US History I—O’Reilly
Improvements and Reforms Unit
Name:________________________________________________
Date:_____________________________Per:________________
Urbanization in the 1800s
Annual Report of the Interments
Primary source: "Annual Report of the Interments in the City and County of New-York," 1842.
Background information: Dr. John Hoskins Griscom (1809–74), a Quaker physician, founded
the New York Academy of Medicine and pioneered the field of public health. His advocacy for
sanitation, medical care, and adequate housing led to the great reforms of the Progressive Era
after the Civil War.
The over-crowded state of many tenements, and the want of separate apartments, are prolific sources of moral
degradation, and physical suffering. They operate directly, by vitiating the atmosphere, already too confined for a
majority of the inmates, while, by close approximation of both sexes, and all ages and relationships, and often no
relationship except necessity, and a too familiar intercourse of parents, sons and daughters, without partition or
curtain to shield them, night or day, sleeping in the same room, and often in the same bed, there are created an
indifference to the common decencies of life, and a disregard of the sacred obligations of moral propriety, which result
in a depressing effect upon the physiological energies, and powerfully heighten the susceptibility to, and render more
difficult the cure of diseases among them. The coincidence, or parallelism, of moral degradation and physical disease,
is plainly apparent to an experienced observer.
By providing the laboring classes with better tenements, improved ventilation, and healthy and cleanly arrangements
in respect to yards, sinks and sewerage, they will certainly suffer less from sickness and premature mortality, and a
vast amount of pauperism, crime, and wretchedness be prevented. On the other hand, it is a well-established fact,
that diseases are not confined to the localities where they originate, but widely diffuse their poisonous miasma.
Hence, though the poor may fall in greater numbers because of their nearer proximity to the causes of disease, yet
the rich, who inhabit the splendid squares and spacious streets of this metropolis, often become the victims of the
same disorders which afflict their poorer brethren. Nor should the momentous fact be overlooked, that the same
causes which occasion a great amount of physical suffering to the laborer, and a high rate of mortality, at the same
time impair his ability of self-support, increase taxation, and present almost insuperable obstacles to his social
elevation, and moral and religious improvement.
"Annual Report of the Interments in the City and County of New-York, for the year 1842, with remarks thereon, and a brief view of
the Sanitary Condition of the City," in John Hoskins Griscom, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1845).
Rising immigration and increasing social stratification affected the development of American cities during the
mid-nineteenth century. City guides, delineating the mysteries of the metropolis, as well as newspapers,
magazines, and novels presented the East’s industrializing cities—New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—as
fractured societies. According to these publications, each was really two cities: one orderly, prosperous, and
bathed in “sunlight,” the other menacing, poor and steeped in “darkness” (or “gaslight”). In this frontispiece
from the 1868 Sunshine and Shadow in New York, the symbolic extremes of day and night were represented by
a Fifth Avenue mansion and the Old Brewery, an infamous “thieves’ den” located in the Five Points slum
district.