All language subtitles for BBC.Filthy.Cities.3of3.Industrial.New.York.PDTV.XviD.AC3.MVGroup.org.eng

New York, famed throughout the world
as a beacon of opportunity,

HQ of capitalism.

A gleaming, brash, technological
marvel, where anything is possible

and everything has its price.

New York City is the ultimate
embodiment of the American dream,

but for the millions of poor
immigrants that arrived here

in the 19th century,
it was more of a nightmare.

150 years ago,
New York covered only the southern
tip of the island of Manhattan.

In the throes of its
Industrial Revolution,

the city had become one of the most

disgusting and filthy
places on earth.

New York was a corrupt
frontier city, where poor immigrants

were ruthlessly exploited by
fat-cat bosses and greedy landlords,

all driven by the pursuit
of filthy money.

The Big Apple
was rotten to its core,
but it was the fight against filth,

the struggle against
grime and crime, that would shape
almost every aspect of this city.

I'm going to explore what
New York was like at its very worst.

I'll meet the parasites
that preyed on its citizens.

Ooh, ow, that just bit me.

And I'll get my hands dirty,
to find out just how close

this city came to drowning
in a sea of its own detritus.

What the heck is this?

You tell me. Is that urine?

I think that could be urine.

Yet, out of its nightmare of filth,
New York's iconic
skyline would be forged.

In just 100 years,
the city's population shot up
by a staggering 1000%.

And to survive and
continue to prosper,
New York had to clean up its act.

Pioneering reformers and inventors
would lead the fight,

with momentous engineering projects
and many revolutionary ideas.

The electric light bulb.

From the world's first
commercial power station
to the earliest automobiles.

Bringing her round.

IMITATES SQUEAKING BRAKES

But it's only now
in the 21st century,

that we're beginning to realise
that New York's battle

to transform itself into
a modern city would come at a price.

New York. Today it's home to
more than eight million people,

the biggest and richest city
in the United States.

Built within easy reach of
the Atlantic trade routes,

for nearly 400 years New York
has been the bridge

between Europe and North America.

New York's success was always
based on trade.

It's a wonderful natural harbour,
where ships from around the world
can anchor safely.

You have the city on Manhattan
Island and the Hudson River,

which reaches deep into
the heart of the continent.

This is the gateway
to North America, the link
between the New World and the Old.

Early in the 19th century,
New York was being transformed
by the Industrial Revolution.

Its shores were lined
with factories and workshops.

Up town, the city's elite
lived in some of the grandest
town houses in America.

New York was a city
where serious money could be made.

It had quickly become a magnet
for millions of European immigrants,

all drawn here to make their
fortunes in the land of opportunity.

It was the start of one of the
biggest mass migrations in history,

as people fled abject poverty,
religious and ethnic persecution.

The first to arrive in great numbers
were the Irish,

as they fled the great potato famine
of the 1840s.

Over 650,000 Irish
would come to New York.

Many migrants were destitute
before they left

and were unable to survive
the terrible conditions on board.

As many as a third of them died.

Despite the horrific death toll
on some of the ships,

at its peak in 1845,
up to 1,000 Irish immigrants
a day were landing in New York.

But for many of the survivors,
the worst was yet to come.

And this is where many of
those poor immigrants ended up.

It's now an area just between
Chinatown and Little Italy
in Lower Manhattan.

Back then it was known
as the Five Points,

because it was the intersection
of five big roads.

Then it was a terrible,
infamous slum.

25,000 people packed into
buildings with no central heating,
no running water and no sewers.

The streets of the Five Points
were piled high

with rubbish and animal waste.

And in New York's cold winters,
this toxic mix would freeze.

This is how bad it could get.

In the winter, layer upon layer
of frozen muck would pile up,

until in some streets
it was a metre and a half deep.

New Yorkers fondly called this
"corporation pudding".

It was a terrible mixture of human
and animal excrement, waste products

from slaughter houses,
breweries and tanneries,

and all the muck
and mud from the streets.

For months at a time
during the winter,

this would have clogged the streets.

It wasn't only disgusting streets
newly arrived immigrants
had to contend with.

The tenements they had to live in
were just as bad.

Vast swathes of New York slums
were owned by the wealthiest
families in America,

and they were making a fortune
from the poor immigrants.

Far from escaping the deprivations
and social injustices of Europe,

these recently arrived immigrants
found they were in a city that was
dirtier and even more unfair.

Employed by the landlords,
it was the job of runners to hustle

freshly arrived immigrants
into the tenements,

where they would be fleeced
to pay an extortionate rent.

Now a museum, this is one of
the last tenement blocks in the city

that has remained pretty much
unchanged since the 19th century.

These rooms might feel
quite nice and spacious

and when they were built,
they were.

With so many immigrants arriving,

building large, six-storey
tenement buildings seemed like
the perfect solution to the problem

of how to house
this expanding population.

But with so many
new immigrants arriving,

demand rapidly outstripped supply,

and the slum landlords spotted the
chance to make some filthy money.

Rents shot up, and some apartments
like this could have had
two families living in them.

There could easily have been
a dozen people in here.

These tiny apartments
rapidly degenerated

as more and more people
were piled in.

With the landlords charging
such high rents,

soon these apartments
were more than just homes.

They'd also have to double up
as a workplace.

This room would have
been a sweatshop,

with five or six people in here
making clothes, shoes and hats,

and at night, it just would
have been a cramped dormitory.

No running water, no bathrooms,

and just three stinking privies
shared by hundreds.

This place was more than unhygienic.

And as if that wasn't enough, there
were reports of some immigrants

keeping their animals
in their apartments.

These corridors
would have been filled with
a dizzying array of smells

and the discordant hubbub of
languages from all over the world.

And, of course, this melting pot
was also the perfect
breeding ground for disease.

Overcrowded and filthy,
early in the 19th century,

New York slums were ravaged by
a series of devastating epidemics.

But the city's elite
were often reluctant to act

until they themselves
were threatened.

In 1832, an outbreak of cholera,
a deadly waterborne bacterium,

had spread through the slums
and infected the whole city.

So many people died
that bodies piled up in the streets,

and it was said that anyone with a
horse was drafted to help move them.

Over 3,500 New Yorkers, both rich
and poor, died in the epidemic.

But it wasn't just disease
that was devastating New York.

At around the same time,
50 acres of the city
were destroyed in an inferno.

Fire and deadly disease

were threatening
its industrial expansion.

New York needed to invest heavily
to secure a plentiful supply of this.

Fresh water.

Back in the 19th century,

people would have killed
to have this much fresh water

delivered reliably
into the heart of New York City.

That's because Manhattan
was very marshy.

It was very hard to dig wells
that would produce

anything other than brackish water,

so lots of people
relied on very few wells.

It also meant that porous soil,

and all the human and animal waste
would seep down and pollute
the fresh water,

and that's how disease spread,
that's how people got cholera,
and epidemics broke out.

In 1837, the city embarked
on America's biggest ever
engineering project -

to get millions and millions
of gallons of fresh water
into New York every day.

And this is where they got it from -
they dammed the Croton River,
north of New York.

This dam was actually built in 1906.

The original is now submerged
under the reservoir.

But that reservoir was still big
enough to hold hundreds of millions
of gallons of fresh water.

You get a sense of the size
of this operation from over here.

It's just vast. It shows the amount
of water that a modern city needs

to survive and prosper.

To get all this water
to New York City, 41 miles away,

they built
an equally impressive aqueduct.

Large parts of the aqueduct
survive right to the present day,

and there's a big stretch of
it right here underneath my feet.

And over here is where I get in.

The Croton Aqueduct served
New York for over a century.

It was finally
decommissioned in 1955,
which means I can get inside it.

New York's first aqueduct would
take more than five years to build.

It cost over 14 million,
which means at the time

it was the most expensive
construction project in America.

It took about 4,000 workers,
mostly Irish, to build this tunnel,

eight feet high
and over seven feet wide.

It loses exactly
13 and a quarter inches
for every mile that it travels,

and that means that the gravity
brings the water from the reservoir,
which is up there,

right the way down there towards
New York City, 41 miles away.

35 million gallons a day,

and it took 22 hours
to make that journey.

When it was completed in 1842,

you could ride on a boat all the way
to New York in this tunnel.

So this was the last section
to be built,

channelling the water
up this seven-foot iron pipe,

right across the last obstacle
before the city - the Harlem River.

Right, this should be the place
to get a sense of the scale.

This is the High Bridge,
a truly epic piece
of 19th-century engineering,

spanning a quarter of a mile
and rising 100 feet above the river.

The Croton Aqueduct
marked the city's first
major step towards modernity.

When the water started flowing,
New Yorkers rejoiced

with a Festival Of Connection,
which included special drinks,
songs and a huge procession.

One New York diarist wrote

that "nothing is talked about
or thought about in New York City,
but Croton water."

The Croton Aqueduct
would bring fresh water...

and a fresh problem for the city.

The first to benefit from
the new water system were the rich.

They now had
even easier ways to keep clean.

And it was really good news
for plumbers,

who got to install
6,000 indoor bathrooms
for the people of New York.

The Croton Aqueduct also proved
to be good news for a whole host
of other industries,

manufacturing things
like taps, toiletries

and, of course, toilets.

It was also very good news for one
New Yorker called Joseph Gayetty,

who in 1857 invented toilet paper,

which gave the filthy rich something
else to flush down their new toilets

with all that Croton water.

With 6,000 homes now connected
up to the Croton Aqueduct,

that was a lot of waste water
that was produced, especially
when all those toilets got flushed.

Much of it ended up on the streets

and flooding the basements
of nice houses like this.

The solution was to build some of
these - sewers. And they did,

building some of New York's first.

The trouble is
these are very expensive,

and the landlords in the slum areas
couldn't or wouldn't pay for them,

and that left the residents of those
areas wallowing in their own filth.

Although the Croton Aqueduct
did bring fresh water into the slums,

there the rich landlords refused
to pay for indoor plumbing,

or even connect to
the sewage system.

The poor were left
with stinking privies
that would flood into the streets.

In fact, with ever more immigrants
arriving all the time,

the slums became even filthier,

which for some new arrivals
was heaven.

The slum landlords
weren't the only ones
feeding off the poor immigrants.

In the bowels of New York's
Museum Of Natural History,

Louis Sorkin has been pursuing
his passion for the insects

that thrived
in 19th-century New York,

like these blood-sucking bed bugs.

There's one. I can see it.

These are adult bed bugs,

and that one's moving off.
Ah, it just bit me, straightaway.

It'll take a few minutes
to fill up on blood.

Millions of bed bugs would have
hitched a ride across the Atlantic

with unsuspecting immigrants.

Although they didn't
transmit disease,

their painful bites
can easily become infected.

This one's pretty full already.

This one's full already?

See? And that one's full already.

That's... They're full on MY blood.

That little one's swollen to
about three times the size already.

Yeah, that can go to
three to five times its volume,

filling with blood.

Bugs have a bad reputation though.

That's true.
Many people just don't like them.

But once you get to know them,
they grow on you.

Grow on me quite literally in fact.

Look at that guy -
he's gone completely red now.

Uh-huh, that's true.

So I'm not getting disease
from these guys.

Which ones were in 19th-century
New York that do spread disease?

Well, body lice.

Have you got some of those?

Yes, I do, actually.
I thought you might.

Body lice proved to be fatal
in the slums.

They carried typhus,
a particularly nasty disease.

Its symptoms include a rash,

delirium and a fever
so debilitating

that more than half
of those infected

die within two weeks
of being bitten.

These are human body lice.

And what conditions do these need
to sort of breed in and prosper?

Usually it's just overcrowding.

When you get many people
all stuck, you know,
in very crowded conditions,

the lice will crawl from
one person to another, to another.

If they were
infesting your clothing,
which is normally what happens,

then you could have
50,000, 70,000 lice could be there.

The typhus bacteria
live in the guts of the lice.

But surprisingly,
it's not their bites
that actually transmit the disease.

Although it looks pretty dangerous,
it's not biting the human
that spreads disease,

it's actually what's coming out
the other end? Yes, that's correct.

The blood is taken up, but
the disease organisms are developed
inside the gut of the louse

and then defecation occurs, and your
disease organisms are now in that,

and the person
scratches it into the wound.

New York's poor were unaware that
they were giving themselves typhus

as they scratched
the infected excrement of the lice
into their fresh bite wounds.

In the mid 1850s, the city not only
lacked the scientific knowledge,

but it saw little financial
incentive to do anything about
its disease-ridden slums.

For every immigrant that died,
there would be a new arrival,
hungry for work and a place to live.

New Yorkers were being decimated
by wave after wave of disease.

In fact, more New Yorkers were
dying than were being born,

and if it wasn't for
all the immigration,
said one city inspector,

the city would soon
become depopulated.

In fact, in many parts of
New York, the death rate
was twice the American average.

Then in 1852, one young doctor
decided it was time to get to grips

with the city's endemic filth
and epidemic injustice.

Doctor Stephen Smith
was horrified to discover

many of his typhus patients
had something else in common.

They all lived at the same address,
in the same stinking
tenement building.

Inside, Smith was appalled to see

so many diseased immigrants crammed
into one disgusting building.

He wrote, "The whole establishment
was reeking with filth,
and the atmosphere was heavy

"with the sickening odour
of the deadly typhus, which
reigned supreme in every room."

Enraged by what he'd witnessed,
Smith stormed off
to confront the slum landlord.

By consulting the tax records,
Smith tracked the slumlord down.

He turned out to be a man of
considerable wealth and influence.

Despite Smith's angry protests,

the landlord initially
refused point blank

to improve conditions
for the residents.

Smith started campaigning to legally
force New York's wealthy landlords
to clean up their slums,

but he soon discovered
that getting the law changed
was not going to be easy.

New York's entire system of
government was beset by sleaze,

and one place symbolised this
more than any other.

This was the New York
County Courthouse.

It was supposed to be devoted to
the administration of
fair and impartial justice,

but in fact it became
a symbol of filthy corruption.

This courthouse,
grand though it is,

at the time
cost New York's tax payers

a staggering 12 million,

almost twice the amount
that the USA paid Russia
for Alaska a few years later.

The man in charge,
William "Boss" Tweed,

headed the infamously corrupt
Tammany Hall Political Machine

and was stealing millions
of dollars from the city.

Corruption was endemic, and it
was thanks to men like Boss Tweed

that these guys were being
left to clean the streets.

Even though New Yorkers
were paying for basic services
like street cleaning,

a large proportion of the cash
was just being pocketed,

which left large parts of the city
looking like a rubbish dump.

So the only people
that could be trusted

were those who would do it for free.

In slum areas like this, pigs were
eating tonnes of rubbish every year.

Boss Tweed and his mates
are estimated to have
embezzled around 200 million.

That's well over 1 billion today,
and that's just greedy.

Faced with corrupt politicians
and filthy rich landlords,

for a decade Dr Stephen Smith's
campaign to improve the lives of
New York's poorest had got nowhere.

Then, in 1865, there were reports
that a fresh outbreak of cholera,

a deadly waterborne disease,
was on its way from Europe.

Smith knew that the epidemic would
take hold in the slums and spread
like wildfire across the city.

Smith had already
spelled out the dangers

in a damning report
published earlier that year.

An original copy of it
is kept here in the library
of the New York Academy of Medicine.

This is it, it's the 1865
Citizens' Association Report On
The Sanitary Condition Of The City.

It lists, ward by ward, everything
that is filthy about New York City,

from rotting horses in the streets
to sewage in the drinking water.

In the front of the book is a letter
signed by prominent reformers,

including - look here -
Stephen Smith.

And they advocate strongly
that the city should introduce

the kind of sanitation system
that London had.

This could not be more pressing,
say these reformers,

because the total number of deaths
in the city of New York during
the year of 1863 was 25,196.

That is equal to one death in every
35 of the inhabitants, and that
was an unacceptably high number.

For the first time, the authorities
were forced to recognise just how
filthy New York had become.

They also produced these maps
that covered the whole city,

going into every single property
in incredible detail.

This is the infamous
Five Points area,

and there's a key
down the left-hand side here

that labels stables,
and privies and private dwellings.

One of the most important symbols
here is the black square.

These are privies "in an extremely
offensive condition."

I've spotted one block next to the
brewery and the Mariner's Church,

where there are several privies
in extremely offensive condition.

That is a block where you would
not have wanted to get caught short.

The report and the imminent arrival
of cholera

finally frightened the city
into action.

It established America's
first independent board of health,

and gave Dr Stephen Smith
a job of vital importance -

stopping cholera
from decimating New York again.

Smith's solution was simple.

He wanted to clear out the slums.

I've come to this 19th-century
tenement building,

because this apartment apparently
hasn't been cleaned for 50 years.

It's going to give me a sense
of just how much filth
Smith had to deal with.

Wow!
HE COUGHS

Oh, the smell's unbelievable!

The elderly lady
who has lived here for 60 years
suffers from depression.

She was found collapsed on the floor
and taken to hospital.

I mean, clearly this is one
old woman's apartment that hasn't
been cleaned since the 1960s.

When you come in here, you
realise humans fight a never-ending
battle against our own waste,

and in modern cities
we're winning that battle.

But this is a reminder that
that filth can overwhelm us,
and ultimately destroy us.

And you get a real sense in here
of the kind of conditions that
Smith would have been dealing with.

New York in the 19th century
was a city labouring under
tonnes of filth,

accumulated mess from years,
like this.

With the imminent arrival
of cholera,

under Smith's control
the Metropolitan Board of Health

set about mobilising an army
of cleaners to get to grips with
the city's grime.

You got your mask on? Yep.

All right, you ready? Let's roll.

Nearly a century and a half later,
this team of specialist cleaners
are about to do the same,

and try to make this apartment
habitable once more.

So we just start right here, OK?

What the heck is this?

You tell me. Is that urine?

I think that could be urine.
You think it's urine?

That is disgusting.

The first six months of 1866 alone,
the health orders went out from
the Metropolitan Board

to remove 160,000 tonnes
of manure from the streets.

Over 38,000 cartloads of night
soil. That's human excrement.

103 dead horses were removed
and over 3,800 dead cats and dogs.

This was a cleanup effort
on a monumental scale.

Crucially,
where cholera was reported,

Smith ensured that residents
were put in quarantine

and the house
thoroughly disinfected.

See all these roaches in here?

They're German. Those are German.

German roaches? German roaches.

Smith's work
was an unqualified success.

Cholera did reach New York, but
only 591 people died in the outbreak.

That's ten times less than the
previous outbreak, 17 years before.

New Yorkers were starting to
realise that connection
between dirt and disease,

and the city could
turn its attention

to an industry with the capacity
to make New Yorker's really sick.

Food.

Some of New York's most famous foods
had their dirty little secrets.

Take hot dogs for example.

Can I have mustard and onions,
please? Sure.

There were some scandalous
things happening
at the city's sausage industry.

With so many people living in New
York, some profit-hungry butchers

had found a way to feed them
rotten pigs' heads,

decaying hearts
and slime-covered steaks.

Oh yeah, there you go, there you go.
It's...

DAN COUGHS

Oh, that is disgusting!

With no refrigerators,
unsold meat in backstreet butchers
would quickly rot,

but some weren't prepared to
throw it away and lose money.

You know, you killed about
a million pigs a year

in New York City, 1880s, and you
made your hams, bacon and all that.

But you got the other stuff.

You got the heads, you got
the hearts, you got the lungs.

What are you going to do with it?

You paid for it, you want to use it,
so you turn it into sausage.

In 1874, one sausage-making butcher

was caught with 220 rotting heads
in his cellar.

Oh, man. That is just disgusting.

The slime and foul smell of
this three-week-old meat

comes from the bacteria
that form on its surface

and start to break down the flesh.

It's funny, it feels like
it's kind of rotting away,

that the layer of scum's
coming up through your fingers.

That's right.
That's just rotting away.

For centuries, butchers could
do little about the stink that made
their rotten meat unsellable,

until in the 1880s, a new wonder
product appeared on the market.

Borax.

Borax, you use it to
clean your floors these days,

but back in the 1880s the meat
companies started to add it.

We've got some right here,
put a little bit of magic...

We're adding a cleaning product!
There it is.

I suppose the key is just using it
as a kind of masking agent, right?

That's right, you want to use it to
kill that bacteria that's there.

When you kill the bacteria, you kill
the smells the bacteria generates.

So you got to trick
those age-old senses

using modern industrial methods,
and it's not going to stink.

'Boracic acid works by killing
the bacteria that make
rotten meat stink,

'and it's also pretty good
at disinfecting wounds,

'killing cockroaches
and, of course, cleaning floors.'

There it goes.

So would this smell nicer now, then?
Well, it wouldn't smell as bad,
shouldn't smell as bad.

What do you think?
Actually that's...much better.

But the meat is still bad, that meat
is still going to get you sick
if you eat that meat.

What you want to do is turn
the meat from looking like that,

kind of old and gnarly,
to looking like this.

'Back then, one way to give grey,
rotten meat a healthy red colour

'was to add clothing dye
made from coal tar.'

And this is clothes dye here?
Clothes dye, yep.

'Which also sometimes
had a touch of arsenic in it.'

And mix it up. Mix it up? Mix it up.

This must just rot
in someone's gut straight out.

'The next stage is to add
some stale bread or biscuits
to bind it all together,

'before
pumping this chemically enhanced,

'pulverised pork mixture
into pre-prepared pig's intestine.'

God. Let's make some sausage.

Just push.
A little bit of air in there,

there is comes, there it comes.

Oh, my goodness, that looks like a
real sausage, doesn't it? It does.

This is the size of your Italian
sausage, and then what you'd do,

you'd tie off the end and
you'd kind of roll it up.

There's your sausage
in New York City, 1900.

I know I shouldn't, but I'm actually
feeling very proud of my sausage.

The fact that it would make
someone very sick or kill them,
well, worry about that later.

In 1898 there were more than 25,000
food establishments in New York,

and with just ten food
inspectors for the whole city...

..for years,
backstreet butchers could do
pretty much as they pleased.

It wasn't until 1906, when
journalist Upton Sinclair exposed

the horrors of the American food
industry in his book The Jungle,

that serious food regulations
were finally introduced.

After that, New York became
deadly serious about food hygiene.

They even locked up
one cook for life
for not washing her hands properly.

TOILET FLUSHES

For Irish immigrant Mary Mallon,
hygiene wasn't too high on
her list of priorities.

Which was unfortunate,
because Mary was a cook.

By not washing her hands, Mary
was unknowingly spreading typhoid.

Its symptoms included diarrhoea
and a terrible fever.

Mary couldn't understand why,
everywhere she worked,
people kept getting sick.

WOMAN VOMITS

Some even died.

Mary had no idea that these
were on her hands. Bacteria.

In 1882, German Robert Koch had
published his paper

proving that these tiny
micro-organisms caused disease.

It transformed medical science.

This was a groundbreaking moment.

For the first time, scientists
could actually see the enemy,

and it also gave birth to a new
science of microbiology,

where they
discovered how different bacteria
caused a host of different diseases.

In 1907, New York sanitary expert
George Soper had tracked
the typhoid outbreak down to Mary.

Suspecting she was immune
to the disease, but still carried
the bacteria,

Soper pleaded with her to
be tested, but Mary angrily refused
and chased him off with a fork.

STABBING VIOLIN NOTES

Soon after a visit from the
Health Board, Mary found herself

locked up in quarantine, where she
remained for three years, until she
promised never to be a cook again.

Five years later there was another
typhoid outbreak.

25 people
were infected and two died.

Again,
it was traced back to a single cook,

although this time
it was to a Mrs Brown.

Mrs Mary Brown.

Mary had reneged on her promise.

Typhoid Mary, as she became known,
was carted off to quarantine again.

This time they never let her out
and she died a prisoner.

Even though science helped New York
get a handle on disease control,

any efforts to clean up the slums

had been quickly overwhelmed
by mammoth immigration.

The city's population
had shot up 600% in just 50 years.

By the 1880s, the population
of New York was 1.2 million.

Half of them
were crammed into the slums.

Whilst the city's rich and powerful
turned a blind eye,

corruption and exploitation

had become as ingrained
as the dirt itself.

Horrified by this injustice
and poverty, one New Yorker
decided to make a stand,

using a new tactic
to shock the entire nation,

and force the city
to tackle its filth.

His name was Jacob Riis, and in 1888
he became the first American
to use this, flash photography,

to expose the true horror
of the slums as never before.

Using a flash, Riis was the first
photographer to be able to capture

the grim reality of life
inside the dark tenements.

His pictures would reveal to
the nation the terrible deprivation

suffered by many of New York's
poorest immigrants.

As a young man,
Riis had himself lived
in many of the city's worst slums.

Including the infamous Five Points
that he now photographed.

And where he made his living
as a crime reporter.

He embarked on a personal crusade
to get things changed.

He gave a series of lectures around
New York City, shocking audiences
with his graphic slides.

Riis saw photography as a weapon

to fight the injustices
he saw daily in the slums.

As his slide shows
drew more attention,
he was offered a book deal.

In 1890, Riis published a book
called How The Other Half Lived.

For the first time,
people could see actual images
of New York City's poor.

Poverty now had a human face.

This had a seismic impact
right across America

and it brought the issue to the
attention of the rich and powerful.

Becoming a bestseller,

Riis's sensational book
caused a national outcry.

A senate committee was convened
to tackle corruption

and New York would be forced
to clean up its streets
and its politics.

Riis' pictures had a real and
lasting impact.

They created a groundswell of
support that enabled him eventually

to successfully campaign for
the destruction of the Five Points.

It galvanised city politics. People
turned against corrupt politicians,

and in the elections of 1895
Tammany Hall finally lost
their grip on power.

A huge clean-up followed,
as the new administration set about
ruthlessly rooting out corruption.

Another revolution was taking place
that would eventually see

New York's rubbish brought to
extraordinary places like this.

Fresh from defeating yellow fever
and typhoid in the South,

George E Waring took control
of New York sanitation departments.

Colonel Waring, a Civil War hero,
had orders to stop New York
looking like a dump.

For decades,
politicians and corrupt contractors

had been taking the cash and leaving
the trash all over the streets.

Now Waring's big clean-up began,
starting with the street cleaners
themselves.

Dressed in their sparkling white
uniforms, Waring's men weren't

just there to pick up rubbish,
they were there to set an example.

They were banned from going
into bars, from swearing,

and from being mean to their horses.

New York had never seen
anything like it.

Soon those nicely treated horses

were taking tonnes of refuse
to the dump,

as Waring's White Angels,
as they became known,

actually
did what they were paid to do,

and the city was
transformed from this...

to this.

And from this...

to this.

Waring was so successful
cleaning up New York City

that the President sent him to Cuba
to sort out their sanitation.

Sadly, just after arriving,
he contracted yellow fever
and died, but he left this world,

and New York City in particular,

a cleaner place.

As the 20th century approached,
it wasn't only New York's streets
that would be transformed.

The Industrial Revolution was
gathering pace, and famous landmarks

like the Statue of Liberty
and the Brooklyn Bridge

were appearing on
the city's skyline.

Meanwhile, new railroads
and telegraph lines had

firmly set the city at the very
heart of international trade.

In the coming years, New York
would soon overtake London to become

the world's wealthiest city, and
one of the most densely populated.

So many people and so much wealth
would generate a mountain of filth.

To survive and prosper, New York
would need to invest heavily

in new technologies.

And, with money to be made,

a new breed of entrepreneur
would flock to the city.

The New York Stock Exchange was
booming, money and trade was flowing

into the city, the future was
looking bright for everybody.

Well, everybody that is apart from
the guys at companies like the
Knickerbocker Gas and Light Company.

Shares in that sector
were collapsing.

Since the 1830s,

New York had been lit
by a poisonous gas made from coal,

but not for much longer.

Thomas Edison had perfected a bright
money-making idea

that would do away with
New York's gas lamps for good.

The electric light bulb.

CHEERING

Edison argued that
gas lamps were a pain to light...

LAUGHTER

..the gas was poisonous...

the fumes were noxious...

they left this horrible
black staining...

LAUGHTER

..and sometimes...

they blew up.

All of which was true.

And, because Edison's light bulbs
had no such problems, they were
a much better way to light New York.

And, to power them,
in 1882 Edison built this.

The world's first commercial
power station,

sited just here off Wall Street,

burning tonnes and tonnes of coal,

not to produce gas, but
electricity to light up New York.

Edison knew his power station,

belching out black smoke
in the heart of the city,

could only send electricity
a few short blocks.

To illuminate the whole of New York,
he would need a lot of

power stations and a lot of
investment from Wall Street.

Edison threw the switch
at 3pm on 4th September 1882...

..and illuminated a square mile
of New York,

thus beginning the city's
love affair with bright lights.

Edison lit up
Broadway and Wall Street.

His plans for world domination
looked to be continuing apace,
but at his moment of triumph

a rival turned up, a man called
Nikola Tesla, who had an alternative
system for distributing electricity,

and he was looking for investors.

Edison squared up for a fight.

Edison was on the back foot.

His direct current system, DC power,

had a very short range, and to make
it work he would need Wall Street

to agree to fund the building of
hundreds of filthy, coal-burning
power stations, all over New York.

Tesla, who had made his name
with this, the Tesla Coil,

knew he was on to a winner promoting
the alternating current system,
AC power.

The advantage of Tesla's system
was that it could send
electricity hundreds of miles,

which meant all those dirty
coal-fired power stations could be

in someone else's back yard.

CHEERING

New York was far too big a prize
to lose, and Edison
set out to smear AC power.

To demonstrate how dangerous it was,
Edison's company began
manufacturing...

MAN SCREAMS
..AC-powered electric chairs.

Then, in 1903, Edison's company
infamously used AC power to execute
Topsy the elephant on Coney Island.

To this day, no-one's certain why,
because the battle had been lost
and Tesla had already won.

New York's battle of the currents
would have far-reaching
consequences.

Soon, not just New York

but virtually every city
in the world adopted AC power,

precisely because it could be
generated in dirty power stations
that were built far, far away.

Electricity would have a massive
impact on the lives of New Yorkers,

and at the start of the 20th
century the city was poised to
embrace a new technological age.

But it hadn't quite turned the tide
against its 19th-century filth.

And here, on Coney Island,
where New Yorkers came to play
in the hot summer months,

a stark reminder
of the city's dirty past
began washing up on the beaches.

Nothing, apart from Jaws,
gets Americans out of the water
faster than raw excrement.

Ever since the beginnings of
New York, New Yorkers had been

pouring their waste into the Hudson
and the East River and had been
polluting New York Harbour here.

That meant, by the end of
the 19th century, Manhattan was
an island floating in its own filth.

The city had built
a few sewage treatment plants,
but they were regularly overwhelmed

by the waste from so many people

and often the sewers would empty
straight into New York's rivers.

New York realised it had to build
a lot more of these - sewage works.

This is the Newtown Creek
Wastewater Treatment Plant,

worth 5 billion.

Its sole job is to remove everything
1.1 million New Yorkers

put down their toilets and drains,

and return clean, treated water
back into the East River.

And this is where the filthy
raw sewage first comes in.

Whoa, that's raw sewage?

That's raw sewage.

It's actually coming in
at a very, very high speed.

I'm nervous to breathe in,

I don't want to get any of those
particles in my nose. Wow.

And how much is floating
through there now?

Approximately, each one
of these channels can manage
110 million gallons a day.

The first step
is to filter out the big stuff.

Every day, these rakes
pull out over six tonnes

of things the plant can't process -

everything from
loo paper and condoms,
to mobile phones and cameras.

The material from downstairs
is now being raised up.

Oh, man, that's disgusting.

Yeah, that's it.
There was a bit of a splash there.

That's New York's best(!)

Raking out the rubbish
is the easy part.

Most of this massive 52-acre site
is devoted to the next stage -

removing all
the really revolting stuff

like urine, blood and excrement
from the waste water.

And it's all done using
microbiology, air and gravity.

What is in here?

This is where the magic takes place,
this is the biological reactor.

This is where the waste water,
the microorganisms and the air

come together
for a three-hour period.

This amazing process
was brought to New York

by sanitary engineer
Richard H Gould.

Gould could see the problem
facing New York's sewage plants,

centred around the fact that
human waste mixed easily with water.

In the late 1920s,
he presented his colleagues

with a revolutionary solution
from Britain - activated sludge.

Full of the bacteria
found in the human gut,

when activated sludge is added to
sewage, it begins to eat the waste.

The bacteria take around
three weeks to finish the job,

but Gould explained that
by adding air,

the process could be shortened
to just six hours.

The real magic of the process
relied on gravity.

Once the bacteria
devoured all the waste,

they became heavier,
sinking to the bottom

and allowing the clean water
to be easily separated.

Gould revolutionised
New York's sewage treatment system.

Today this plant
is just one of 14

needed to process
the 475 billion gallons of sewage

New York produces every year.

What a fantastic view of Manhattan,
but it feels appropriate, right,

because without this place,
that place would not exist.

Yeah, that's the iconic styling
of Manhattan.

That's where our customers are.

It probably wouldn't be
the island it is if it wasn't for
the waste water treatment plants.

While the city became ever more
reliant on science and technology

to clean up
after its human population,

on the streets there remained
another major source of excrement...

Horses.

Throughout most of the 19th century,
New York's industrial expansion

had relied on horses to move pretty
much everything around the city.

Trouble was, they left behind
a mountain of manure.

In the late 19th century,
there were 200,000 horses

on the streets of New York City.

And every year, they produced
over 400,000 tonnes of manure.

Getting rid of all that waste was
the holy grail, and as a result,

two fundamentally different types
of automobile

were vying with each other
to supersede those filthy horses.

Watch out, everyone, coming through.

On one side was the electric car.

The amazing thing is this an
electric car, which is the future,

and yet it's 100 years old. This is
really going back to the future.

The Detroit Electric, built in 1918,
and now worth more than 100,000,

is one of the oldest electric cars
still on the road in America.

This is fantastic.

Watch out, dude, I don't want to run
you over in my vintage vehicle.

At the end of the 19th century,

there were hundreds
of electric cars,

fighting it out with
their petrol-engined rivals

to win market dominance
on the streets of New York.

Bringing her round.

HORN HONKS

Ooh, urgh, come on.

This is the coolest vehicle
I have ever driven in my life.

Electric cars were not only cool,

they produced little noise
and no emissions.

But compared to
their main competitor,

electric cars
had one major drawback.

It was a pretty good car, the
trouble was it didn't go that far.

The fate of the electric car
was sealed in 1908

when Mr Henry Ford launched this,
the famous Model T.

Now, this would have a profound
effect on the lives of New Yorkers,

if they could get it started.

It may have taken some effort to
get its petrol engine started...

Watch out. Very good, excellent.

ENGINE CHUGS

..but the mass-produced
Model T Ford

undercut its cheapest competitor
by a third.

Take your foot off the brake.

And one could have been yours
to drive away for just 825.

There you go, we're doing good.

It doesn't have power steering,
does it? No, no power steering, no.

Woo-hoo!
There we go, we're rolling now.

So what effect did this have
on cities like New York?

It must have been a revolution.

Yeah, tremendous,
tremendous change took place.

Before, these streets that we're
driving down right now were filthy,

you know, they had thousands,
tens of thousands of horses

and of course, they went to
the bathroom all over the streets,

so it was a mess.

I'd say 90% of the horses

were eliminated within about
five years of the automobile.

Wow. That's a revolution, isn't it?
It is a real revolution.

As mass-produced cars
were revolutionising the way

that New Yorkers
got around the city,

another revolution
of mass production

was taking place in their homes.

And housework
would never be the same again.

In the 1920s, door-to-door salesmen
started selling this, the Hoover.

The tagline was, "It beats
as it sweeps as it cleans."

Round about the same time,
Edison's General Electric Company
launched this,

the world's first mass-produced
consumer refrigerator,

with the tagline,
"Makes it safe to be hungry."

Like every great marketing campaign,
this one had a memorable jingle.

JAUNTY PIANO

# It's here, it's there,
it's everywhere...

In the 1920s, fridges and cars
became potent symbols

of a new, clean,
technologically-driven
American dream.

New York was swept
by a tidal wave of consumerism,

as mass production made them
ever more affordable for everybody.

But it soon became apparent
this progress came at a price.

Not only were the streets
soon jammed with cars,

there was another drawback
to driving a Model T
in New York traffic.

A big problem with these early
motor cars

is the engines kept stuttering -
or pinking, as they called it.

It was because the petrol
was actually burning too well
in the engine.

So in 1920, the chemical engineer
Thomas Midgley Jnr

set out to try
and find an alternative.

Midgley needed to find a way
to make petrol less flammable.

So he began working his way
through the elements

to see which one
would do the job.

Eventually,
he hit upon the solution.

And here it is...

lead.

He'd only gone and just invented
leaded petrol.

Realising deadly lead
might be a bit of a hard sell,

Midgley launched his new additive
under the name of ethyl

and took big whiffs of it
to prove it was safe.

MAN VOMITS

Not long after, Midgley ended up
with lead poisoning,

and had to spend a year
in Florida recovering.

It turned out that lead doesn't
actually burn in a car's engine,

it comes straight out of the
exhaust, polluting the atmosphere.

Yet amazingly, even though there
were soon unleaded alternatives...

..because the oil companies
owned the patent,

leaded became the standard
for most of the 20th century,

and it wasn't banned in New York
until 1996.

Midgley had done his bit to ensure

that the smog that would come
to plague the 20th century

would be that little bit more
noxious. But he wasn't finished yet.

Next, this genius
turned his attention to fridges.

Midgley knew there was a very
obvious problem with early fridges.

The gas used to make them cool
would sometimes catch fire

and occasionally...

..explode.

A bit of a problem.

So Midgley set about
searching for a gas that didn't.

He came up with another
brilliant idea, Freon,

the world's first chlorofluorocarbon
- otherwise known as a CFC.

Midgley didn't realise it,

but he'd invented a gas that would
decimate the world's ozone layer.

In the space of ten years,
Thomas Midgley had managed to create

two of the most environmentally
deadly pollutants in history,

leaded petrol and CFCs.

And with New York's growing appetite
for fridges and cars,

the world's largest city
was set to become one
of its biggest pollutants.

New York's population,
wealth, traffic,

power consumption and its pollution

would all continue to rise
throughout the 20th century.

Only now are we coming to terms with
the vast amounts of unseen filth

our modern cities create.

Many of the technological solutions

that transformed New York City
in the 19th century

produced waste
that has blighted the 21st.

Every 15 minutes, New York produces
enough greenhouse gases

to fill
the entire Empire State Building.

That's 58 million tonnes a year,
or seven tonnes per person per year.

And of course,
those gases cannot be confined

to the city that created them.
Now it's a truly global problem.

Our cities
have always teetered on the edge of
being destroyed by their own filth.

Through the centuries,

we've developed more sophisticated
ways of dealing with waste.

Our battle against our
filth has given us laws,
governments and inventions

that have allowed millions of us
to live together in vast cities,

of which New York
is the ultimate example.

But that struggle is far from over.

This glamorous city
with its glittering skyline

would drown in its own sewage
and rubbish in a matter of days

if its complex waste-disposal
mechanisms broke down.

Our battle against our filth
will never be over.

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