Date of Award

5-1-2024

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of History

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Kendra Smith-Howard

Committee Members

Carl Bon Tempo, Ryan Irwin

Keywords

New York City, urban history, waste management

Subject Categories

History

Abstract

Wretched Refuse: The Making of New York City. is a social and economic history of waste management in New York City from the late nineteenth century through the 1990s. This dissertation uses waste management as a lens to examine the city’s social and economic life over the long twentieth century, and especially its class and racial hierarchies. Wretched Refuse argues that waste management was a critical part of New York City’s physical and economic growth over the course of the twentieth century. Sanitation was a public health problem that needed to be solved in order for New York to grow into a truly global city, and New York’s waste management problems predominantly fell on the poor, immigrants, and minorities. However, waste was more than a technical problem to be solved. Waste also undergirded New York’s physical and economic expansion between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Landfills, whether municipal or private, added new land to the city’s boundaries along the waterfront and converted what was seen as economically unviable marsh land into recreational or residential space. Refuse was also an important commodity in the city’s changing economy over the course of the twentieth century, from being used to manufacture products like fertilizers to creating land for recreational space and housing in the transition to a post-industrial economy.

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