Concerns with Garbage, Sewage in Bushwick Brooklyn and Rikers Island - Harper's Weekly 8 Sept 1894

This article in Harper's Weekly page 844, 8 Sept 1894 discusses garbage and sewage in Brooklyn before incorporation of NYC in 1898 and labeled "Scene Of The Great Garbage Dump At Red Hook, Brooklyn" - the article has nothing outwardly to do with Red Hook in the southern part of Brooklyn and not the northern part with geography and streets names (with typos) of Bushwick.

The one legitimate reference to Red Hook in the article regarding dumps, sewage and pollution, are  the visuals, one photo labeled "The Dump, Columbia and Lorraine Streets" which is in Red Hook, the other images conform more to the written article.

I can only guess that this one bleeding heart article about conditions of the poor and in Brooklyn was to a limited audience of a very tony magazine like Harper's Weekly. I can only imagine that some junior editor commuting from over the East River to Harper's offices in NYC, knew where Columbia and Lorraine was and the rest of the geography got lost on him  and thus the title. That living on and off for decades in the Big Apple a lot of the neighborhoods in the Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx are still a mystery to me as well.

The article interested me in that what it said about bathhouses being parked in the summer at the mouth of waterways filled with sewage and pollution, reminded of Philadelphia's own similar manner of giving free bathing in floating houses and more than likely docked at the mouth of similarly polluted waterways flowing into the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers in the late decades of the 19th century before permanent brick buildings were erected for the cleanliness and pleasure of the poor of the city, cities like New York and Philadelphia in the early decades of the twentieth century to replace these old obsolete, in terms of good health, floating bathhouses.

An area of Standard Oil and its tanks at what I believe is Bushwick Inlet mentioned in the article and on a peninsula of sorts with Newtown Creek, only "some hundreds of yards or from Newtown Creek",  a dividing boundary between King's County (Brooklyn) and Queens County.

Dealing with Garbage and Other issues in Brooklyn before Incorporation 


That of note in images of print below is the typo of "Briggs" for "Driggs" avenue, an area described there as a current dumping site thirty to forty feet high and its geography matching closely that of McCarran Park pool within the greater McCarren Park label on Google maps and near Bushwick Inlet. That in the end, the poor and or the common citizen benefits in the repurposing of old industrial or waste sites. 

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