NYC EATS

 “Can you not see that the task is your task – yours to dream, yours to resolve, yours to execute?” - Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

In the 1880s, Manhattan’s Beekman Hill couldn’t be swankier. Many of the city’s most affluent citizens dwelled on Beekman Place, high on a cliff overlooking the East River. They had all of the luxuries money could buy...except breathable air.

Beekman Place resident Mathilde Wendt and her neighbors had to keep all their windows shut and stay indoors because of the stench from the many slaughterhouses along the river. The entire East Side, from 40th to 47th Streets, reeked of blood, excrement, offal and rotting flesh. Some residents blamed their families’ illnesses (headaches, nausea, lack of appetite) on the constant, inescapable odors.

Mathilde finally had enough. She gathered ten of her influential neighbors together and in 1884 formed the Ladies Health Protective Association of New York to combat the butcheries.

After sniffing their way around the neighborhood, they discovered that much of the malodorous smell was emanating from a massive, open river barge, stockpiled with 20,000 tons of manure, 30 feet high, steaming and fermenting in the sun. Upon further investigation they discovered that the stankboat, which had been floating there for years, was owned by Michael Kane, whose company made its fortune gathering up mountains of excrement from the stockyards and selling it to farmers as fertilizer. The ladies decided to press a nuisance suit against the Kane company.

Mathilde describes her spouse’s reaction: “My husband...and many other gentlemen in the neighborhood are so taken up with politics that they do not care to interfere in the business. They quietly tell their wives that the ladies had better take the matter up.” And so they did. Women hardly ever appeared in court at the time, but these courageous ladies stood up and shared their stories. Their testimony describing their horrible conditions was very convincing, and represented a startling advance for women’s legal power. Not only did the jury find Kane guilty, but the judge appointed the Ladies Health Protective Association to continue inspecting the pile to make sure it was removed, effectively deputizing the voluntary organization. It was another first for jurisprudence.

But there was still a lot more rotting meat in the city to take care of.

Galvanized by their victory, Mathilde and her Association next went after the slaughterhouses, touring the worst violators. Their goal was to pressure the Health Department into enforcing its own laws. In a blaze of publicity, the Association inspected 44 slaughterhouses in the neighborhood. The conditions the women found were appalling, including animals climbing on top of each other to reach a whiff of fresh air from a small grate. Flies covered the hanging carcasses, and offal lay rotting in piles. Mathilde would stand in the middle of the blood-stained floors, her nose and mouth covered with a handkerchief, and read the city code aloud to the owners.

The newspapers called the women “The Committee on Smells.” When the L.H.P.A. pressured the health commissioner, he explained that the slaughterhouses had no record of violations...because they hadn’t been inspected in years! 

Exposing the hidden backstory of how the city’s meat was handled, the Ladies’ Association had touched a nerve. New Yorkers expected their meat to be treated better than this. Over the next years, squads of angry women began protesting at the worst offenders. Despite a police escort, they were pelted with rocks and garbage. But they persevered. Mathilde explained, “if we don’t insist on this we’ll all die of cholera.”

The L.H.P.A. took their fight to the mayor, who sat on their report and did nothing. Then they lobbied the notoriously corrupt state legislature in Albany, but all of their lawsuits and bills were defeated. 

In the end, the butcheries finally gave up. One confessed, “If we have to pay out all this money to lawyers and legislators, we may as well put in into what the women want.” Soon the slaughterhouses cleaned up their act, thanks to the persistence of Mathilde West and her brave cohorts.

But that wasn’t the end of the trouble. At the turn of the century, the major meatpackers formed the Beef Trust and hiked prices by 50% in one year. Meat became out of reach for all but the wealthiest New Yorkers. Taking their cue from the Ladies’ Health Protective Association, neighborhood women reacted by boycotting meat and engaging in spontaneous riots outside butcher shops across the city. They doused the meat with carbolic acid and dragged carcasses into the streets. Hundreds of women were arrested, but their actions caused a government investigation of the Beef Trust, resulting in beefed-up fines, and stricter, more enforceable regulations.

In the end, every butchery in Slaughterhouse Row was bulldozed. The land was sold to developer William Zeckendorf for $6 million. He resold it for $8.5 million to the United Nations, who built their headquarters where the herd-slaughters used to be. 

Mathilde Wendt and her Ladies Health Protective Association inspired similar organizations, as well as Suffragette movements, in many cities across America. We have them to thank for safer and healthier food, air, and environment. If you’d like to pay tribute to this brave coterie of women champions, you can visit their monument on Riverside Drive at 116th Street.

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