The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894

The sanitation challenges caused by the 2.5 million lbs of manure daily and 60,000 gallons of urine from the City's more than 100,000 animals led to the First International Urban Planning Conference.

In 1895, Waring was brought to New York City, where sanitary conditions had become intolerable. Horses were leaving an estimated 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine on the streets every day. Horse carcasses rotted in the streets. Garbage piles reached a foot or two deep, cleared only haphazardly by "ragtag army of the unemployed."

Waring began by securing a law requiring horses and carts to be stabled overnight, instead of being left on the street. He established a Street Cleaning Department, a white-uniformed corps of workers wearing pith helmets and pushing wheeled carts tasked with cleaning up city streets . Waring's men cleared a shin-deep accumulation of waste across the city. Horse carcasses were removed from the streets and sold for glue; horse manure was sold for fertilizer. Other refuse was sent to dumps along the waterfront. Waring's crew even removed snow, packing it into trucks and dumping it into the rivers.