Free Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City by Carla L. Peterson Page A

of a wanton curiosity and then expose it to beasts and birds.” Predictably, their pleas went ignored until the student “resurrectionists” began digging up bodies in the Trinity Church cemetery. White New Yorkers then took to the streets in what became known as the Doctors Riot. This time, the authorities listened. The state legislature passed an act banning “the Odious Practice of Digging up and Removing, for the Purpose of Dissection, Dead Bodies Interred in Cemeteries or Burial Places.” 26
    The demise of the Negroes Burial Ground in 1795 could only have been devastating to the city’s black community. But the men who reclaimed the land as personal property were undoubtedly indifferent to the fact that the bones of a people’s ancestors lay buried there. They were interested only in making money—lots of it. In this, all three Lorillard brothers were spectacularly successful. The first to die, George, left an estate valued at over two million dollars. At his death, Peter was worth many millions more; it was said that he was the first man to whom the term “millionaire” was applied. The brothers’ wealth—and their means of obtaining it—occasioned vitriolic comments. When Peter died, former New York mayor Philip Hone wrote in his diary: “He was the last of the three brothers of that name, himself the eldest—Peter, George, and Jacob—all rich men; he the richest. … He led people by the nose for the best part of a century, and made his enormous fortune by giving them that to chew which they could not swallow.” Even more caustically, one of New York’s leading society figures, George TempletonStrong, observed: “How many cubic miles of smoke and gallons of colored saliva are embodied in the immense fortune that was his last week.” 27
Filth
     
    The lots that George Lorillard sold or rented to black New Yorkers on Collect Street were hardly choice property. Quite the contrary. Not only was the land poor: in the process of enriching themselves, the Lorillards and their ilk had created a host of environmental problems that affected all New Yorkers—black and white, rich and poor, but most especially those of little means.
    Much of Manhattan’s land was low lying. Drainage was inadequate when rains were heavy, so lots situated below street level became “deep sunk holes, the receptacles of water in the rainy seasons, and the source of many unwholesome and noxious stenches.” Human action further degraded the environment. Sewers were open and became easily clogged. Privies overflowed, emitting nauseating odors. Garbage, consisting of shells, ashes, offal, manure, human excrement, and spoiled food such as putrid meat and dead fish, piled up in the streets and went uncollected for days. In the warm weather these garbage mounds attracted swarms of flies and the odor could be smelled blocks away. The city hired cartmen to remove the garbage, but their work was spotty. They often took the manure, which they could sell at profit, and left the rest. Consequently, many New Yorkers kept up the old practice of allowing hogs to roam the streets to scavenge for garbage. But hogs added to the already foul street odors, rooted up pavements, knocked over carriages, and tried to eat children. Even deaths could not solve matters. Dead animals were simply left on the streets alongside the garbage. One citizen sarcastically wrote about how he had come across “dead horses, dogs, cats, and other dead animals lying about in such abundance as if the inhabitants accounted the stench arising from putrid carcasses a delicious perfume.” 28
    The activities of merchants and tradesmen compounded these wretched conditions. Those working in the so-called obnoxious tradeswere responsible for the many “nuisances” that plagued the city. Among these were the offal and entrails discarded by butchers and fishmongers into the streets as well as the industrial waste created by brewers, distillers, dyers, and soap makers. Most