[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: All right, so after we signed off I Googled between I don’t know 100,000 and 200,000 horses across the across the five boroughs of New York City, each horse making between 15 and 20 kilos of shit a day I think plus the piss. The piss is significant too. It wasn’t just the horse’s waste, when a horse died people would just often leave it there until it rotted. So, stuff was a mess.
In the 1880s they started having meetings about what to do and there weren’t great ideas. They started coming up with dedicated horseshit squads and the farmers would come and pick up the shit for manure but it was still a huge problem. One thing they did was they raised the Brownstones; The New York Row Homes, the fancy ones like 6’8 feet or six eight steps above the sidewalk because that would get the houses above the sea of shit. The New York horse population peaked in 1920, as we kind of figured and then the total U.S horse population is down about 85% since then because we use cars and trucks.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 