Garbage and Waste Disposal

What did people do with their garbage in the 19th century?

“To city dwellers in the twenty-first century”, many of whom do not know where their trash ends up or how many different institutions and people work daily to take it there, “it defies easy explanation why the extensive midden excavated at the Charnley-Persky House exists in the first place. Chicago residents, especially in that wealthy neighborhood, would have had access to various garbage disposal options, from hiring private scavengers or using public contractors, both of whom would remove these foul-smelling materials from alongside a home. The proximity and extent of this dumpsite seems confusing and even repellent to many twenty-first-century urbanites whose own trash is removed from garbage cans or dumpsters at mandated intervals by municipal employees. But norms of what is or is not ‘healthy,’ ‘gross,’ or ‘offensive’ may differ within these different time periods, although the familiar location of the site in an elegant historic district obscures the formidable temporal breach between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century waste disposal practices. It was common and acceptable in the nineteenth century to ‘use the borders of the house for disposal’ (Strasser 2000:7). To find a midden adjacent to a home, even one like the Charnley House, reflects this set of traditional practices that has also been verified by archaeological research” (Graff 2020:149).

“Municipal sanitation and refuse disposal evolved alongside notions of the miasma theory of disease versus germ theory and other concepts of health. Sanitation and sanitation reform covers the emptying and maintenance of cesspools and privy vaults; the removal of garbage; the eradication of swamps or other disease vectors, often by the use of fill; and the creation of sanitary infrastructure, including pipes for sewerage and water systems. To discuss waste removal, then, is also to discuss efforts in sanitation reform” (Graff 2020:153).

“Potter Palmer’s 1882 move to fill in the so-called plague spots along Lake Shore Drive (Chicago Tribune 1882b:9) was a local manifestation of a citywide and nationwide movement to improve health by using garbage as fill, at the same time creating new land” (Graff 2020:153). This fits into the first of Colten’s (1994) three, semi-overlapping regimes of waste disposal in Chicago. In phase one (1840—1900), urban “reclamation” expanded the surface area of the city. Next came a period (1871—1950) where waste materials either filled in pits and quarries opened for post-fire rebuilding projects or raised the grade level of streets. This gave way to the current practice of hauling waste to rural landfills (Graff 2020:154).

Garbage Disposal in the Neighborhoods of the Charnley House and Mecca Flats

During the time that the Charnleys lived in Chicago and the first tenants moved into the Mecca Flats, “municipal garbage collection was still haphazard and dependent on contracted labor, and not all districts were equally served. Lake Michigan was still used as a dumping ground for barges full of municipal trash through 1882, and garbage continued to be used to build up Chicago’s lakefront Grant Park into 1900 (Colten 1994:128,129). A 1906 Chicago Tribune article, ‘Picturesque Stretch of the “Streeterville” Dump,’ follows one Sanitary Inspector Doherty, who, after a complaint from the Imperial German Counsel posted in Chicago, notes ‘decaying refuse from the stores and peddlars’ [sic] supplies’ and ‘two large and unsightly holes with green and brown colored water’ (1906b:3). The owners of the site—who included Adrian Honoré, brother of Bertha Honoré Palmer—were ordered under threat of suit to clean it up” (Graff 2020:154).

In 1892, the year both Charnley House and the Mecca Flats were constructed, Chicago reached a “garbage crisis” that affected the entire city, not just one neighborhood or the other. “Although the 1889 annexation increased Chicago’s size by 125 square miles and population by 225,000 (Cain 2004), there was no concomitant expansion of city trash collection. The only dump for all this refuse was located at 35th Street and Western Avenue (Knight 2006:12). By the 1890s city officials across the United States were realizing that ‘the complexities of urban life in the late nineteenth century made collection and disposal of refuse by private citizens impractical’ (Melosi 2005:23)” (Graff 2020:155). That year, “citizen groups largely made of middle- and upper-class women launched a ‘garbage campaign’ in Chicago (Knight 2006) to address the sanitation crisis. The impetus for local sanitary reform groups to solve this sanitation problem coincided with work to prepare the city of Chicago for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition” (Graff 2020:156).

Did Chicago Improve Its Garbage Disposal Practices After the 1893 Fair?

In the years after the Chicago Fair, the city’s sanitation picture was still bleak. “Although an 1893 ordinance (5134) mandated that garbage from hotels, restaurants, and cafes be privately removed, private residences were still not included in the directive (Binmore 1894:128–129).... Faced with inadequate municipal waste disposal for private residences, wealthy Chicagoans continued to hire private scavengers well into the first years of the twentieth century (Colten 1994:321)” (Graff 2020:156–157). But that only affected a limited number of residents and neighborhoods.

Concerns over trash were animated, not only by health worries, but by a Progressive moral sense that the state of the area around one's residence, especially the alleys where trash was stored for pick-up, reflected the virtue of one's household (Knight 2006:23–24). These twin motives led citizens to found the Civic Federation of Chicago, with its prominent sanitary committee, and to volunteer to be garbage inspectors, as reformer Jane Addams did for the 19th Ward (Knight 2006:19–20).

They also inspired reforms of municipal and state regulations. “In 1897 the state of Illinois mandated that cities with a population over one hundred thousand had to make contracts for removing garbage. By 1898 ‘the city had abandoned the use of the wooden garbage boxes for metal cans and, although the contracting system was still in use, a new plan was implemented that year to enter into five-year contracts for garbage removal and disposal in order to reduce the opportunities for patronage’ (Knight 2006:24)” (Graff 2020:157). The City Council's 1911 Sanitary Code was intended to bring further clarity and organization to the patchwork system of sanitation. It set out legal definitions for categories of ‘garbage’—apart from ‘ashes’ and ‘miscellaneous waste’—and requirements for the containment, handling, and removal of each (Chicago City Council and John Siman 1916:84). Trash cans were to be moved from alleys to front sidewalks, and only licensed scavengers could empty them.

These reforms seem not to have made an immediate impact on long-standing trash disposal habits. "[I]n 1914 the City Council ordained that ‘no person, firm or corporation shall empty, dump or deposit any ashes, soot, sand, dust, refuse, offal, rubbish, cinders, dirt, manure, street sweepings . . . upon any private property or upon any vacant lot or grounds within the limits of the City of Chicago’ unless ‘the written consent of the owner or owners or their duly authorized agent shall first be obtained and filed with the commissioner of health,’ who would then issue a permit (Chicago City Council 1914:1391)” (Graff 2020:157–158). Enforcement of these regulations, however, only really began with the 1916 creation of the Bureau of Waste Disposal (Chicago City Council and John Siman 1916:87). In this new regulatory environment, one of the contractors overseen by the Bureau, the Chicago Reduction Company, gained prominence and influence by pushing for the incineration of trash (Citizens’ Association of Chicago 1912). And, even with the ban on dumping trash inside city limits, and the alternatives provided by officially approved contractors, individual petitioners could get permission from the city's public health commissioner (Colten 1994:133).

Garbage, Garbage Everywhere

Given all of these contemporaneous changes to trash disposal, the appearance of a midden of household garbage, containing materials that date between 1880 and 1920, beside the Charnley House raises some important question—especially since no records exist of anyone on Astor Street pursuing the legal loophole for dumping on their property described above. "Was it opportunistic and surreptitious dumping? Was it a practice that, having been the norm for decades, continued into the twentieth century despite the location within a wealthy district with greater access to hiring scavengers? Were concepts of what was and was not offensive to both smell and to concerns of health so different from today that the question of whether you had garbage next to your home—especially highly burnt material—was not a cause for concern? And why did an elite, majority white neighborhood like the Gold Coast have the same, if not worse, sanitary conditions than other less socioeconomically prosperous parts of Chicago?" (Graff 2020:158). The Charnley midden illustrates why, even with all of the archival data available, archaeology is so crucial for showing just how foreign a country the recent past was.

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