The Sanitary Nightmare of Hell's Kitchen in 1860s New York

Today, the stretch of Hell’s Kitchen around Eleventh Avenue and 39 Street doesn’t make much of an impression—the stoic facade of the Javits Convention Center, idling buses, a dull roar of Lincoln Tunnel traffic.

But in the 1860s, the Manhattan neighborhood was a beastly wonderland of stenches, bloody parades, and diseases from which to horribly perish. Among its meatpacking-focused highlights were slaughterhouses, gut-cleaning and fat-boiling outfits, towering manure heaps, and stables devoted to the production of “swill milk”—the squeezings of frequently diseased cows that were consumed by the poor, to their detriment.