One of the animating principles of Microkhan is the steadfast belief that the recent past was more chaotic—and thus immeasurably more interesting—than most of us realize. Take, for example, the prevalence of hogs on the streets of New York City in the mid-19th century, the subject of this paper by a pair of Spanish professors. It took a public-health catastrophe—the cholera epidemic of 1849—for municipal officials to realize that the well-inhabited portion of Manhattan wasn’t an ideal stomping ground for our porcine friends. And so the pigs were exiled to what was then the city’s equivalent of Siberia:
Overcoming sometimes violent resistance by impoverished owners, the police flushed five to six thousand pigs out of cellars and garrets and drove an estimated twenty thousand swine north to the upper wards that summer…The authorities, moreover, kept up their campaign year after year, banishing from lower Manhattan all bone-boiling works along with the putrefying carcasses piled high in their yards. In the late 1850s, Hog Town was invaded and the west side piggery complex between 50th and 59th Streets dismantled. By 1860, New York´s porkers had been definitively exiled north of 86th Street and transformed into a distinctively uptown menace.
According to the authors, the ejected pigs flourished in Manhattan’s northern hinterlands, under the care of Irish immigrants to who slept rough in what would later become Central Park. If anyone can point me in the direction of documents that detail those swineherds’ experiences, please advise.
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