The Smell of Money

Texas Cattle down Fifth Avenue, New York City, in 1866

WASHINGTON MARKET RAISES A STINK — THE SAMUEL ALLERTON PROTOTYPE — THE ILLINOIS CONNECTION — CATTLE HEALTH AND MARKETS

In 1866, thousands of pedestrians crowding Lower Manhattan in New York City considered the smell of cattle manure wafting off the streets nothing less than a wretched stench. But cattle buyers and sellers like William McCoy breathed it in as a sweet fragrance, one that filled the air with the "smell of money." He and his brothers, James and Joseph, operated a profitable cattle buying-and-selling business in Springfield, Illinois — by some accounts, one of the largest such businesses in the country. New York, with its nearly one million people, offered aggressive and ambitious businessmen like the McCoy brothers an opportunity to play the nation's largest and best cattle market. William, the eldest of the three, conducted the Chicago and New York City side of the family business while his brothers stayed in Illinois.

McCoy smelled more than money as he made his way to Washington Market, the public outlet where vendors sold vegetables, fruits, and meat. On the way he could have passed some 180 slaughter-butcher shops clustered within a one-mile radius of Canal Street. Crowded into the same area, people lived in some of the worst tenement housing in the nation. The Seventeenth Ward held 95,000 people with about 64,000 of them crammed into 1,890 tenement houses. Over 150 of these rickety three- to five-story dwellings lacked any kind of toilets or sewer connections, and about 2,500 people lived in their dank, dark cellars. Altogether, at least half the population of New York City lived in tenement houses in 1866. These same impoverished men and women made up the majority of the consumers to whom W. K. McCoy and Brothers hoped to sell the meat cut from Texas longhorns.

Washington Market Raises a Stink

Cuts of beef from the cattle that McCoy sold reached four public city markets — Catharine, Fulton, Franklin, and Washington. In 1813, New Jersey farmers had built the first, Washington Market, a large red brick pavilion where they could sell dairy and eggs to the growing population of New York City. The streets of Barclay, Vesey, and Fulton all led to Washington Market on the waterfront of the North River (now Hudson River). Every day, throngs of buyers stood nearly shoulder to shoulder buying most of the food eaten in the city.

Washington Market failed utterly to merit a seal of approval from the Metropolitan Board of Health. As bemoaned in the New York Tribune in January 1867, the place had "within a few years been twice indicted by the Grand Jury as a public nuisance," and the reporter believed the other three markets deserved the same denunciation. From the time it was built, few improvements had been made to the Washington Market structure aside from wooden stalls extended from its brick core. As one writer would describe it later in 1877, the structure was not "worthy of the extent of business done or deserving of praise on economic or sanitarian grounds." Yet inside hung "avenues with crimson drapery — the best of beef in prodigious quarters," all made possible by cattle dealers like McCoy.

While William McCoy might have smelled the money, he also contributed to one of the rankest urban environments in North America. For most New Yorkers the streets did an excellent job of covering the scent of the money. The city thoroughfares stank and posed dangers to anyone near or on them. No one had to remind residents of that fact in 1866. The odors of horse, sheep, and hog dung filled the nostrils of pedestrians, coach passengers, and teamsters alike. Hogs ran free, feeding on whatever garbage residents threw onto the streets. Pedestrians often forgot that under the tons of manure deposited on the streets each day, the streets were paved with cobblestones.

Travel by any means had become increasingly difficult anywhere in the city. New York's population had swollen beyond the capacity of its streets, and its downtown areas groaned under the daily additions of people. Overcrowded "street railways" failed to transport their customers comfortably. In 1866, the legislature, in an attempt to relieve the congestion, approved funding for a subway system.

The butchering and consumption of meat in these crowded, smelly urban confines only compounded pollution and street-congestion problems. Swine provided a ready source of meat for their owners who often butchered their animals at home. The poor often dined on captured "wild" hogs found running at large. Each week butchers slaughtered thousands of sheep and prepared cuts for sale in 180 shops located in the heart of downtown Manhattan. Then the butchers discarded the offal in back alleys, where hogs fed on it.

While hogs and sheep provided most of the meat eaten in the city, New York consumers also developed a healthy taste for beef. Between 1855 and 1865, the annual consumption of pork grew from over 250,000 to over 650,000 animals, and during the same period, mutton consumption increased from over 550,000 to over 1,000,000 animals. Beef consumption also rose dramatically, increasing from nearly 160,000 animals in 1855 to over 270,000 in 1865.

Eating certain cuts of beef became a symbol of class status. In 1830, John and Peter Delmonico opened one of the first restaurants in the city, and soon competitors followed. The brothers dominated the business by specializing in a menu offering French-styled cuisine. In 1837, they opened a distinctly upscale, opulent restaurant at the intersection of Beaver and William Streets that catered explicitly to the elites of the world. In 1850, the chefs added to the menu the "Delmonico steak," a twenty-ounce cut of sirloin, a favorite of Abraham Lincoln. In 1862, Charles Delmonico opened an exclusive restaurant next to Union Square on 14th Street and 5th Avenue, and hired Charles Ranhofer, one of the earliest examples of a celebrity chef. On August 29, 1866, his banquet menu for the dinner given to President Andrew Johnson included as part of one course a tenderloin called Filet de boeuf à la Pocahontas.

By 1866, meeting the demand for beef in the rapidly growing city approaching one million people required the massive importation of animals. During one week in March 1866, for example, 4,100 steers still fell short of supplying consumer demand in the city. Buying cuts of meat and other foodstuffs created a daily rush to Washington Market, where during the forenoon it became "almost impossible for merchants to deliver their goods to the various forwarding lines...