The Problem of Water in New York’s History

By Carolyn Eastman

New York’s water problem has been on my mind because in the evening after I arrived in the city on September 1, 2021 to start a fellowship at the New-York Historical Society, Hurricane Ida barreled through the region. The water was devastating. Dozens died in basement apartments or when they unwittingly drove their cars into flooded streets and got swept away by the rushing water. Media filled with video of torrents of water pouring into the subway and dramatic water rescues in New Jersey. (Equally worrying were the images of Fordham students gleefully, and naively, swimming in the middle of their Bronx campus.) Only nine years after Hurricane Sandy created equally damaging flooding, it has become clear that climate change will continue to create chaotic weather events for which the region is currently unprepared, and that water runoff remains one significant concern in a city dominated by impermeable hardscaping.

But while climate change poses profound problems for us, early city leaders also recognized the problem of water in the low-lying region of lower Manhattan — and not only because of flooding. They believed that flooded streets and wet basements might also foster the spread of yellow fever, one of the deadliest epidemic diseases to hit the city in the years after the Revolution.

William P. Chappel, Fly Market (1870)

Pause for a moment to imagine the Fly Market of the 1790s — the central market where New Yorkers bought their meat, seafood, and produce. Situated along several blocks of Maiden Lane starting from the docks on the East River, it bustled with activity, for New Yorkers knew it wasn’t “a market swarming with flies.” “This is an uncouth name to a stranger,” wrote Samuel Mitchell, a chronicler of the city, in 1807. He explained that the market sat on a kind of wet, marshy land that the city’s Dutch inhabitants had called the vlaie, or meadow market, a name that soon got Anglicized into Fly Market. “This name certainly ought to be rejected and a better one adopted,” Mitchell editorialized.[1] (They kept the name.)

The fact that the Fly Market — and indeed, much of the rest of lower Manhattan — was built on marshland had long been a problem. The drain that snaked underneath the market failed to funnel off rainwater in wet seasons, and the low-lying streets nearby collected water. In 1796, city leaders decided to rebuild the entire market by installing fill underneath, raising up the building “so as to give descent for the Water towards the Houses instead of the Market.”[2] Raising one building, as this solution indicates, only created water problems for surrounding buildings.

I have found my own research during the past year circling, insect-like, around the Fly Market, as I started a project on New York’s experience of yellow fever epidemics during 1795 and 1798, for the market was the center of disease at the time. “The fever is making as great ravages around the fly Market as it did in Dover Street,” one worried mother wrote to her son at the height of the epidemic in September 1795. “I am informed that this Hearse has been Several times to day employed in carr[y]ing the Dead from there—I have requested your Father not to go to that Market for anything.”[3]

No one at the time understood yellow fever’s cause or how it was transmitted. Indeed, scientists didn’t learn until the 20th century that yellow fever was transmitted by a particular species of mosquito (commonly known as the yellow fever mosquito) that thrived in urban areas of the new United States during warm and wet seasons.[4] Eighteenth-century Americans did, however, see the close association between yellow fever outbreaks and stagnant standing water — a particular problem in the densely-inhabited region of lower Manhattan, all of which sat on low ground. It didn’t take much of a summer storm for water to fill cellars and flood the streets. And once the fever started to spread, it was terrifying — producing high fever, jaundice in the skin and eyes, internal hemorrhaging, and vomiting. Death was common. Even today, up to fifty percent of those unlucky enough to be unvaccinated, and who come down with a serious infection, die from the disease. During Philadelphia’s epidemic of 1793, some ten percent of the city’s population had died. Thus, when the number of cases in New York began to rise, many residents of means began to flee the city.

The epidemic was particularly bad in 1798. In August of that year the city was hit with a deluge. It rained “not in large drops, like a thunder shower,” one resident recalled, but “in floating sheets of transparent water.” It poured down a blacksmith’s chimney and extinguished his fire. “In Maiden-Lane, from Gold to Pearl-streets, the water was three feet deep. All the cellars from William-street to the East-river were filled with water.”[5] At first residents believed the rain might do good by cleansing streets of the garbage and animal waste that accumulated every day. “It cleansed the city more faithfully than all our scavengers could have done the rest of the summer,” Greenleaf’s New York Journal reported, referring to the pigs and goats that roamed the city eating garbage. “We rejoice, that our city is sweet and healthy.”[6] The writer would regret those words. In the very next issue, the paper began to report that the standing water in people’s cellars now produced “a noxious effluvia” and that “we have more to fear from this rain … than from all the importations from the West-Indies this season.”[7] Only a week after the storm, one resident remembered, “the report of fever was from every quarter, like a besieged city set on fire with shells and red-hot shot.” He estimated that more than 2,700 people died that fall before cold weather set in during early November.[8] One of them would be Thomas Greenleaf, the editor of Greenleaf’s New York Journal.[9]

John Roberts, A new & accurate plan of the city of New York in the state of New York in North America (1797)

When the state’s medical society stepped back that winter to assess the situation, its members offered crystal-clear conclusions. “Yellow Fever is not a contagious or catching disease,” they proclaimed in their report. “It is not communicable from person to person in a pure atmosphere, but spreads only in an air loaded and contaminated by putrid exhalations.” Those “putrid exhalations” were “engendered, by heat and moisture acting upon dead animal and vegetable matter.”[10] Dirty streets or piles of garbage that might be mere nuisances in the winter could become deadly in the hot, wet, muggy period of late summer and fall.

Taking that scientific assessment into account, New York City leaders sought to enact policy changes to avoid future epidemics — changes that focused on the perceived combination of water and filth in the “Deep Damp Cellars and Filthy Sunken Yards” of the city. “A number of such Cellars in different parts of the City, and particularly along the East River, as used for sailor’s boarding places and tippling shops, and during the last summer proved as so many graves to those who frequented them; and many yards are so situated as that the water, and fluids of all other kinds collecting therein, are not carried off by drains either over or under ground, thus become a source of noxious exhalations,” they concluded.[11]

What to do? The city’s recommendations focused on three main areas. First, the city must redouble its efforts to clean the streets of dirt and manure, which left unattended could produce the “noxious effluvia” that led to fever outbreaks. They advised creating a complex system of garbage collectors, street sweepers, and men to haul away this material, selling it if possible to farmers outside the city. Second, they proposed hiring street commissioners to “Examine all Lots, Cellars, Sewers, Sinks and Yards and to Report from time to time such of them to the Corporation as in their Opinion should be filled up Altered or Cleansed.”[12] Finally, they suggested that when the commissioners discovered particularly problematic, damp lots and cellars, they should have the capacity to demand that the owners pay to raise the entire lot with “wholesome Earth” (not manure).[13] If those owners failed to comply, they would be fined.

All of this was combined with the effort to raise low-lying streets to permit rain runoff — a Herculean effort for a part of Manhattan that was inclined to be marshy. In a series of small, painstaking steps, city workers raised up the streets. When city workers tackled Cherry Street (on what is now the Lower East Side) in 1796, they raised the street so it would have an ascent of one and half inches every ten feet. But this always required working on all the other adjoining streets, so council minutes often filled with detailed instructions for projects that encompassed entire neighborhoods.[14] Inspectors followed in the wake of those improvements, examining the degree to which the newly-raised streets had led water to pool in people’s lots. If they perceived a problem, they demanded that individual property owners raise their lots at their own expense — and if they ignored the demand, they received significant fines. 

If such efforts by the city’s Common Council sound extraordinarily onerous to 21st century ears, it’s worth remembering how profound was the threat of yellow fever — and that in the late 18th century, one’s neighbors were just as likely to voice their concerns about the problem of low-lying lots. In August 1796, almost exactly a year after the first yellow fever epidemic had hit the city, the Council received a petition from residents of Barley Street and Catherine Street asking that the city address the problem “so as to prevent Pools of Water remaining thereon stagnent [sic] & dangerous to the Health of the neighborhood.”[15]

Did it work? It’s difficult to say. The city continued to contain small yellow fever outbreaks every summer, but did not have another bad epidemic until 1803 (and again in 1805). Certainly, managing the amount of standing water in streets and cellars would have helped control mosquitoes, and contemporaries would have reassured themselves that they might have limited the noxious fumes that arose from wet, filthy spaces. But controlling epidemics required other steps as well — such as quarantining visitors coming from areas where yellow fever was known to be prevalent, a notoriously difficult job, considering the many ways that people entered New York City. The Committee of Health struggled in vain to guarantee quarantine, but always had people slip through the cracks.[16]

More than 200 years later, city leaders continue to struggle — albeit separately — with water and epidemic disease. In the late 18th century, those struggles were linked, making those leaders motivated to make dramatic improvements to the infrastructure in part because they believed the city’s water problem might contribute to terrifying diseases. It remains to be seen whether our own politicians will see equally urgent reasons to address the problem that continues today.

Carolyn Eastman is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and 2021-2022 NEH fellow at the New-York Historical Society. She is the prizewinning author of The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity (2021).

[1] [Samuel Mitchell], The Picture of New York, or The Traveller’s Guide through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States. By a Gentleman Residing in This City (New York: I. Riley and Co., 1807), 131.

[2] Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784-1831. Volume II: April 8, 1793 to June 12, 1801 (New York: City of New York, 1917), 222, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015055308491.

[3] Sarah Anderson to Alexander Anderson, September 29, 1795, Letters to Alexander Anderson from his mother (Mss. Coll. 98), Digital Collections, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/f8b50890-df40-0133-cc4e-00505686a51c.

[4] “Yellow Fever Mosquito - Aedes Aegypti (Linnaeus),” accessed September 24, 2021, https://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/aquatic/aedes_aegypti.htm.

[5] Grant Thorburn, Fifty Years’ Reminiscences of New-York, or, Flowers from the Garden of Laurie Todd: Being a Collection of Fugitive Pieces Which Appeared in the Newspapers and Periodicals of the Day, for the Last Thirty Years ... (New York: Daniel Fanshaw, 1845), 104-05.

[6] “The Rain,” Greenleaf’s New York Journal & Patriotic Register, August 15, 1798, [3].

[7] “Of the Rain,” Greenleaf’s New-York Journal & Patriotic Register, August 16, 1798, [3].

[8] Thorburn, Fifty Years’ Reminiscences of New-York, 105.

[9] “New-York Register,” Greenleaf’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, November 7, 1798, [1].

[10] Report of the Committee, Appointed by the Medical Society, of the State of New-York, to Enquire into the Symptoms, Origin, Cause, and Prevention of the Pestilential disease, that Prevailed in New-York during the Summer and Autumn of the Year 1798 (New York: Office of the Daily Advertiser, 1799), 12.

[11] Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 494-95.

[12] Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 533.

[13] Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 515.

[14] Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 255-257.

[15] Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 270.

[16] New York Committee of Health, “Record Book of Minutes” (1793-1796), BV NY Committee of Health, Manuscript Collections, New-York Historical Society Library, New York.