. You ready? Oh, yeah. Let's roll.
25:55Nearly a century and a half later, this team of specialist cleaners are about to do the same
26:00and try to make this apartment habitable once more.
26:03Here you go. Hold that.
26:05So we just start right here, OK?
26:07What the heck is this?
26:09You tell me. Is that urine? I think that could be urine.
26:12You think it's urine?
26:14Disgusting.
26:19In the first six months of 1866 alone,
26:22the health force went out from the Metropolitan Board
26:25to remove 160,000 tonnes of manure from the streets,
26:30over 38,000 cartloads of nitrile, that's human excrement,
26:35103 dead horses were removed and over 3,800 dead cats and dogs.
26:41This was a clean-up effort on a monumental scale.
26:48Crucially, where cholera was reported,
26:50Smith ensured that residents were put in quarantine
26:53and the house thoroughly disinfected.
26:55Look, you see all these roaches in here?
26:57The German, those are German.
26:59German roaches. German roaches.
27:06Smith's work was an unqualified success.
27:08Cholera did reach New York,
27:10but only 591 people died in the outbreak.
27:13That's ten times less than the previous outbreak 17 years before.
27:17New Yorkers were starting to realise
27:19that connection between dirt and disease,
27:21and the city could move on, turn its attention to an industry
27:24that had the capacity to make New Yorkers really sick.
27:27Food.
27:30Some of New York's most famous foods had their dirty little secrets.
27:34Take hot dogs, for example.
27:36Can I take that with mustard and onions, please?
27:38Sure.
27:39There were some scandalous things happening in the city's sausage industry.
27:49With so many people now living in New York,
27:51some profit-hungry butchers had found a way to feed them
27:54rotten pig's heads, decaying hearts and slime-covered steaks.
28:00Oh, yeah, there you go. There you go.
28:02Oh, that is disgusting.
28:06With no refrigerators,
28:08unsold meat in backstreet butchers would quickly rot,
28:11but some weren't prepared to throw it away and lose money.
28:15You know, you killed about a million pigs a year,
28:18New York City, 1880s,
28:20and, of course, you made your hams and your bacon and all that,
28:22but you got the older stuff.
28:24You got the heads, you got the hearts, you got the lungs.
28:26What are you going to do with it?
28:28You paid for it, you want to do something with it,
28:30so you turn it into sausage.
28:35In 1874, one sausage-making butcher
28:38was caught with 220 rotting heads in his cellar.
28:45That is just disgusting.
28:49The slime and foul smell of this three-week-old meat
28:52comes from the bacteria that form on its surface
28:55and start to break down the flesh.
28:58It's funny, it feels like it's kind of rotting away,
29:00that the whole layer of scum just coming out through his fingers.
29:03That's right, that's probably there.
29:05That's just rotting away, isn't it?
29:07For centuries, butchers could do little about the stink
29:10that made their rotten meat unsellable,
29:12until, in the 1880s,
29:14a new wonder product appeared on the market.
29:18Borax.
29:21Borax, you use it to clean your floors these days,
29:23but back in the 1880s, the meat companies started to add it.
29:26We've got some right here, put a little bit of magic...
29:29I can't believe we're adding cleaning products here.
29:31There it is.
29:32I suppose the key is just using it as a kind of masking agent, right?
29:35That's right, you want to use it to kill that bacteria that's there,
29:39and when you kill the bacteria,
29:40you kill the smells that the bacteria generates.
29:43So you've got to trick those age-old senses
29:46using modern industrial methods,
29:48and it's not going to stink.
29:51Boracic acid works by killing the bacteria
29:54that make rotten meat stink.
29:57And it's also pretty good at disinfecting wounds,
30:00killing cockroaches,
30:02and, of course, cleaning floors.
30:04There it goes.
30:06Shouldn't this smell nicer now, then?
30:08Well, it won't smell as bad. It shouldn't smell as bad.
30:10What do you think?
30:11Actually, that's much better.
30:13But the meat is still bad.
30:15That meat is still going to get you sick if you eat that meat,
30:18and what you want to do is turn the meat from looking like that,
30:21which is kind of old and gnarly,
30:23to looking like this.
30:25Back then, one way to give grey, rotten meat a healthy red colour
30:29was to add clothing dye made from coal tar.
30:32And this is clothes dye here?
30:33This is clothes dye, yep.
30:35Which also sometimes had a touch of arsenic in it.
30:38Can I mix it up?
30:39Mix it up?
30:40Mix it up.
30:41This must just rot in someone's gut straight out.
30:44The next stage is to add some stale bread or biscuits
30:47to bind it all together.
30:50Before pumping this chemically enhanced pulverised pork mixture
30:54into pre-prepared pig's intestine.
30:58Let's make some sausage.
31:00Just push.
31:02Put a little bit of air in there.
31:04There it comes.
31:05Oh, my goodness.
31:06There it comes.
31:07That looks like a real sausage, doesn't it?
31:08That does.
31:13This is the size of your Italian sausage.
31:16What you do is you tie off the end,
31:18and you kind of roll it up.
31:20There's your sausage in New York City, 1900.
31:23I know I shouldn't, but I'm actually feeling very proud of my sausage.
31:27The fact that it would make someone very sick or kill them,
31:30well, more about that later.
31:33In 1898, there were more than 25,000 food establishments in New York,
31:37and with just ten food inspectors for the whole city.
31:42For years, backstreet butchers could do pretty much as they pleased.
31:48It wasn't until 1906, when journalist Upton Sinclair
31:51exposed the horrors of the American food industry in his book The Jungle,
31:56that serious food regulations were finally introduced.
32:02After that, New York became deadly serious about food hygiene.
32:06They even locked up one cook for life for not washing her hands properly.
32:12MUSIC PLAYS
32:18For Irish immigrant Mary Mallon,
32:20hygiene wasn't too high on her list of priorities.
32:25Which was unfortunate, because Mary was a cook.
32:31By not washing her hands, Mary was unknowingly spreading typhoid.
32:36Its symptoms included diarrhoea and a terrible fever.
32:41Mary couldn't understand why, everywhere she worked, people kept getting sick.
32:49Some even died.
32:53Mary had no idea that these were on her hands.
32:57Bacteria.
32:59In 1882, German Robert Koch had published his paper
33:02proving that these tiny microorganisms cause disease.
33:08It transformed medical science.
33:11This was a groundbreaking moment.
33:14For the first time, scientists could actually see the enemy.
33:17And it also gave birth to a new science of microbiology,
33:20where they discovered how different bacteria cause a host of different diseases.
33:29In 1907, New York sanitary expert George Soper
33:33had tracked the typhoid outbreak down to Mary.
33:36Suspecting she was immune to the disease, but still carried the bacteria,
33:40Soper pleaded with her to be tested.
33:43But Mary angrily refused, and chased him off with a fork.
33:53Soon after a visit from the health board, Mary found herself locked up in quarantine,
33:58where she remained for three years, until she promised never to be a cook again.
34:05Five years later, there was another typhoid outbreak.
34:0825 people were infected, and two died.
34:12Again, it was traced back to a single cook.
34:15Although this time, it was to a Mrs Brown.
34:20Mrs Mary Brown.
34:25Mary had reneged on her promise.
34:28Typhoid Mary, as she became known, was carted off to quarantine again.
34:33This time, they never let her out, and she died a prisoner.
34:39Even though science helped New York get a handle on disease control,
34:44any efforts to clean up the slums had been quickly overwhelmed by mammoth immigration.
34:51The city's population had shot up 600% in just 50 years.
34:55By the 1880s, the population of New York was 1.2 million.
35:00Half of them were crammed into the slums.
35:03Whilst the city's rich and powerful turned a blind eye,
35:06corruption and exploitation had become as ingrained as the dirt itself.
35:12Horrified by this injustice and poverty, one New Yorker decided to make a stand,
35:19using a new tactic to shock the entire nation
35:24and force the city to tackle its filth.
35:26His name was Jacob Rees.
35:28In 1888, he became the first American to use this,
35:32flash photography, to expose the true horror of the slums as never before.
35:39Using a flash, Rees was the first photographer to be able to capture
35:43the grim reality of life inside the dark tenements.
35:46His pictures would reveal to the nation the terrible deprivation suffered
35:50by many of New York's poorest immigrants.
35:55As a young man, Rees had himself lived in many of the city's worst slums.
36:03In contrast, Rees was the first photographer to be able to capture
36:07the grim reality of life inside the dark tenements.
36:10As a young man, Rees had himself lived in many of the city's worst slums,
36:17including the infamous Five Points that he now photographed
36:22and where he made his living as a crime reporter.
36:26He embarked on a personal crusade to get things changed.
36:29He gave a series of lectures around New York City,
36:32shocking audiences with his graphic slides.
36:35Rees saw photography as a weapon to fight the injustices he saw daily in the slums.
36:43As his slideshows drew more attention, he was offered a book deal.
36:48In 1890, Rees published a book called How The Other Half Lived.
36:52The first time people could see actual images of New York City's poor.
36:56Poverty now had a human face.
36:59This had a seismic impact right across America
37:02and it brought the issue to the attention of the rich and powerful.
37:07Becoming a bestseller, Rees' sensational book caused a national outcry.
37:12A Senate committee was convened to tackle corruption
37:15and New York would be forced to clean up its streets and its politics.
37:22Rees' pictures had a real and lasting impact.
37:24They created a groundswell of support that enabled him eventually
37:27to successfully campaign for the destruction of the Five Points.
37:32As a galvanised city politics, people turned against corrupt politicians
37:36and the elections of 1895, Tammany Hall finally lost their grip on power.
37:46A huge clean-up followed as the new administration set about ruthlessly rooting out corruption.
37:53Another revolution was taking place that would eventually see New York's rubbish
37:57brought to extraordinary places like this.
38:00Fresh from defeating yellow fever and typhoid in the south,
38:04George E Waring took control of New York's sanitation department.
38:12Colonel Waring, a Civil War hero, had orders to stop New York looking like a dump.
38:21For decades, politicians and corrupt contractors had been taking the cash
38:25and leaving the trash all over the streets.
38:28Now Waring's big clean-up began, starting with the street cleaners themselves.
38:35Dressed in their sparkling white uniforms, Waring's men weren't just there to pick up rubbish,
38:39they were there to set an example.
38:41They were banned from going into bars, from swearing and from being mean to their horses.
38:46New York had never seen anything like it.
38:50Soon those nicely treated horses were taking tonnes of refuse to the dump
38:54as Waring's white angels, as they became known, actually did what they were paid to do.
39:00And the city was transformed from this...
39:03to this...
39:05and from this...
39:07to this.
39:11Waring was so successful cleaning up New York City
39:13that the President sent him to Cuba to sort out their sanitation.
39:17Sadly, just after arriving, he contracted yellow fever and died.
39:21But he left this world, and New York City in particular, a cleaner place.
39:31As the 20th century approached, it wasn't only New York's streets that would be transformed.
39:39The Industrial Revolution was gathering pace,
39:41and famous landmarks like the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge
39:45were appearing on the city's skyline.
39:51Meanwhile, new railroads and telegraph lines had firmly set the city
39:56at the very heart of international trade.
40:00In the coming years, New York would soon overtake London
40:03to become the world's wealthiest city, and one of the most densely populated.
40:11So many people and so much wealth would generate a mountain of filth.
40:17To survive and prosper, New York would need to invest heavily in new technologies.
40:23And with money to be made, a new breed of entrepreneur would flock to the city.
40:29The New York Stock Exchange was booming.
40:31Money and trade was flowing into the city.
40:33The future was looking bright for everybody.
40:36Well, everybody, that is, apart from the guys at companies
40:39like the Knickerbocker Gas and Light Company.
40:41Shares in that sector were collapsing.
40:44Since the 1830s, New York had been lit by a poisonous gas made from coal,
40:49but not for much longer.
40:52Thomas Edison had perfected a bright money-making idea
40:57that would do away with New York's gas lamps for good.
41:00The electric light bulb.
41:03Edison argued that gas lamps were a pain to light.
41:10The gas was poisonous.
41:13The fumes were noxious.
41:16They left this horrible black staining.
41:22And sometimes...
41:25...they were just as dangerous.
41:28And sometimes...
41:30...they blew up.
41:32All of which was true.
41:34And because Edison's light bulbs had no such problems,
41:37they were a much better way to light New York.
41:40And to power them, in 1882, Edison built this.
41:44The world's first commercial power station,
41:47sited just here off Wall Street,
41:50burning tonnes and tonnes of coal,
41:52not to produce gas, but electricity,
41:54to light up New York.
41:57Edison knew his power station,
41:59belching out black smoke in the heart of the city,
42:02could only send electricity a few short blocks.
42:06To illuminate the whole of New York,
42:08he would need a lot of power stations
42:10and a lot of investment from Wall Street.
42:14Edison threw the switch at 3pm on the 4th of September, 1882,
42:22and illuminated a square mile of New York,
42:25thus beginning the city's love affair with bright lights.
42:31Edison lit up Broadway and Wall Street.
42:33His plans for world domination looked to be continuing apace,
42:36but at this moment of triumph, a rival turned up,
42:39a man called Nikola Tesla,
42:41who had an alternative system for distributing electricity,
42:44and he was looking for investors.
42:46Edison squared up for a fight.
42:52Edison was on the back foot.
42:54His direct current system, DC power, had a very short range,
42:59and to make it work, he would need Wall Street
43:01to agree to fund the building of hundreds of filthy,
43:04coal-burning power stations all over New York.
43:08Tesla, who had made his name with this, the Tesla Coil,
43:11knew he was on to a winner,
43:13promoting the alternating current system, AC power.
43:17The advantage of Tesla's system
43:19was that it could send electricity hundreds of miles,
43:22which meant all those dirty, coal-fired power stations
43:25could be in someone else's backyard.
43:34New York was far too big a prize to lose,
43:37and Edison set out to smear AC power.
43:42To demonstrate how dangerous it was,
43:44Edison's company began manufacturing...
43:47AC-powered electric chairs.
43:53Then, in 1903, Edison's company infamously used AC power
43:58to execute Topsy the Elephant on Coney Island.
44:04To this day, no-one's certain why,
44:06because the battle had been lost, and Tesla had already won.
44:11New York's battle of the currents would have far-reaching consequences.
44:15Soon, not just New York,
44:17but virtually every city in the world adopted AC power,
44:21mostly because it could be generated in dirty power stations
44:24that were built far, far away.
44:35Electricity would have a massive impact on the lives of New Yorkers,
44:39and at the start of the 20th century,
44:41the city was poised to embrace a new technological age.
44:45But it hadn't quite turned the tide against its 19th-century filth.
44:53And here on Coney Island,
44:55where New Yorkers came to play in the hot summer months,
44:58a stark reminder of the city's dirty past began washing up on the beaches.
45:04Nothing, apart from jaws,
45:06gets Americans out of the water faster than raw excrement.
45:09Ever since the beginnings of New York,
45:11New Yorkers have been pouring their waste
45:13into the Hudson and the East River
45:15and have been polluting New York harbour here.
45:17Remember, by the end of the 19th century,
45:19Manhattan was an island floating in its own filth.
45:24The city had built a few sewage treatment plants,
45:27but they were regularly overwhelmed by the waste from so many people,
45:31and often the sewers would empty straight into New York's rivers.
45:36New York realised it had to build a lot more of these.
45:39Sewage works.
45:43This is the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant,
45:47worth $5 billion.
45:51Its sole job is to remove everything
45:531.1 million New Yorkers put down their toilets and drains
45:57and return clean, treated water back into the East River.
46:02And this is where the filthy raw sewage first comes in.
46:06Whoa, that's raw sewage?
46:08That's raw sewage. It's actually coming in at a very, very high speed.
46:12I'm nervous to breathe in.
46:13It feels like I don't want to get any of those particles in my nose.
46:16Wow. And how much would that be going through there now?
46:19Approximately, each one of these channels
46:21can manage 110 million gallons a day.
46:24The first step is to filter out the big stuff.
46:27Every day, these rakes pull out over six tonnes of things
46:31the plant can't process,
46:33everything from loo paper and condoms
46:35to mobile phones and cameras.
46:37The material that came from downstairs is now being raised up.
46:41Oh, man, that's disgusting.
46:43Yeah, that's it.
46:44That's a little bit of a splash there.
46:46Yeah, that's New York's best.
46:49Raking out the rubbish is the easy part.
46:53Most of this massive 52-acre site is devoted to the next stage,
46:57removing all the really revolting stuff
46:59like urine, blood and excrement from the wastewater.
47:03And it's all done using microbiology, air and gravity.
47:08What is in here?
47:09Well, this is where the magic takes place.
47:11This is the biological reactor.
47:13This is where the wastewater, the microorganisms and the air
47:16all come together for about a three-hour period.
47:19This amazing process was brought to New York
47:22by sanitary engineer Richard H Gould.
47:27Gould could see the problem facing New York's sewage plants,
47:30centred around the fact that human waste mixed easily with water.
47:35In the late 1920s, he presented his colleagues
47:38with a revolutionary solution from Britain,
47:41activated sludge.
47:44Full of the bacteria found in the human gut,
47:47when activated sludge is added to sewage,
47:50it begins to eat the waste.
47:53The bacteria take around three weeks to finish the job,
47:57but Gould explained that by adding air,
48:00the process could be shortened to just six hours.
48:04The real magic of the process relied on gravity.
48:08Once the bacteria had devoured all the waste,
48:11they became heavier, sinking to the bottom
48:13and allowing the clean water to be easily separated.
48:20Gould revolutionised New York's sewage treatment system.
48:23Today, this plant is just one of 14 needed to process
48:27the 475 billion gallons of sewage New York produces every year.
48:34We've got a fantastic view of Manhattan,
48:36but it feels appropriate, right, because without this place,
48:38that place would not exist.
48:40Yeah, that's the iconic skyline of Manhattan,
48:42and that's where our customers are right now.
48:44It probably wouldn't be the island it is today
48:46if it wasn't for one of the wastewater treatment plants in the city.
48:53While the city became ever more reliant on science and technology
48:56to clean up after its human population,
48:59on the streets, there remained another major source of excrement.
49:05Horses.
49:09Throughout most of the 19th century,
49:11New York's industrial expansion had relied on horses
49:14to move pretty much everything around the city.
49:18Trouble was, they left behind a mountain of manure.
49:23In the late 19th century, there were 200,000 horses
49:26on the streets of New York City,
49:28and every year they produced over 400,000 tonnes of manure.
49:32Getting rid of all that waste was the holy grail.
49:35As a result, two fundamentally different types of automobile
49:39were vying with each other to supersede those filthy horses.
49:47Watch out, everyone, coming through!
49:49On one side were these, the electric cars.
49:52The amazing thing about this car is it's electric car
49:55which is the future, and yet it's 100 years old.
49:57This is really going back to the future.
50:00The Detroit Electric, built in 1918 and now worth more than $100,000,
50:05is one of the oldest electric cars still on the road in America.
50:10This is fantastic. Watch out, dude.
50:12I don't want to run you over in my vintage vehicle.
50:15At the end of the 19th century, there were hundreds of electric cars
50:19fighting it out with their petrol-engined rivals
50:22to win market dominance on the streets of New York.
50:25Bringing it around.
50:31Come on!
50:35This is the coolest vehicle I have ever driven in my life.
50:39Electric cars were not only cool,
50:41they produced little noise and no emissions.
50:44But compared to their main competitor, electric cars had one major drawback.
50:51It was a pretty good car.
50:53Trouble was, it didn't go that far.
50:55The fate of the electric car was sealed in 1908
50:58when Mr Henry Ford launched this, the famous Model T.
51:02Now, this would have a profound effect on the lives of New Yorkers
51:06if they could get it started.
51:10It may have taken some effort to get its petrol engine started.
51:15Watch out. Very good. Excellent.
51:18But the mass-produced Model T Ford undercut its cheapest competitor by a third.
51:25Take your foot off the brake.
51:28And one could have been yours to drive away for just $825.
51:33There you go. We're doing good.
51:35It doesn't have power steering, does it?
51:37No, no power steering, no.
51:40There we go. We're rolling now.
51:43So what effect did this have on cities like New York?
51:46It must have been a revolution.
51:48Yeah, tremendous, tremendous change took place.
51:52Before, these streets that we're driving down right now were filthy.
51:56You know, they had thousands, tens of thousands of horses.
51:59And, of course, they went to the bathroom all over the streets.
52:03So it was a mess.
52:05I'd say 90% of the horses were eliminated within about five years of the automobile.
52:12That's a revolution, isn't it?
52:13It is a real revolution.
52:16As mass-produced cars were revolutionising the way that New Yorkers got around the city,
52:21another revolution of mass production was taking place in their homes.
52:29And housework would never be the same again.
52:41In the 1920s, door-to-door salesmen started selling this, the Hoover.
52:47The tagline was, it beats as it sweeps as it cleans.
52:56At around about the same time, Edison's General Electric Company launched this,
53:00the world's first mass-produced consumer refrigerator,
53:04with the tagline, makes it safe to be hungry.
53:08Like every great marketing campaign, this one had a memorable jingle.
53:13It's here, it's there, it's everywhere.
53:19In the 1920s, fridges and cars became potent symbols
53:23of a new, clean, technologically-driven American dream.
53:27New York was swept by a tidal wave of consumerism
53:31as mass production made them ever more affordable for everybody.
53:37But it soon became apparent this progress came at a price.
53:41Not only were the city's streets soon jammed with cars,
53:44there was another drawback to driving a Model T in New York traffic.
53:51A big problem with these early motorcars
53:53is the engines kept stuttering, or pinking, as they called it.
53:58It's because the petrol was actually burning too well in the engine.
54:02So in 1920, the chemical engineer Thomas Midgley Jr.
54:06set out to try and find a solution.
54:10Midgley needed to find a way to make petrol less flammable.
54:16So he began working his way through the elements
54:18to see which one would do the job.
54:22Eventually, he hit upon the solution.
54:26And here it is.
54:28Lead.
54:30He'd only gone and just invented leaded petrol.
54:33Realising deadly lead might be a bit of a hard sell,
54:36Midgley launched his new additive under the name of Ethyl
54:40and took big whiffs of it to prove it was safe.
54:49Not long after, Midgley ended up with lead poisoning
54:52and had to spend a year in a hospital.
54:55But he was not the only one to suffer.
54:58Not long after, Midgley ended up with lead poisoning
55:01and had to spend a year in Florida recovering.
55:08It turned out that lead doesn't actually burn in a car's engine.
55:13It comes straight out of the exhaust, polluting the atmosphere.
55:17Yet amazingly, even though there were soon unleaded alternatives,
55:22because the oil companies owned the patent,
55:25leaded became the standard for most of the 20th century.
55:28It wasn't banned in New York until 1996.
55:35Midgley had done his bit to ensure that the smog
55:38that would come to plague the 20th century
55:40would be that little bit more noxious.
55:42But he wasn't finished yet.
55:44Next, this genius turned his attention to fridges.
55:49Midgley knew there was a very obvious problem with early fridges.
55:56The gas used to make them cool would sometimes catch fire
55:59and occasionally...
56:03...explode.
56:04A bit of a problem.
56:07So Midgley set about searching for a gas that didn't.
56:11He came up with another brilliant idea.
56:14Freon.
56:15The world's first chlorofluorocarbon.
56:18Otherwise known as a CFC.
56:21Midgley didn't realise it, but he'd invented a gas
56:24that would decimate the world's ozone layer.
56:31In the space of ten years, Thomas Midgley had managed to create
56:35two of the most environmentally deadly pollutants in history.
56:39Leaded petrol and CFCs.
56:41And with New York's growing appetite for fridges and cars,
56:44the world's largest city was set to become
56:47one of its biggest polluters.
56:51New York's population, wealth, traffic, power consumption
56:55and its pollution would all continue to rise
56:58throughout the 20th century.
57:03Only now are we coming to terms with the vast amount of pollution
57:08Only now are we coming to terms with the vast amount of unseen filth
57:13our modern cities create.
57:20Many of the technological solutions that transformed New York City
57:23in the 19th century produced waste that has blighted the 21st.
57:28Every 15 minutes, New York produces enough greenhouse gases
57:32to fill the entire Empire State Building.
57:35That's 58 million tonnes a year, or seven tonnes per person per year.
57:40And, of course, those gases cannot be confined to the city that created them.
57:44Now it's a truly global problem.
57:50Our cities have always teetered on the edge of being destroyed
57:53by their own filth.
57:55Throughout the centuries, we've developed more sophisticated ways
57:58of dealing with our waste.
58:00Our battle against our filth has given us laws, governments
58:04and inventions that have allowed millions of us to live together
58:07in vast cities, of which New York is the ultimate example.
58:14But that struggle is far from over.
58:16This glamorous city with its glittering skyline
58:19would drown in its own sewage and rubbish in a matter of days
58:23if its complex waste disposal mechanisms broke down.
58:26Our battle against our filth will never be over.
58:34ALBERT SQUARE
58:42Next this evening, stay with us for a trip to Albert Square,
58:45EastEnders, in a few moments.
59:04ALBERT SQUARE