The White Wings: How Colonel George Waring Transformed New York City Sanitation

In the late nineteenth century, New York City had a street-cleaning problem so severe that reformers described entire thoroughfares as coated with mud, ashes, garbage, paper, manure, and decomposing organic matter. The city already had a Department of Street Cleaning, but political patronage, weak supervision, and poor waste-disposal practices left the agency unable to keep pace with a rapidly…