A New Book Examines How New York City Was Built on Garbage

Reading Benjamin Miller's Fat of the Land (Four Walls Eight Windows, 414 pages, $18) you come to realize just how much of New York City is founded on garbage. Literally and figuratively.

Fat of the Land recounts the history of urban waste and its disposal over the last 200 years, with a special focus on how waste management has been woven into New York City's politics and institutions. "I started out in graduate school at Columbia studying urban ecological anthropology," Miller tells me. "So I come at this as an anthropologist." As he was working on his dissertation, he went native, as anthropologists say, and took a job with the Dept. of Sanitation, where he became the director of policy planning from the late 1980s until 1992. Since then he's been a private environmental consultant. This is his first book.

Miller says he finds that garbage is "a wonderful lens to use to look at municipal government, because we have cultural blinders that prevent us from thinking about these waste products. These are pretty universal cultural blinders, by the way. People don't think about these things that are perceived to be polluting." Doing the research on this relatively arcane subject "was wonderful," he says, "because no one else has looked at it. I spent years doing research in archives looking at papers I'm sure had never been looked at since they'd been put there 100 years before."

Regarding the city's literal foundation of garbage, there's the fact that as much as 25 percent of the current island of Manhattan is manmade and built on refuse?everything west of 10th Ave., south of Broad St. and east of Water St., for example. Olmsted filled in a wasteland to create Central Park. Portions of the boroughs, especially the Bronx and Queens, are also manmade.

Many of the city's movers and shakers have had their hands in garbage, so to speak. W.R. Grace got his start in the garbage industry. William H. Reynolds ("[b]ig, brash, bull-necked and bullet-headed," Miller writes) was a turn of the century leader in waste management; his Metropolitan By-Products Company ran a waste facility on Staten Island, on the site where Robert Moses would put the Fresh Kills landfill years later. He was also a builder and developer who founded (and was first mayor of) Long Beach, created Coney Island's Dreamland and "sold a plot of land to Walter Chrysler complete with architectural drawings of the art deco building" that became the Chrysler Bldg.

For background, Miller parallels the history of New York garbage with that of London and Paris. In one memorable passage he describes life in Paris' "sewage and dead horse dump on Montfaucon" in the 1830s. The people there were surprisingly healthy, including "a woman whose family worked in the thick of the cutting up and dismembering and who was always pregnant. To keep her youngest child nearby for nursing, she kept it stuffed inside a carcass. Certainly there was unpleasantness: for example, the fields where layers of horseflesh were left to putrefy until the whole surface of the ground writhed with maggots to be harvested for poultry feed and fish bait (a passing drunk who lay down and fell to sleep there lost both sight and hearing), or the rats that swarmed over the cutting grounds. But there was nothing inherently dangerous..." Montfaucon, like many previous dumps, was later transformed into a park.

Bone-boiling and rendering was a large, if circumspect, industry in the New York of the 1830s. Animal bones left over after butchering were recycled for numerous uses, from buttons to fertilizer to sugar refining to the tallow used in soap and candles. Leftover animal flesh and fat were also valuable. (Today, these same leftovers are fed back to animals, which has fostered the Mad Cow epidemic.) A contemporary observer described how "hid away in densely populated neighborhoods" one found "shanties and outbuildings, in which are boiled up together, in large cauldrons, the refuse of the streets and markets, the bones and scraps of animal substances, found about these places, and every particle of dead and putrefying animal matter, that the scavengers of the city collect in hand-carts and bags, by raking the gutters and purlieus of offal and filth. The carrion of horses, and oxen, cows, hogs, rancid fat, bought or begged at the markets, are all thrown into the cauldrons and boiled, for various purposes of traffic. From these places the most intolerable stench arises, which, mingling with the atmosphere, is brought into the dwellings of the neighborhood, their sick rooms and nurseries, in a greater or less state of dilution."

By the mid-1800s, the waste management industry had developed from this anarchy of independent rag-and-bone men into something very like today's business model, where large contractors are hired to haul away all of the city's refuse. This system presents marvelous opportunities for corruption, graft and backdoor politicking, which explains why it attracts the Tony Sopranos of the world. Miller describes various political machinations involving the industry across the last two centuries with a former bureaucrat's love of minute detail.

There have been many garbage dumps and landfills around the city, all of them controversial in their day and variously noisome to their neighbors?yet most of them surprisingly long-lived. "Once you put garbage in a particular place, it develops an incredible inertia," Miller says. "Once you start sticking garbage in a place, because of the horror it arouses, you can't just pick it up and move it around." The best example is Fresh Kills. When Robert Moses first started dumping there in 1948, he promised Staten Islanders it'd only be for three years. Fifty-odd years later, it's the largest manmade object on the planet, and still in operation, at least for the next couple of months.

Garbage and offal were dumped on Rikers and neighboring islands from the 1880s until 1939; Miller recounts one 19th-century "landing party from the Bronx [who] said that they found a scowful of putrefying horse carcasses, and maggot-infested hides and entrails...and that the stench forced them to flee within minutes." Fumes from the Barren Island dump in Jamaica Bay, which operated from 1852 to 1917, turned the white paint of neighboring houses black. For some years, putrid animal remains were dumped straight into the East River, where, "[d]espite the action of tide and currents, a viscous accumulation had so filled the channel that it impeded navigation."

Corona Meadows is, famously, the site of what was once the vast and ghastly landfill described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. It's less widely remembered that the land under La Guardia Airport is also landfill. Moses smirkingly wrote of a visit he made to the site during which "we were intrigued to see a sixteen foot lamppost sink slowly into the sand, ooze and garbage and to spot rats large enough to wear saddles leaping out of the crevasses."

Miller adds that,

The airport's settlement and rat problems never ceased. For years after the initial...construction was completed the airport settled at such a rate that by the late 1940s the main terminal building had all but collapsed. Even today runways have to be filled on a regular basis to be brought back to grade. Controlling the hordes of rats that nested underground, in buildings, anywhere they could, was a problem that also lasted for years; at least one flight was aborted soon after takeoff in the panic created by a stowaway scurrying down the aisles.

It was a revelation to me that much of Moses' grand plan for the region was based on existing visions, some going as far back as Frederick Law Olmsted's "park-way" projections of the 1870s. "There's this myth New Yorkers hold, particularly if they've read [Robert A. Caro's 1975] The Power Broker, that were it not for Robert Moses, New York would have a completely different face. I don't believe that's necessarily true," Miller tells me. To oppose the Moses myth, Miller resurrects the career of one of Moses' archrivals, William Wilgus, who was responsible, among other things, for planning Grand Central Terminal. Wilgus was a rails man, as opposed to Moses' fixation on automobiles. He invented the electric locomotive, because you couldn't have steam engines safely running in the long tunnels he envisioned, and also the concept of freight containerization, as well as creating the notion of selling "air rights" to help fund the whole thing.

As for the near-term futures of refuse and New York City, Miller is highly critical of Mayor Giuliani's precipitous, and clearly politically motivated, announcement in 1996 that Fresh Kills would be closed by Dec. 31, 2001.

"I have no objection to exporting garbage," Miller says. "In fact, I wrote the 1992 Solid Waste Management Plan, which recommended exporting garbage to the extent that it made sense economically and from an environmental perspective?but with the goal of keeping Fresh Kills open as long as possible, because it's a very precious resource and we should try to extend the possibility of its use. Without it, we have no options or leverage. I think the mistake here is making a law against the use of Fresh Kills under any circumstances, including dire economic necessity. Because now there's effectively no possibility for waste disposal in the city. Incineration is illegal, landfilling is now illegal. So now we are at the mercy of a particularly predatory portion of the private sector. There are four companies that control most of the waste in the country, and these companies are very well integrated vertically." (Is that delicate bureaucratese for How ya doin'?) "So we have very little negotiating leverage," he concludes. "I think that over time the price will continue to escalate."

Afterwords

Writer and Open City editor Tom Beller has had his [mrbellersneighborhood.com] up for some time now, but put off the official coming out until this week. It's like a patchwork literary map of the city. Aerial photographs of Manhattan are marked with dots that, when you click on them, take you to writing (mostly nonfiction, thankfully) about that specific neighborhood, street corner or building. A couple of William Bryk's "Old Smoke" history columns are reprinted here; Beller interviews people like Fran Lebowitz (W. 57th St.), Liv Ullman (CPW) and Christina Ricci (downtown); other entries include a story about the aggressive swans in Van Cortlandt Park, some of Alfred Chester's letters to Paul Bowles, items on egg cream wars on 2nd Ave. and chess players in Harlem, Lypsinka's journal, and Mel Gussow reminiscing on the day Weathermen blew themselves up in the house next door to him on W. 11th St. He's threatening to add MP3s and virtual tours of artists' studios and such, but I like it as a literary site, without the bells and whistles.