Posts Tagged ‘sanitation’
“Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves.”*…
Madeleine Adams on John Scanlan‘s new book The Idea of Waste- On the Limits of Human Life… and on the place of trash in our culture…
… Trash is the hidden foundation of modern civilization. The ancient Trojans waded “ankle deep” in pottery shards and animal bones and whatever else they threw on the floor until they got so fed up with the mess that they paved it over. Rome’s first underground sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which used the city’s rivers to sweep away waste, was constructed in the third century BC. Writing over two centuries after its construction, Livy praised the Cloaca as a monument without match, and Pliny, writing about a hundred years after him in AD 77, called it the “most noteworthy achievement” of the Roman Empire, beating out the Colosseum and the Parthenon. At the time of its construction the Cloaca was an engineering spectacle, and it also became a symbol of Roman civic virtue. Sturdy infrastructures that served the people endured; flashy monuments to emperors did not. During floods, Pliny noted, “the street above, massive blocks of stone are dragged along, and yet the tunnels do not cave in.” Humbly concealed by walls and by continued elevations of the surface of the city through centuries of accumulated matter, its invisibility ensured its durability.
No Roman subject could have predicted just how enduring an achievement the Cloaca Maxima was: SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus, or the Senate and People of Rome—the emblem of ancient Rome) decorates manhole covers and trash cans throughout Rome. European sewer systems of the nineteenth century drew many comparisons to the Cloaca. “And as would be the case much later with the underground tunnels and drains of Paris and London, its concealment had the effect of making it an object of curiosity,” Scanlan notes, “providing it with the allure of a place that held truth or secrets about the life of the city.” The sewers drew admiration from many quarters—photographer Félix Nadar explored Paris’s extensively in the 1860s, and London’s caused a Manchester Guardian reporter to muse three-quarters of a century later: “These tremendous undertakings may very easily be the most lasting memorials of our cities.” “Out of sight out of mind”—yet also: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The sense that waste was a thing to be conquered became a transhistorical justification for increasing waste technocracy, but the mysterious underworld of waste has always beckoned to the chthonically inclined.
With the rapid industrialization of the Victorian city came the explicitly progressive urge to submerge its grime. Mudlarks, ragpickers, and sewermen populated London’s new underworld. The sewermen, with their “long greasy velveteen coats, furnished with pockets of vast capacity” for holding money, jewelry, and other cleanable trinkets, were a cut above the mudlarks. Mudlarks, mainly women and children who scavenged on the banks of the Thames, wore “torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description.” But this grime, inspiring contemporary works like Dickens’s Bleak House, covered everything: “Fog everywhere” opens the second paragraph of the novel. For Scanlan, Dickens’s fog is not only the grimy remnant of industrial production; the Lord High Chancellor presiding over the decades-old case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce sits “at the very heart of the fog.” For Scanlan, Dickens’ fog obscured the social apparatus—London’s bureaucracy and class system—thereby keeping the lower stratum from rising out of the perceived muck. Progressive urban projects further ensured class segregation as a matter of aesthetics. Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden Cities of To-Morrow allotted spaces for the healthy and happy middle class, as well as for inebriates and the insane. His “slumless and smokeless” urban plans designed a future city with less (visible) waste.
But interred beneath the gardens of modern progress was mass culture’s growing pile of discarded commodities. Responding to the fragmentation of Europe in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin posited history as an endless accumulation of debris in his Arcades Project, which Scanlan calls a “strange literary waste-book.”…
… All waste goes through cycles of decomposition, buying and selling, or displacement. It was not until the 1970s that the idea of “recycling” appeared in opposition to “disposal.” England’s rag-and-bone collectors formed the economy of recycling before 1970. Rag collectors only appeared after the fourteenth-century popularization of the spinning wheel, which enabled the production of a surplus of rags for the first time in history. Bones were ground into fertilizer, while linen rags were sometimes reused to make linen again, or else they too were returned to the earth (flax makes great fertilizer). But industrialized clothing production in the mid-nineteenth century meant that there were now many different kinds of rags, some with trimmings and linings, some in blended materials. By 1949 these Mr. Krooks had to sort through some seven hundred and fifty grades of rags. “I can tell them in the dark,” Scanlan quotes a collector saying, “but you can still lose out on a deal if you aren’t awake.” By 1970, rag-and-bone collectors had disappeared as recycling became centralized by city haulers and municipal tracking codes. Secondhand stores and eBay keep decentralized recycling—albeit as an economy of trends and “vintage” styles—alive. Despite the “hunter-gatherer impulse” that thrills William Gibson when he clicks eBay’s Seller’s Other Auctions, browsing eBay, antiquing, and thrifting are, for the middle class, a pastime, albeit an eco-friendly one.
The “throwaway society” invented the idea that any commodity could be briefly desired, barely used, and tossed out of sight with impunity. The many tech gadgets you’re supposed to give dad this Father’s Day come with a gift receipt but no reminder that their lithium-ion batteries form centuries of toxic landfill. Dads—well, all people—form a bond with their phones and laptops. Sherry Turkle compares the oneness of tech device and human to “the diabetic [who] feels at one with his glucometer.” “The user who is engaged with their device is probably not given to contemplating the future waste that it creates,” writes Scanlan, “given that they are rather caught up in a permanently unfolding present that arrives on demand, through [our devices’] potentially limitless experiences.” But this constant media stream produces not only dead phones and laptops—it also generates media waste…
Looking for the future in the dustbins of history: “W.A.S.T.E. Not,” from @thebaffler.com. Read on…
* Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash
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As we grapple with garbage, we might send antique birthday greetings to David George Hogarth; he was born on this date in 1862. An archaeologist, he explored and excavated (1887–1907) in Cyprus, Crete, Egypt, Syria, and Melos… uncovering both the ruins of buidlings and the buried detrius of those civilations. From 1908 until his death in 1927, he was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.
Hogarth employed T.E. Lawrence on some of his digs, and worked with him during WWI to plan the Arab Revolt— when Lawrence bacame “Lawrence of Arabia.”
“The greatest wealth is health”*…
On the state of healthcare around the world, three charts…
* Virgil
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As we contemplate care, we might send revealing birthday greetings to Leopold Auenbrugger; he was born on this date in 1722. A physician, he devised the diagnostic technique of percussion (the art of striking a surface part of the body with short, sharp taps to diagnose the condition of the parts beneath the sound)– by which he could estimate the amount of fluid in a patient’s chest and the size of his/her heart.
Auenbrugger was simply applying an approach he’d learned as boy, tapping his father’s wine casks to determine how full they were. After seven years of clinical investigation, he published the method in Inventum Novum (1761), though his technique did not gain recognition and acceptance until years after his death. When a translator republished the work in French (1808) the method gained acceptance around the world, and through time (to the present) as a fundamental diagnostic procedure… for which Auenbrugger is considered one of the fathers of modern medicine.
“God loveth the clean”*…
The history of ordinary things can be fascinating while offering insight into our immediate future. We’ve previously noted how artificial ice and assorted refrigeration/cooling technologies helped change demographics in the American South. Recent news from the Census Bureau confirms this trend as northern states like Michigan and New York lost population while the south, Texas and Florida in particular, gained. But the history of the ordinary can be hidden by ubiquity, tedium, and general disinterest. Unnoticed until they cry out for attention. Today’s Tedium is looking at the history of New York City restaurant inspections and the variety of ways restaurants cope. (And yes, the pandemic has certainly had an impact.)
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There is no shortage of great New Yorkers, the people that helped shape the city and its culture. How one measures impact can vary. The wealthy and influential find their names on street signs, convention centers, and airports. A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, however, there is a renewed appreciation for those that helped lay the foundation for the city’s hospitals and medical care. In this regard, there are few New Yorkers greater than Dr. Sigismund Goldwater.
A graduate of Columbia University and NYU medical school, Dr. Goldwater was a recognized authority in hospital construction. Among the numerous posts he held over a distinguished career included Superintendent at Mount Sinai Hospital, president of the American Conference on Hospital Service, and vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine. In recognition of his career and experience, he was appointed City Commissioner of Hospitals from 1934 to 1940. During his administration, Dr. Goldwater oversaw the construction of 25 new hospital buildings. His Times obituary credits him with adding more than 5,000 hospital beds to city capacity.
While his work in hospital administration and construction helped lay the foundation for New York City as a world-class center for health care, Dr. Goldwater has a legacy a bit more meaningful to modern restaurateurs. In 1914, Mayor John Purroy Mitchel was newly elected and in need of a health commissioner. His first choice, Dr. Goldwater, didn’t really want the job but finally acquiesced on the strong insistence of his predecessor.
About six months after taking over the role, now Health Commissioner Goldwater announced a couple of general initiatives in public transportation and dining to ensure general cleanliness, pointing out to the Times that, “…the Sanitary Code at present did not call for regular inspection as in the case of bakeries and meat markets.” His solution was to require permits and require commercial restaurants to be inspected on an annual basis.
Public health, especially regarding sanitary food handling practices, had grabbed media attention in the early 20th century in part to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Sinclair, an investigative journalist, went undercover to detail the working conditions in meat packing facilities. His account of rat infested factories and spoiled meat products shipped to consumers provoked outrage. Unfortunately for Sinclair, who was trying to shed light on the conditions of workers, readers were incensed to learn what was in their food. By 1905, the federal government had passed legislation to create what would become the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Another unique circumstance that kept food safety in the minds of New Yorkers was the terrible tale of Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary. A private cook that was also an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, Mary Mallon became infamous for her condition, the number of people she infected, and her refusal to cooperate with safety guidelines. [See here]
There was another reason for the attention Mary Mallon received, explains Claire Stewart, a chef and hospitality management professor at the New York City College of Technology. “Typhoid was considered a disease of the poor and associated with immigrants and overcrowded tenements,” she said. “Mary Mallon spent a lot of her career cooking for wealthy people, so her bringing typhoid to the upper classes caused a lot of alarm.”
Still, by the time Dr. Goldwater became health commissioner, New York City had yet to regulate restaurants, creating a range of dining experiences and anxiety about the status of any given kitchen.
One concerned citizen wrote to the Times in a letter titled, “We Need Dainty Waiters.”, “In these days of pure food laws and Boards of Health… I would like to ask what assurance, if any, has the public that in our hotels, restaurants, and clubs proper supervision over their employes is exercised so as to insure us a fair degree of cleanliness on the part of those who handle the food we are to eat? This inquiry is prompted by occurrences coming under the personal observation of the writer, showing that employes in so-called high-class hotels, clubs, and restaurants are often guilty of practices which would not be tolerated in our own homes. One large restaurant in this city requires its waiters to pass an inspection by a manicure before they are allowed to handle food for its patrons.”
After Dr. Goldwater noted that other cities had also adopted regular restaurant inspections, and noting the potential for additional revenue via fines and permit fees, the city agreed. Now they just had to get some 15,000 owners and operators to comply. Should be easy, right?…
The wacky and surprising history of NYC restaurant inspections (and by extension, that same system in other cities). That letter grade is a lot more effective than you might think: “The Letter in the Window.” By Andrew Egan, in Ernie Smith’s (@ShortFormErnie) ever-illuminating newsletter Tedium (@readtedium).
* Francis Bacon
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As we wash our hands, we might recall that it was on this date in 1913 that Gideon Sundback was granted a patent on the first modern zipper. While he did well with his invention for several decades, he and his western competitors were overtaken in the mid-20th century by YKK.
Most checked chefs pants still have buttons.
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die”*…
Further to Wednesday’s almanac entry on America’s first independent municipal sewer system…
Sometime in mid to late January, researchers from MIT plan to gather around a manhole on Portland Street in East Cambridge, dressed in plastic disposable biohazard coats and gloves. Each hour over the next 24, working in teams of two over four-hour shifts, they’ll sink a tube into the muck and pump one to two liters of sewage water into a plastic container. The container will be put into a cooler and taken to the nearby lab at MIT run by Eric Alm, a computational microbiologist. Alm’s lab will analyze all 24 of these sludgy samples to see what viruses and bacteria they hold; meanwhile, a vial of each sample will be sent to another lab to be analyzed for biomarkers (molecular or cellular flags for things like diseases and drugs, legal and illegal ).
These researchers—who include architects, computational biologists, designers, electrical and mechanical engineers, geneticists, and microbiologists—will be testing an idea that’s attracting interest around the world: namely, that sewage can tell us important things about the people who excrete it. Already, research has shown that sewage can reveal illicit drug usage, the presence of influenza, the poliovirus and other pathogens, and the state of community health. So far, however, none of this has been tested in our local waste systems, other than some proof-of-concept sampling done in Boston. That has led to this first formal effort by scientists and public health officials to get a sewage snapshot of the people of Cambridge…
Get to the bottom at “What does Cambridge sewage say about residents? MIT plans to find out.”
* Mel Brooks
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As we hold our noses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1594 that Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus was first performed (by Sussex’s Men at The Rose). Titus‘s premiere is the first performance of a Shakespeare play of which there is precise record (though confident deduction dates other plays’ performances earlier); it was recorded in Philip Henslowe‘s diary. It is also the only Shakespeare play for which a contemporary illustration survives, the work of a drawing master named Henry Peacham.
The Peacham drawing (c.1595)
“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be”*…
Concave drawing of the Getty gardens
David Hockney has famously pondered perspective in his work; when criticized for a lack of “reality,” he’s observed,
Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, ‘Things don’t look like that!’
The twin brothers Ryan and Trevor Oakes share his adventurousness in seeing in the artwork that they create together.
As children in the back seat, Trevor and Ryan Oakes noticed that when they focused on the horizon, bugs on the windshield seemed to split in two. Twenty-odd years later these identical twins are still investigating the intricacies of visual perception. This show pulls back the curtain on a decade of their optical obsession. To avoid the distortions that occur when the world is traced onto a flat canvas, the twins have built a concave metal easel that allows them to sketch directly onto the inside of a sphere. Rather than using lenses or mirrors to project an image onto canvas, as the Renaissance masters did, the twins have devised an ultra-low-tech method for sketching from life: they cross their eyes until an object floats onto their paper’s edge — and then they trace it. Visitors can marvel at the plaster helmet (dubbed an “optical cockpit” by Lawrence Weschler) where the twins have spent hours with their eyes out of stereo alignment [cross-eyed], reproducing skylines and courtyards into curved paper with a supernatural sense of depth and perspective. During the exhibition, the twins will haul their curved easel outside the museum to trace the Flatiron building with their cross-eyed technique. “Our subject matter is as much an eye looking as the thing being looked at,” said Trevor. Ryan added, “We’re dissecting what it feels like to have two eyes.”
See more, learn more at OakesOakes.
[TotH to @MartyKrasney]
* George Carlin
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As we focus on the tips of our noses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1880 that the City of Memphis, Tennessee began construction of the first independent municipal sewage system in the U.S. Independent sewer systems had been introduced in 25 years earlier in England; but American engineers at the time, still favored “combined” systems, in which storm water and sewage were handled in the same large pipes. Memphis was the first U.S. municipal system to forgo the benefits of the natural “flushing” provided by rain water, opting for smaller, dedicated pipes.
Memphis suffered through several severe plagues of cholera (1873) and yellow fever (1878 and 1879) — over 10,000 lives were lost. The city recognized the need to get their sanitary sewage away from their water sources (then, primarily small private wells), even though the final decision was erroneously based on the belief that yellow fever was being caused by inadequate sanitation practices. The city and the state legislature tried to raise monies; the efforts gained some of the money they thought would be needed for a new sewer system — but not a lot.
The situation in Memphis aroused the sympathy of the nation and was largely responsible for the creation of the National Board of Health. The Board retained and sent Col. George E. Waring, Jr., [who had gained notoriety draining Central Park] to Memphis. He designed what he thought was a system Memphis could afford, but also one he felt would work: a separate system using 6″ diameter laterals, with sewers with 112-gallon flush-tank mechanisms placed at the upstream terminal end of each of the lateral (collector) sewer runs — to be flushed once every 24 hours. The house connection sewers were 4″ diameter. Both vertical and horizontal changes of alignment were routinely done along the long runs of manhole-less gravity sewer mains. No more than 300 homes were to be connected to each 6″ main. No rain water was to be made tributary to these sewers and the sewer system was to be vented through the soil pipe plumbing system in each house..
Col. George E. Waring, Jr.
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