I was visiting Charleston South Carolina recently and in the old quarter they have horses taking around tourists on carriages (like little mini horse drawn open air buses). The smell of horse piss and manure in the area was gross and very strong (this was summer). I can't imagine what it would be like to have that many horses in NYC as the main mode of transportation. The smell back then must have been awful. I get everyone just put up with it.
People (including myself) are already saying this.
I live in an Easter European major city and when traveling to a civilized country (yes fellow eastern europeans, hate me for saying this) I'm always take aback by the quality of the air. I've recently visited Stockholm and the amount and variety of mushrooms growing in small urban parks surprised me -- I'm sure there's many orders of magnitude less pollution there than where I live.
I always think about this even today when an older car passes by - you can really smell the difference between 1980s exhaust filtering and more modern technology, and imagine how it must have been when all cars smelled that way. So technology is improving, but I'm not optimistic that we will get completely rid of motor traffic in cities in my lifetime...
Don't forget that there was also no deodorant for the humans back then, I think it is easy to forget just how bad cities in general must have smelt back then. Plus coal fires, people smoking, people washing their bodies and their clothes irregularly.
(my father tells a story of how in the 50s he only had one work shirt and 10 removable collars - he'd wear the same shirt for 2 weeks just changing the collar daily)
> I think it is easy to forget just how bad cities in general must have smelt back then.
I refer you to London's "Great Stink" of 1858 during which the smell was so bad that Parliament seriously considered moving to a different city: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
Well, people either shit in the streets or emptied their piss-pots into them. If you were lucky enough (?) to have access to a communal toilet it was shared with a large number of people and likely just emptied into the street anyway. Everything eventually flowed to the Thames which must have stank. Horse shit everywhere. I'm sure there was dog shit everywhere too. Honestly the smell of feet and armpits was probably tame and "natural" by comparison.
In early Victorian London, like most cites of the time, ones shit was directed into a cesspool. These were regularly emptied by 'nightsoil' men who took the waste away as fertiliser. (The drains in the streets were only for rainwater).
What caused the Great Stink was, paradoxically, the invention of the water closet (the flushing bog to you and me) which massively increased the volume of liquid waste, which was then discharged into the Thames and caused the famous Great Stink.
I can assure you, our Victorian ancestors were not animals that regularly shat in the streets.
On the other hand in the great stink era the waterwheels on London Bridge were industriously injecting into the drinking water supply the same effluent that had just been ejected.
One would have been grateful to be on The New River company's list of clients.
There's an excellent book also called "The Great Stink" on the problem and on Bazalgette's solution of them.
We get used to the smell and stink (environment). Ever realized that the person who walks into the room notices a smell that the people in the room aren't even aware off.
