THE FILTHY STREETS OF STUY HEIGHTS (1891)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
Do you know the history of YOUR house?
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“I have lived in Macon Street since Nov. 28, and there has not been a soul to clean that street during that time.”
It happened then as it does now – people complain about the condition of their streets and their neighborhood, in general.
The above quote was from 1891, back when Stuyvesant Heights was in the throes of a major construction expansion. Apparently, there were construction materials everywhere – filling the streets and clogging the sewers.
“There are at least a thousand tons of sand and stone in the street with grass growing all over it,” the same commenter noted. “The sewer is filled up with sand.”
It got so bad for this section of town – due to the relatively unregulated construction industry – that every time there was a heavy rain storm, the article continued, residents’ cellars were “flooded with one or two feet of water.”
Ironically, our current 21st century Mayor’s Office declared a few years ago that the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant were among the dirtiest in the city. Specifically, the office noted that the cleanliness of 15% of our streets was “unacceptable.”
Now that Bed-Stuy is a built-up section of our city, maybe we don’t have much of an excuse for the filth.
But it must have been tough getting around in Stuyvesant Heights back then. You were lucky if your street had been laid with cobblestone and downright lucky if it had been resurfaced with macadam.
Surely, some homebuyers – traveling to certain parts of Stuyvesant Heights to see the newly constructed brownstones – never left their carriages.
“You can turn a furrow with a plow in Howard Avenue, near my house,” noted the Stuyvesant Heights resident, “and on Macon Street you could use a steam dredge all day and it wouldn’t touch the cobblestones.”
Apparently, Macon Street had the cobblestones – although you wouldn’t have known it.
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