In the 1800s, the carcasses of the many horses that died transporting city residents were dumped in a bay in New York City.

In the late 1800s, New York City streets were covered with millions of pounds of horse manure thanks to a widespread horse-driven transportation industry.

New York City's carriage horses are a holdover from a time when the city was home to hundreds of thousands of horses roaming its streets.

Before modern sanitation, New York City let pigs roam the streets to eat its garbage

In the early 1820s, an estimated 20,000 hogs roamed Manhattan's streets, feeding on trash that the city lacked a system to collect. Pigs were eventually banned at the urging of wealthy residents, who feared they would deter tourists and drive down property values.

New York City spends $429 million a year just to get rid of its trash

None of NYC's garbage is processed within the city. It is transported by truck, train, and barge to waste-to-energy facilities and landfills as far away as Ohio and South Carolina, a vast logistical operation.

The sewage of New York City

Residents of the five boroughs of New York produce 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater everyday. Seventy miles of sewer pipes, first built in the mid-1800s, feed the sewage to 14 wastewater treatment and recovery plants where the waste is treated back to viable, drinkable water. See what shouldn't go down the toilet here.

How a polluted New York City waterway created extremophiles hungry for 'black mayonnaise'

In the 19th century, coal processing plants, oil refineries, a tannery, and other industries lining the Gowanus Canal contaminated its waters with coal tar, sewage, and other pollutants, forming the toxic sludge. Samples taken from the site before clean-up efforts revealed over 450 species of microbes with metabolisms adapted to break down these contaminants.

Horse diving was a popular attraction for 50 years

The event, which took place in Atlantic City, is exactly as it sounds: horses, directed by (sometimes scantily clad) riders, would jump from diving boards into pools. Although it was a popular spectacle for decades, it fell out of favor by the late 1970s.

Horses aren't eaten in the US, though they're delicacies in other places, including Japan and Slovenia.

A 1987 garbage barge that no state would accept accidentally sparked the US recycling movement

In the 1980s, an Alabama businessman loaded 3,168 tons of mafia-controlled New York trash onto a barge. It was rejected by six states and three countries, sparking a media frenzy. This event helped convince Americans that they were running out of landfill space, giving rise to curbside recycling.

In 1711, the New York City Common Council decided that the city’s slave market would operate on Wall Street

In 1711, the New York City Common Council decided that the city’s slave market would operate on Wall Street. Back then, the nation’s economy rode on the backs of slave labor and the slave trade itself—meaning that the slave market’s location was an economic hub for the city.

The Love Canal disaster exposed the dangers of buried toxic waste

In the late 1970s, residents of Niagara Falls, New York, discovered their neighborhood was built atop 20,000 tons of chemical waste. Leaking toxins caused illness and birth defects, sparking nationwide outrage and leading to the creation of the EPA's Superfund cleanup program in 1980.

Mass transit in America began with horse-drawn omnibuses in New York City in 1827

The omnibus, a large horse-drawn stagecoach that ran a fixed route and carried a dozen riders at an affordable fare, was different from a private carriage because it carried everyone, not just the wealthy.

In the 1930s, New York banned buskers as part of an antinoise campaign

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was hoping to modernize the city and believed that street performers only crowded the streets and added to an annoying cacophony. Residents wrote to the mayor to protest the decision, arguing that buskers were appreciated by the public.

Essential pipes, sewers, and cables lie buried beneath New York City

The Department of Design and Construction offers a tour of its work sites, explaining the complex systems that exist underground. Gas, electrical, telecom pipes, and many others, sprawl out underneath the entire city, with dozens of maps that help workers know where they're placed. This layout is unusual compared to the rest of the country, where wires are often present and visible above ground.

August A. Busch, Sr. was gifted a six-horse Clydesdale hitch to celebrate Prohibition’s end

This helped reveal the marketing power of a horse-drawn beer wagon, so it invested in a second six-horse Clydesdale hitch. The Clydesdales soon went to New York, where they drew a crowd of thousands en route to the Empire State Building. Anheuser-Busch even gifted a case of Budweiser to New York Governor Alfred E. Smith in thanks for his help in the fight against Prohibition.

Boston opened the first subway tunnel in the US in 1897

By the end of the 19th century, nearly 400,000 people were packed into less than a square mile of downtown Boston, with 8,000 horses pulling trolleys through streets choked with noise, manure, and congestion. This prompted the city to pursue a then-controversial subway system.

The Erie Canal transformed New York City into America’s banking capital

By redirecting western trade through New York Harbor, the canal turned New York into the nation’s commercial hub. This surge in commerce shifted financial power from Philadelphia to Wall Street, establishing the city as America’s banking capital.

Horses can—rarely—get West Nile, too

The animals can contract the virus via infected mosquito bites, but for horses there are four vaccines available. Though West Nile's often asymptomatic or mild in horses, the disease can sometimes be deadly, killing via severe neurological inflammation. There are no reported instances of people becoming sickened by infected horses or vice-versa.

The canal carried germs as well as goods

In 1832, North America’s first cholera epidemic spread inland by way of the Erie Canal, carried by immigrants arriving on ships. Fearful towns barred passengers from disembarking, yet cholera, smallpox, and other diseases still traveled the waterway.

New York was once called New Amsterdam

Although New York has a long history, it wasn’t actually called “New York” until the late 1600s, when the English beat out the Dutch for control of the area. In 1664, Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant surrendered what used to be known as “New Amsterdam” to the English, who renamed it New York after the Duke of York.

Whose bodies are held inside the American Museum of Natural History?

The American Museum of Natural History holds the remains of at least 12,000 people collected via purchase, donation, or expedition. This article by a professor of art crime details their attempt to identify the individuals whose remains the museum held. Amid questioning, AMNH announced it would change its human remains policy. At the time of the article's publication in October 2023, AMNH had few human remains on public display.

Grosse Île, the quarantine island of the Port of Quebec

As tens of thousands of Irish emigrated to North America to escape the Great Famine in the mid-19th century, many port cities set up quarantine areas amid an epidemic of cholera. In Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River, one island became a mass graveyard where over 3,000 Irish immigrants died over a decade as they waited in quarantine. Listen to the history here.

New York named a street after Basquiat in 2025

The influential pop artist made his name (and developed his unique graffiti-inflected style) in the city's East Village. In 2025, the city added his name to one of the neighborhood's streets in his honor. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

The history of Wall Street as a financial center dates back to the 1700s, beginning with the establishment of the New York Stock Exchange and New York City's first official slave market.

Mapping early New York

Want to see how Wall Street (and New York City as a whole) has changed over time? Use this timeline and map to see Manhattan today overlaid with the precise boundaries of early land grants to the Dutch in the 1600s. Scroll through the progress of city building through the first century of European settlement there.

More than 80% of New York City's newsstands have closed in the past two decades, in part due to a series of price caps that hurt the stands' ability to evolve.

See how New York City has grown since 1609

Wall Street and the southern tip of Manhattan were the first parts of the island to be developed beyond farmland by Dutch and English settlers. It wasn’t long until New York City resembled the city we know today.

1970s New York was viewed by many as a city in decline

By 1975, the city owed $5B to $6B in short-term debt; over a million manufacturing jobs had left the city since the end of World War II. Meanwhile, the murder rate was more than double than 10 years earlier. Graffiti was seen as illegal vandalism perpetrated by unsupervised teenagers and was viewed by some as emblematic of the larger societal decline.

The Erie Canal was opened Oct. 25, 1825, with a group of boats from Buffalo to NYC

The unlikely engineering project connecting the Midwest to the Atlantic saw a ceremonious opening as Governor Dewitt Clinton rode with a flotilla of boats from Buffalo on Lake Erie to New York City.

Abandoned racetracks can be found via Google Earth

With auto racing a favorite American pastime in the 1900s, tracks both small and large were built across the country. Some were local tracks used for small races, while others were super-speedways used by NASCAR.

DeWitt Clinton’s “Big Ditch” gamble transformed New York

Mocked as “Clinton’s Folly” and “Clinton’s Big Ditch,” New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton championed the Erie Canal against skeptics. His political drive secured funding for the project in 1817.

NYC's first subway was built largely in secret

In 1870, Alfred Ely Beach secretly tunneled under Broadway in 58 nights, disguising his pneumatic subway as a mail tube to fool Tammany Hall, the corrupt political machine that ran New York City. Nearly half a million New Yorkers rode it before politics, and a stock market crash killed the project.

Nearly 5,500 crows died during four months in 1999 from West Nile in NYC

Subsequent testing made clear the disease at that point was 100% fatal to crows. From 1999 to 2004, millions of birds died as West Nile spread across North America, but the virus fortunately became less virulent as it moved westward.

Decommissioned oil rigs have been repurposed into artificial reefs that serve as nursery habitats for fish, corals, sponges, and other invertebrates in the decades since their installation.

Paris and Boston were redesigned partly to combat cholera's spread

Georges-Eugène "Baron" Haussmann, who oversaw Paris's redesign in the 1800s, replaced many of the city's narrow streets with wide boulevards. This was done at least in part to bring more air and light into the city to help control cholera. Architect Arthur Gilman redeveloped Boston's Back Bay to similarly combat cholera, among other reasons.

Teen rides stranded scared horse to safety—14 miles out of burning canyon

When wildfires tore through the Los Angeles area in 2025, resulting in one of the worst natural disasters on record, one 16-year-old equestrian named Kalyna Fedorowycz bravely rescued an animal. She saw a horse named Sovereignty in the evacuation zone of the still-raging Palisades Fire, and led and rode him for 14 miles to safety. Sovereignty was eventually reunited with his owner.

Watch a visualization of New York City's greenhouse gas emissions

About 1.72 tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent gases are released into the atmosphere every second in the Big Apple, enough to fill a balloon 33 feet across at standard pressure and 59 degrees Fahrenheit. After a day, the spheres would pile up into a pyramid whose base spans from the bottom of Manhattan to the south of Central Park.

Horses account for about 96% of the known mammalian cases of West Nile beyond humans

That's partly because horse owners likely notice and take veterinary action when their animals get sick. There is no way to know how frequently wild animals are getting infected with the virus.

Thousands of Atari cartridges were once buried in a New Mexico landfill

A waste management specialist unearthed a legendary cache of unsold games decades after they were buried, transforming one of gaming history's most famous disposal stories into an unexpected and lucrative salvage operation.