Mop Shaking

The Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia collection has proven time and again to be a treasure-trove of interesting material, leading to several blog posts on important topics as well as the 2022 Conference on Conditions in Harlem. A surprising entry in the collection guide is named “Mop Shaking” which lists two folders dating to 1944-1945.

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Letter to Mayor LaGuardia, regarding mop shaking, November 28, 1944. Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers, NYC Municipal Archives.

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Letter to Mayor LaGuardia, regarding mop shaking, November 28, 1944. Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers, NYC Municipal Archives.

Indeed, mop shaking violated the City’s Sanitary Code as did shaking rugs and dusters. The folders contain several complaints sent to the Mayor, many made anonymously. Consider an excerpt from a letter received at City Hall on November 4, 1944.

“I have a neighbor right next door to me who shakes her dust mop out of her front window every morning two and three times full of dirt and dust. My husband painted our apt. last week and our windows were open with white enamel paint on the wood work and this woman shook her mop out and all the dirt set right in the wet paint. My husband nearly went mad and had to take benzine and clean it all off and paint it over again….”

The frustration oozes off the paper. In response to this and other complaints, the Mayor’s staff would forward the information to the Commissioner of Health with instructions to “Investigate and Report.”

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Referral to Commissioner Stebbins, Department of Health, from the office of the Mayor, November 13, 1944. Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers, NYC Municipal Archives.

Health inspectors were dispatched to the address provided and, inevitably, they found no evidence of the dust shakers. Considering the chain of events, that’s not surprising. The complaint was mailed to City Hall, opened by the Mayor’s staff, circulated to the Health Commissioner, the location was added to the inspectors’ route and the inspection took place. The results were relayed to the Commissioner, who, in turn, dutifully reported back to the Mayor the absence of a dust nuisance. Little wonder since days expired between the offending incident and the actual inspection.   

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Report to Mayor LaGuardia from Ernest L. Stebbins, Commissioner of the Department of Health, November 29th, 1944. Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers, NYC Municipal Archives.

Reporters seemed to get a kick out of City Hall’s efforts against the shaking of mops out of windows. One report stated that inquiries “received a gentle brush-off from city departments in a survey conducted to ascertain where and how the daunted housewife may legally clean a mop.”  The city recommended wet mopping over dry mopping and pointed to the Sanitary Code which contained a variety of prohibitions including the ban on shaking rags and mops out of windows, hanging bedding from balconies or sweeping sidewalks after 8. a.m. in much of the City. A New York Tribune headline read, “Mayor would Mop Up Practice of Shaking Mops Out Windows” and referenced Mayor LaGuardia’s radio broadcast in which he said “It is very dangerous, because nothing is more dangerous than spreading germs or dust in that manner. Besides, it is a very serious offense.”

The radio broadcast indicates how seriously the Mayor took this issue. Normally his broadcasts on WNYC ran for thirty or forty minutes. In this instance Mayor LaGuardia was in Chicago and was limited to ten minutes for his remarks. Along with reducing the exorbitant interest rates on mortgages, commercial rent, leashing dogs, stopping smoking in the subways and the hazards of gambling, he included shaking mops… “a very filthy thing to do….civilized people don’t do it.”

One letter began, “I live near 180th St and the people around here think your request not to shake mops out windows is silly—all I hear is “what does he want me to do with the dust,” but Sir, judging by some of the dust coming from windows nearby one would think the owners of same were raising a victory garden under the beds.” The writer continued on to make specific complaints and suggest the dust was a cause of polio.

Another plea: “I have hesitated writing you regarding warning people not to shake their dust mops out of windows. However, it has gotten to a point where I must ask your help,” from 115 B West 168th Street, the Bronx. There was an anonymous complaint about a Mrs. Grillo in Woodside who allegedly shook her carpets.  Commissioner Ernest Stebbins reported that Grillo “was instructed not to cause any nuisance.”

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“How to Clean a Mop in New York,” New York World-Telegram, October 26, 1944. Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia Papers, NYC Municipal Archives.

It’s actually remarkable that any violations were issued at all. Nevertheless, The New York World Telegram reported that in October 1944 two housewives were fined $5.00 each for the violation. The City even included this menace in a public service announcement that also focused on littering on the subways and sticking gum on the seats.  

The sanitary code now is administered by the City’s Department of Sanitation. The penalty for shaking or beating a mat, carpet or cloth that creates litter or dust is punished with a $50.00 fine for the first offense and $100.00 for subsequent violations. There’s no word on whether violations have actually been issued.

From Health Officer of the Port to Disease Detectives: Public Health Workers in New York City

More than 250 years ago, the sole responsibility of New York City's first public health workers, as they could be called, was keeping disease out of the city. It is a function essential to a rapidly-growing metropolis. Centuries later, we are again face-to-face with it, even as New York in 2020 bears almost no resemblance to the port city at the lower tip of Manhattan it once was.

Until the late 19th century, the role of public health was largely to react to outbreaks of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. A Health Officer of the Port enforced the quarantining of ships coming into New York Harbor when there was a known or suspected contagion.

Group portrait of 17 sanitary inspectors, 1870-1873. NYC Municipal Archives.

In 1805, a designated board of the mayor and legislators was tasked with overseeing the health of city residents. Officials kept increasingly robust counts of the dead in an attempt to stem these diseases. The city's sanitary inspectors, part of the nascent Board of Health, worked to ensure the streets were free of garbage and rotting animals and vacant lots were unsoiled.

The population of Manhattan skyrocketed mid-century with the arrival of Irish and German immigrants, more than doubling the population between 1840 and 1860. Yearly outbreaks of cholera were exacerbated by tightly-packed housing quarters where these newcomers resided in neighborhoods such as the Five Points. Efforts to manage the health of the population became a more pressing issue for city government.

Aerial view of Hoffman Island, off Staten Island, once used to quarantine incoming immigrants, circa 1934-1945. Mayor LaGuardia Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

The state created a new board of professionals to oversee health in New York City and its immediate surrounding areas in 1866. This was followed by a full-fledged Department of Health, staffed by doctors and other professionals in 1870. New York City opened the first city-controlled diagnostic laboratory in 1892, employing bacteriologists who mitigated outbreaks of infectious diseases over the years through testing and producing antitoxins and vaccines. The city’s public health lab continues this work to this day.

Additional waves of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe around the turn of the century and reforms in the social, educational and labor realms ushered in the public health nursing movement. In 1902, the New York City Department of Health created the first public health nursing program in the country. City nurses were installed at schools and paid home visits to millions of families and new mothers to tackle high infant mortality rates. Baby health stations popped up around the five boroughs. Public health nurses advised and examined pregnant women and mothers of young children, gave referrals, instruction on early child care and breast-feeding, information about access to city services and provided low-cost, quality milk.

Nurse visiting patient, possibly with tuberculosis, in tenement apartment, ca. 1910. Department of Public Charities Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Fleet of “healthmobiles” employed by the Department of Health in the late 1920s to promote information about diphtheria and offer free toxin-antitoxins. NYC Municipal Archives.

Through the Great Depression to the post-World War II years, federal and private money funded an expansion of health services. Physicians and nurses staffed new district health centers. More food inspectors examined more establishments. And the city increased resources focusing on child health by bringing dentistry into the fold of city services.

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia with Department of Health Commissioner John Rice touting the plunging city death rate to under 10 per 1,000 of population for the first time, 1939. Mayor LaGuardia Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Baby Health Station under elevated tracks at Gun Hill Road and White Plains Road, Bronx, circa 1940s. NYC Municipal Archives.

The Department of Health struggled and contracted under Mayor John Lindsay’s superagency reorganization plan and subsequent economic crisis of the 1970s only to take on renewed importance when HIV appeared and devastated the city. The city was able to secure outside funds to bolster staff and much-needed tracing, research and outreach programs. City health workers continued the uphill fight against HIV/AIDS on a community basis. They tackled tuberculosis outbreaks and lead poisoning among vulnerable populations into the 2000s.

Technicians at work in a Department of Health laboratory, circa 1940s. NYC Municipal Archives.

As the city launches its contact tracing and testing program for Covid-19, it is important to remember this work has a history in New York City. During the first decades of the 20th century, the Department of Health’s Dr. Josephine Baker was instrumental in tracking down asymptomatic carrier “Typhoid Mary” Mallon. Department employees, sometimes with the help of volunteers, have used detective methods of sorts to track, refer and follow up on cases of tuberculosis, venereal diseases and later, HIV/AIDS. At the threat of a smallpox outbreak in 1947, city health workers and volunteers vaccinated an astonishing 6.3 million New Yorkers in a month! In 1978, staff epidemiologists tracked the source of the city’s first outbreak of Legionnaires Disease.

The city continues to disperse health workers to New Yorkers’ homes, schools, restaurants and other businesses to monitor the city’s health on numerous fronts. Providing direction for New Yorkers coping with the Covid-19 pandemic is the latest example of the city’s public health workers fulfilling a centuries-old imperative.

PPE in NYC

As the COVID19 pandemic continues, there has been much discussion surrounding personal protective equipment, or PPE.  Hospitals have struggled to get sufficient supplies of protective equipment for the healthcare professionals who are working tirelessly keep the public safe.  How would this be relevant to the Municipal Archives? Conservators and archivists in many cultural institutions, including the Municipal Archives, use PPE  such as N95 masks and nitrile gloves while working with items contaminated by dust, mold spores, or other harmful elements. Since we are now working remotely and not handling archival items, the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) recently donated its stock of N95 masks and nitrile gloves for use by healthcare workers.

Recent reports indicate that the City is receiving large quantities of PPE from around the country. But every bit helps and to donate boxes of unopened PPE visit NYC.GOV/ppedonations  

The existence of PPE goes back thousands of years. In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder wrote about using masks made from animal bladders to protect Roman miners from breathing in toxic dust. Wearing gloves and aprons for various purposes is so ancient that their origin cannot be traced. 

The use a full protective outfit for doctors probably originated in the early 1600s, when a French physician named Charles de Lorme proposed a head-to-toe protective costume for treating plague patients. The attire consisted of a long waxed coat, a brimmed hat, goggles, leather gloves, and a distinctive mask shaped like a bird’s beak. At the time, bad smells were thought to  cause  the plague, and the long beak was designed to hold flowers and fragrant herbs to mask this “miasma” while allowing the doctor to breathe. Over the next two centuries doctors adopted this distinctive get-up for treating plague victims.  The most obvious element—the bird’s beak mask—lodged itself so deeply in the popular imagination that it became a common feature of scary costumes for Venetian masquerades. The mere sight of the doctor’s mask was enough to terrify. 

The  beaked mask may have hindered bad smells, but it was not effective at blocking germs. A better technology was a mask that passed air through a filter as the wearer breathed. In the 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci suggested using a wet cloth as a respirator to prevent inhaling toxic gas, a technique still used as a last resort in fire emergencies. By the end of  the 18th century, modern masks began to appear, some using charcoal to filter the air. In 1889, William Stewart Halsted invented surgical rubber gloves to protect doctors and nurses during medical procedures. By this time, medical personnel used cloth surgical masks during procedures, and lab technicians wore medical gowns over their clothes.

Wearing protective garment while developing X-rays, Municipal Sanatorium, Otisville, N.Y. Department of Public Charities Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Operating room nurses with protective masks and gloves, Bellevue Hospital, May 1950. Department of Public Charities Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Masked operating room nurses, Bellevue Hospital, May 1950. Department of Public Charities Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Masked operating room personnel, Kings County Hospital. Department of Public Charities Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Not only did PPE change over time, but so did the way it was worn. As our understanding of infectious disease  grew, so has awareness of the most effective uses of PPE. Early photographs in the Department of Public Charities collection at the Municipal Archives show doctors wearing masks covering only their mouths. Today, this would be considered incorrect, as it still allows the wearer to breathe in unfiltered air. In fact, today, the goal is to prevent air from passing around the edges, forcing all air to be inhaled through the material of the mask. Modern masks are designed with a metal strip at the top that can be shaped to the bridge of the nose. The N95 mask also includes two straps that hold it tightly against the face. When worn properly, the N95 filters 95% of breathed air.

As a large city and trade port with a diverse population, New York City frequently has been at the forefront in the fight against infectious disease. Collections such as the Archives’ Almshouse ledgers, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene records, and Department of Public Charities and Hospitals photographs provide ample documentation for research in topics related to public health. Of particular relevance today is New York City’s response to outbreaks of diseases such as typhoid and cholera in the 18th and 19th centuries, and to the erroneously named “Spanish” flu pandemic of 1918.

“New Operating Room,” with models. Exhibit in the Golden Jubilee at the Grand Central Palace, 1948. Department of Public Charities Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Nurse taking notes with infant patient, Bellevue Hospital, 1950. Department of Public Charities Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

“Surgery in Progress,” painting, Harlem Hospital Conference room. Public Design Commission Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

The Lung Block: A New York City Slum & Its Forgotten Italian Immigrant Community

On April 25, 2019, the Department of Records and Information Services opened a new exhibit: The Lung Block: A New York City Slum & Its Forgotten Italian Immigrant Community. Set during the Progressive Era of the last century, curators Kerri Culhane, an architectural historian, and cultural critic Stefano Morello tell a story of immigration, public health, and housing reform as reflected in the experience of one block in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Visiting Nurse in tenement backyard, Jessie Tarbox Beals, ca. 1912.

Co-sponsored by The Center for the Humanities of The Graduate Center, CUNY, the Calandra Italian American Institute, and Queens College Makerspace, the exhibit will be on display at DORIS’ 31 Chambers Street gallery from April 26 to August 29, 2019.

Co-curator Stefano Morello is a native of Torino, Italy. In 2013, Stefano set out to solve a family mystery. He knew that in 1913 his great-grandmother, Salvatrice Nigido had emigrated to New York City from Militello in Val di Catania, a small town in Sicily. She left behind a 5-year old daughter and was never heard from again. Thanks to the availability of on-line indices to New York City vital records and the Municipal Archives’ mail-order service he obtained his great-grandmother’s death certificate. He learned that she had died in the Lung Block of influenza in 1920. In 2015, Stefano came to New York City for graduate studies at CUNY Graduate Center. While his dissertation research focused on the punk world in the San Francisco Bay area, he also decided to try to learn more about his great-grandmother’s life in New York. His research led him to Kerri Culhane, and the work she did researching the history of the ‘Two Bridges’ neighborhood of the Lower East Side. Together, they realized the story of this area, and specifically the Lung Block, was more complicated than the accepted narrative that had assigned to it such dire conditions that its destruction was inevitable.

The following excerpt from the exhibition narrative recounts the story of Salvatrice Nigido and some of her fellow villagers.

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THE PLACENTES & FAVARAS ARRIVE, 1904-1905

In 1904, Salvatore Placente arrived in New York City from Militello in Val di Catania. He was the first paesano from Militello to set foot in the Lung Block, preceding over 1,000 fellow-villagers who settled in the neighborhood over the following twenty years. The community from Militello was one of the largest on the block, and one of several Eastern Sicilian clusters that coexisted with enclaves from Italian districts as far apart—culturally and geographically—as Abruzzi, Piacenza, Western Sicily, Irpinia, and Tuscany. Although the general narratives treated the Lung Block as a discrete entity, its residents were indeed part of a larger community that extended well beyond its borders.

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Passport photo of Salvatore Placente, 1921. United States Passport Applications, 1795-1925 Collection, National Archives and Records Administration. Courtesy of FamilySearch.

In 1905, Salvatore’s brother Sebastiano and brother-in-law Francesco Favara joined him in his rented tenement at 31 Hamilton Street. Unlike the Gaimaris, who came from a family of artisans, the Placentes and Favaras worked as peasants in their native land and arrived in New York at a time when the competition for manual work was fierce.

In 1913, Salvatrice Nigido fled Militello in rural Eastern Sicily to join her brother, Mario, and her sisters-in-law Arcangela, Genueffa, and Maristella Ragusa, in New York City. She said her goodbyes to her daughter Antonia, only five years old at the time, with the ultimate goal of earning enough money in the new world to eventually reunite. However, things did not go as planned. In the Lung Block, Salvatrice became romantically involved with Salvatore Placente, at that time president of the Independent Sons of Militello Society, and a prominent figure in the Militellese colony. Though her family disperses—brother Mario back to Militello and her sisters-in-law to Plainfield, NJ, Salvatrice stayed in the Lung Block. After seven years working as a seamstress in the tenement apartment she shared with Placente at 47 Market Street, she passed away in February 1920, due to the pandemic influenza still ravaging the city. She was barely thirty-two. Her family back in Italy would not learn her fate until 2013, when great-grandson Stefano Morello uncovered her story and through it, the story of the Lung Block.

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Photo of Salvatrice Nigido, 1919. Courtesy of Stefano Morello.

During his first year in the United States, Salvatore held several blue-collar jobs in and out of the city, mostly seasonal construction work common to Italian laborers. In 1905, Salvatore embarked on a white-collar career as a clerk for the local banca La Sicilia, serving the Militellese community from 61 Catherine Street. A banca—combination travel agency, post office, and bank—was a lifeline between the Italian immigrant and the home country. Francesco and Sebastiano continued to work as laborers in the neighborhood. Between 1907 and 1913, all the women in the family, Concetta and Grazia (Salvatore’s sisters) and Nicoletta (Sebastiano’s wife), also immigrated from Militello to New York City.

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GAIMARIS, PLACENTES & FAVARAS IN THE 1910S-20S

The Gaimaris took ownership of the property at 142 Cherry in 1921, while continuing to act as brokers for other buildings in and around the block. Together with the Rofranos, the Garones, and the Torregrossas, the Gaimaris were among the Lung Block’s prominenti: middle-upper class Italian professionals and business owners, often earlier-comers, who gained financial and political prominence within the community. The family’s influence in local politics and their lobbying for neighborhood improvement continued throughout the decade. This is exemplified by the petition filed by Albert Gaimari in 1922 to convert the neighborhood from unrestricted use to residential and business, to protect the thriving community that had come to life.

In 1910, the Placentes & Favaras lived in different units of the building at 148 Cherry Street, owned by the Gaimaris. By 1915 on the Lung Block, most Italian residents were renting from fellow-countrymen. Although they tended to move frequently, Italians generally stayed within the neighborhood, in proximity to work, kin, and fellow-villagers. This trend of frequent residential mobility decreased as they were able to find steadier employment and more desirable living conditions. Between 1904 and 1914, the Placentes resided at several addresses on (or in close proximity to) the block: 31 Hamilton, 2 and 8 Monroe Street, 153 and 148 Cherry. Despite being employed in different parts of the city and different lines of work, after 1914, Salvatore and his siblings finally established lasting living quarters in the neighborhood: at 122 Cherry, on the Lung Block; and ½ a block away at 47 Market. …

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Map of the “Lung Block” from A Brief History of the Campaign Against Tuberculosis in New York City, Department of Health, 1908. NYC Municipal Library.

Readers are invited to learn more of the fate of the Gamaris, Placentes and Favaras and their homes in the “Lung Block” of the Lower East Side in the new exhibit The Lung Block: A New York City Slum & Its Forgotten Italian Immigrant Community, on display at DORIS’ 31 Chambers Street gallery from April 26 to August 29, 2019.