ancient cities

volumes (social impact, politics of recovery, economic
impact) with only minimal cross-referencing.
Nuanced individual research projects are often
praiseworthy, but the whole is in effect a heap of
disconnected analyses, using different languages
and addressing different readerships. The city’s
story remains many stories. It seems that readers do
not expect, and may actually distrust, any attempt
at larger coherence. Edmund G. Burrows and Mike
Wallace’s Gotham (1999) awaits completion.
Narrative history regularly threatens to make a
comeback but seldom seems capable of holding this
complex metropolis in clear view.
The History of Change
Change, diversity, and fragmentation have been
dominant themes in the interpretation of New
York City as a community. Instability has been a
way of life, a New York tradition. If change
expressed the powerful social, cultural, and economic
forces at work in the city, change was also
an occasion for wounded regret. In 1839, the former
Mayor Philip Hone noted in his manuscript
diary the “rage for pulling down” in the city. Older
structures hallowed by association with the city’s
past were heedlessly demolished. Gazing helplessly
at the ruins of a house on John Street once owned
by his father, Hone “mourned over the departure
of an old acquaintance.” As he memorably put it,
the impulse to “Overturn, overturn, overturn!”
seemed to express the spirit of New York.
But so, too, did a willingness to resist change.
The historic preservation system, created with the
passage of the landmark law in 1965, identified and
sought to preserve some of the city’s older buildings.
Historic preservation became a potential counterforce
to unrestricted real estate development. The
struggle between the forces of change and the resistance
to change, with intermittent community activism
and sophisticated political campaigning, restates
the city’s dynamic—at once to welcome modernity,
to tear down and glorify change, and yet to seek to
conserve the traces of the past and sometimes to
mourn their loss. But the labels we fix on such figures
and groups are tendentious. It is not at all settled
who are wearing the white hats and who the
black, and this adds interesting ambiguity to the
struggles and the outcomes.
Sanitary Reform
New York City, New York
557
The oft-told story of sanitary reform in New
York City stands as a dynamic model of experiment
and social mobilization, which led in time,
and with the advances of the scientific understanding
of contagious disease, to a vastly safer urban
life. Yet such campaigns often seemed far from an
unmixed blessing to contemporaries. The nineteenth-
century city was a notoriously unhealthy place,
and there was little opposition to the calls by sanitary
reformers for the city to collect accurate information
about birth and deaths. The compilation
and interpretation of statistics became a central
tool in the management of urban sanitary policy.
Physicians, often drawing on the pioneering work
of Edwin Chadwick, author of the influential 1842
report on the sanitary condition of the laboring
population of Great Britain, pushed for similar
approaches to New York and its grave sanitary
problems.
Dr. John H. Griscom (1804–1874), serving briefly
as city inspector, had been in correspondence with
Chadwick before he published a powerful report
on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population
of New York in 1845. Griscom showed the
scale of the problem: the immense amount of sickness,
disability, and premature mortality in the
city’s slums. He argued that poor housing conditions
were a major contributory factor in the city
population’s ill health and called for sanitary regulations
to alleviate avoidable causes of ill health.
“Teach them how to live,” he wrote of the poor,
“so as to avoid disease and be more comfortable,
and then their school education will have a redoubled
effect, in mending their morals, and rendering
them intelligent and happy.”
Griscom’s call for universal vaccination, however,
and his advocacy of enhanced powers for
health inspectors, who would enforce “domiciliary
cleanliness” were regarded as tyrannical. Griscom’s
demands for tenement reform encountered resistance
from the owners of slum real estate, always
tenacious in the defense of the rights of private
property, and from tenement dwellers, who feared
that his reforms would raise rents. Griscom went
on to play a significant role in sanitary reform in
New York, but his 1845 report lay stillborn.
Two decades later, Griscom’s “failure” seemed
a heroic precursor to the generation of sanitary