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Planet horse shit6/19/2023 ![]() ![]() George Waring, Jr., who served as the city’s Street Cleaning Commissioner, described Manhattan as stinking “with the emanations of putrefying organic matter.” Another observer wrote that the streets were “literally carpeted with a warm, brown matting. Each one relieved itself of, on average, twenty-two pounds of manure a day, meaning that the city’s production of horse droppings ran to at least forty-five thousand tons a month. By 1880, there were at least a hundred and fifty thousand horses living in New York, and probably a great many more. Horses were also employed to transport goods as the amount of freight arriving at the city’s railroad terminals increased, so, too, did the number of horses needed to distribute it along local streets. ![]() Additional horses were needed if the route ran up a grade, or if the weather was hot. Each horse could work only a four-hour shift, so operating a single car required at least eight animals. The standard horsecar, which seated twenty, was drawn by a pair of roans and ran sixteen hours a day. (The Herald described the experience of travelling by omnibus as a form of “modern martyrdom.”) New Yorkers made some thirty-five million horsecar trips a year at the start of the decade. The horsecars, which operated on iron rails, offered a smoother ride than the horse-drawn omnibuses they replaced. In the eighteen-sixties, the quickest, or at least the most popular, way to get around New York was in a horse-drawn streetcar. “SuperFreakonomics” has some ideas for reëngineering the planet.
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