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Center
for the History & Ethics of Public Health
Dept. of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health
Columbia University
722 West 168th Street
Suite 934
New York, NY 10032
(212) 305-1307 Tel
(212) 342-1986 Fax
hphm@columbia.edu
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This project was generously supported by:
Intellectual
contributors to this project include:
Elizabeth Robilotti,
MPH
Doctoral Student, Program in the History & Ethics
of Public Health & Medicine
Martina Lynch
Program Coordinator, Center for the History & Ethics
of Public Health
Amy Fairchild,
PhD, MPH
Assistant
Professor and Assistant Director, Center for the History & Ethics
of Public Health
David Rosner, PhD, MSPH
Professor
and Director, Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health
Content contributors
to this project include:
Elizabeth Robilotti,
MPH
Martina Lynch
Donald Olson,
MPH
Prea Gulati
Technical
and Design Consultant:
Charles
Forcey, Jr., Clio Inc.
Taking New York City as its starting point, the Living City Project
will create a resource for visualizing and studying the interplay among
sanitary engineering, technology, laboratory science, society, and culture
in shaping the built city.
During the decades between the end of the Civil War and the end of World
War I, American cities experienced profound changes in their populations,
geographic boundaries, and economic and social bases along with changes
in their physical infrastructure. Horse-drawn carriages were replaced
by subways and cars; low-rise housing gave way to modern skylines; uneven
sewerage and water supplies were extended and developed; electricity,
telephone wires, and steam pipes were introduced and then concealed
underground. During this period, science and technology were brought
to bear on the problems of urban industrial America. Disease, in particular,
stood at the crossroads of the myriad social, cultural, environmental,
and infrastructural problems of rapidly growing cities.
New York City provides a unique place to begin studies of the built
city. New York's published and unpublished record of reports, statistics,
maps, photographs, and correspondence documents the social reordering
of the city via sewer lines, subway systems, and water works; this record
documents the manufacture of chronic ailments borne of the modern city
and its creation. More important, New York City's careful documentation
of its "technological" conquest of infectious disease provided
paradigms for national social, health, and urban policy. Wrote historian
Charles Rosenberg of the creation of its health department: "in
the history of public health in the United States, there is no date
more important than 1866, no event more significant than the organization
of the Metropolitan Board of Health." For the first time, "The
tools and concepts of an urban industrial society were beginning to
be used in solving this new society's problems." The Annual Reports
of the New York City Department of Health (NYCDOH), published continuously
from 1866, provide a unique portrait of the changing city. These reports
were the primary means of documenting the activities, achievements,
and plans of the agency most responsible for maintaining and shaping
the city's environment.
The NYCDOH Annual Reports serve as the foundation for the digital collection.
They also serve as the framework for understanding more narrowly conceived
yet important social snapshots of specific aspects of the city's growth
and have helped us to identify several key local sources that provide
the background for tracing the dynamics of infrastructural transformation
within a framework of health. In addition to the Annual Reports, the
digital collection now includes: John Griscom's 1845 report, The Sanitary
Conditions of the Laboring Population of New York; the Citizens' Association
1864 report on The Sanitary Condition of the City; John Shaw Billings's
1890 report on the Vital Statistics of New York City and Brooklyn; and
the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission Reports of 1910, 1912, and 1914.
Some 1,000 images from the 19th- and 20th-century illustrated press
revolving around health in New York City flesh out the initial substance
of this digital library, offering visual commentary on and documentation
of the sanitary and health issues that most concerned the city. Sources
for these images include Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated
Magazine, Puck, Judge, Scientific American, Harper's Monthly, Scribner's
Monthly, McClure's Magazine, Outlook, and The Survey. These nationally
circulating publications were largely based in New York City. As was
the case with the city's paradigmatic sanitary reports, these visual
representations of science, disease, health, and urban change were widely
distributed and had significant national impact.
The Development of the Project
The Living City Project will unfold in several phases. At this first
critical juncture, it is our goal to provide users the core documents
in the form of image files searchable via metadata and a searchable
database of images from the 19th and 20th century illustrated press.
We will post these documents on line as they are scanned, cleaned, and
coded.
A large portion of this collection (roughly 40% of approximately 20,000
pages) is quantitative. In the second phase of this project, we will
begin converting these statistics into database form. When it is complete,
The Living City databases will span approximately 55 years, from 1865
to 1920 and reflect urban infrastructure in the Manhattan, New York
study area.
In phase three of the project, we hope to create a geographic information
system (GIS) linking physical data regarding the progress of sewer,
water, and steam systems, electrical and telephone lines, and subways
and other transportation systems to the mortality statistics in the
digital collection. Statistics will be linked at the city ward level.
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