During the late nineteenth century, when Americans learned that Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch had isolated the specific bacilli and the general germ culture conditions for certain dangerous diseases, public health became a new and growing concern for municipalities throughout the country. In response to the recently discovered scientific evidence linking unsanitary conditions with specific diseases, reformers of the Progressive Era became increasingly aware that the provision of adequate housing and bathing facilities was of the utmost importance if the general public welfare were to be maintained and if the spread of contagious diseases were to be checked.

Today, it is hard to imagine the degradation of the urban environment and the plight of the industrial worker during the second half of the nineteenth century, since a combination of new housing standards, government regulations, and the extensive undertakings of city, state, and federal agencies have cleared most of the slums that once marked the center of every major American city. Nevertheless, as early as the 1860s, books such as Peter Stryler’s The Lower Depths of the Great American Metropolis began to portray the seamier side of American society, as metropolitan areas were transformed into vile cesspools of poverty, disease and squalor by the overcrowding of rural and European immigrants into substandard housing. Providing an enormous source of cheap labor, these newcomers often found their lives no better, if not worse, than those which they had left behind.

Indeed, as late as 1887 it was noted in an address delivered to the American Medical Association that in eighteen industrial cities surveyed, five–sixths of the inhabitants had no facilities for bathing “except such as are afforded by pail and sponge, or a river, lake, or other body of water which may be easily accessible.”¹ In Yonkers, the rapid growth of its population (from 11,484 in 1860 to 79,803 in 1910), the expansion of industry, the almost complete lack of regulations governing building and land use, as well as the overcrowding of workers in tenements, all resulted in the rapid deterioration of the city’s urban center during the second half of the nineteenth century. According to local authorities of the time, the Nepperhan River had become a “seething nuisance” of polluted water that had the potential of breeding cholera and other diseases. By the 1890s, the river had grown so choked with wastes that The Yonkers Gazette would write of it²

Developments in transportation and communication during the era—especially the inauguration ofthe city’s first trolley system in 1886—enabled the middle and upper classes to flee the rapidly deteriorating urban center for new suburban communities located at some distance from the town’s historic nucleus. With the withdrawal of large segments of its population to new residential areas such as Park Hill, Ludlow Park and Shonnard Park, the center of the city was left for industrial and commercial uses as well as for housing the poorer segments of the population.