I

I

Immediately after the inauguration, Roosevelt appeared on the White House balcony dressed in the purple robes of a Roman emperor, and, leading a blind and toothless lion on a gold chain, hog-called his constituents to come and get their appointments.  The constituents rushed up grunting and squealing like the hogs they were.

William S. Burroughs, "Roosevelt After The Inauguration"

It was a sunny morning in early April when I set off across Central Park to consummate a desire I had long held without definite hope of fulfillment.  I had not been to the Park, or, in fact, to New York city, since reaching adulthood, but using a tourist map I was able to chart a plausible route to my destination.  I entered near East 67th St., and wandered through Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux's urban Eden.  Despite the historic nature of the site, there are virtually none of the informational plaques or "interpretive trails" one often finds in these places.  I tried to steer a course by maintaining my orientation to the giant buildings which hem the park in like the walls of a great canyon, but soon became lost in a tangle of paths leading every which way among the bare broadleaf trees, whose profusion of skyward tendrils were mobbed by screeching, iridescent starlings, obese American robins and other birds I could not identify.  As I climbed a low hill I came upon a dishevelled man standing doubled at the waist, his matted hair brushing the ground, completely motionless.  His greasy trousers were too large, and most of his wasted, white buttocks brightly reflected the morning sun.  As I approached he slowly drew himself partially erect, and began to shuffle wearily up the path, still bent forwards at an angle of nearly thirty degrees.  He gave no sign of being aware of me, and I vacillated as to whether I should attempt to hail him or offer some manner of assistance, but could arrive at no plan of action which seemed plausible other than to skirt him awkwardly and continue in a roughly northeastern direction through the labyrinth, feeling somehow negligent.
 
I eventually found my way to the western side of the park, where I encountered a small pillar faced with placards offering some historical details.  I had just passed, as it turned out, an area that used to be known as Sheep Meadow.  The sign informed me that the Park's architects had sought to provide scenery that intentionally evoked the rural countryside that many city dwellers had left behind during the Industrial revolution, when cities experienced exponential growth.  The 15-acre Sheep Meadow, with its flock of Southdown sheep, was, (evidently,) an important component of the Picturesque park plan.

The sheep, I learned, had been removed in 1934, and their fold converted into a restaurant, which the sign implied was at the height of its popularity - although I discovered later by trying to buy a drink there that the Tavern on the Green had closed several years prior to my arrival.  The sign also informed me that Sheep Meadow was "completely restored" in the year of my birth.  I was not sure what this meant, since no sheep were in evidence.  

I wondered how the scene would have struck the inhabitants of Manhattan when the animals were imported in 1871.  Presumably many did come from the sheep-rearing Counties of northern England, Scotland, Wales, and especially Ireland. Most were probably driven to brave the dangerous ocean passage to the unfriendly metropolis of an infant nation occupying a corner of a largely unknown continent by circumstances which rendered their rural countryside intolerable, or, perhaps, even more intolerable.  Some, no doubt, had come to America in their childhood as refugees from the Highland Clearances or the Irish Potato Famine.  Perhaps the Sheep Meadow evoked an idyll for them; perhaps it merely recalled endemic want, abject serfdom, and forced exile.  Others viewing the sheep in 1871 came, no doubt, from other centers of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, which is to say, other cities which in this period consumed more human beings than they produced.  Many of these unfortunates would have been unfamiliar with any actual place which resembled the vision of bucolic peace which Jacob Wrey Mould, the architect of the Sheep Meadow, hoped to evoke, and one can only imagine what they must have made of this lush expanse of arable ground consecrated, in the middle of the cholera-ridden, overcrowded, and fire-prone warren of Manhattan, to the enjoyment of these exotic, horned ruminants.  The Evangelist, in any case, tells us that the Son of Man will set them at his right hand.




Harper's Weekly, Vol. 24, 1880

The flock of Southdowns were an arriviste minority on the the tetrapod scene of late nineteenth-century New York, where they were vastly outnumbered by pigs.  Since the before the Revolution, New York had been home to an enormous number of semi-domesticated swine which roamed the streets and served, for about two centuries, as the primary means of public sanitation in a city notorious for its enormous volume of publicly visible organic waste, and as a source of meat and other animal products for the burgeoning mass of urban poor.  They also presented real hazards to the well-being of the citizenry; contemporary sources attest that in early nineteenth-century Manhattan being mauled to death by hogs was a significant cause of pediatric mortality.  Swine were so ubiquitous that, although frequently represented in the periods visual depictions of urban life, they are almost never mentioned by contemporary American writers, presumably because they were so ordinary a feature of city life as to be beneath notice.  Foreigners, however, preserve some record of their impressions;  In 1842, Dickens wrote:

They are the city scavengers, the pigs. Ugly brutes they are; having, for the most part, scanty, brown backs, like the lids of old horse-hair trunks: spotted with unwholesome black blotches. They have long, gaunt legs, too, and such peaked snouts, that if one of them could be persuaded to sit for his profile, nobody would recognize it for a pig’s likeness. They are never attended upon, or fed, or driven, or caught, but are thrown upon their own resources in early life, and become preternaturally knowing in consequence. Every pig knows where he lives, much better than anybody could tell him. At this hour, just as evening is closing in, you will see them roaming towards bed by scores, eating their way to the last. Occasionally, some youth among them who has over-eaten himself, or has been worried by dogs, trots shrinkingly homeward, like a prodigal son: but this is a rare case: perfect self possession and self-reliance, and immovable composure, being their foremost attributes.

In fact, pace Dickens, over the course of the nineteenth century various roundups were undertaken.  When these took place, they were not motivated by urban hogs' documented penchant for devouring children but rather in connection with the periodic epidemics of cholera which racked the city, as the swine were considered emblematic of the disease which, until late in the nineteenth century, was not thought to be contagious but rather to enjoy spontaneous generation in conditions of squalour.  It is recorded that after the cholera epidemic of 1849, upwards of 20,000 free-roaming pigs were "driven uptown."  Their subsequent disposition is unknown, and that fact is significant because it forces one to consider what kind of city could absorb such a legion of swine without any recorded comment.  It is also, of course, possible that they ran violently down a steep place into the waters, and were choked. 

Before work on Olmstead and Vaux's Greensward Plan could begin, all of the larger vertebrate omnivores within the boundaries of the future Park had to be removed, including those inhabiting the various permanent settlements which had existed there for decades.  The largest and oldest of these was called Seneca Village.  

Map of Seneca Village

The origin of the village's enigmatic name is unknown, but the transactions which established it are well documented.  The village grew up around a nucleus of land bought as subdivisions of an even older farm by free African-Americans in 1825.  The community swelled with the abolition of slavery in New York State in 1827, and the Potato Famine brought a further wave of Irish residents, who by all accounts lived in harmony with the community's founders, farming pigs and potatoes in what would become the Sheep Meadow.  An 1855 census recorded a population of 264 inhabitants, who gathered in three churches and whose children attended a school within the village.  Evictions began in the year of that account, and the last holdouts were forcibly ejected under right of eminent domain by the City authorities in 1857. The park was to remain uninhabited by organized settlers until one of the many "Hoovervilles" which dotted the United States during the Great Depression sprung up there about half a century later.  

Census of Seneca Village

Despite sporadic roundups and the destruction of Seneca Village and other "squatter" communities, swine continued to flourish in Manhattan, and were highly cultivated in an area immediately south of Central Park's modern boundaries then known as the Piggery District.  This was another of the areas forcibly cleared by the Corporation, (as the city's government was then known,) prior to the opening of Central Park.  The epicenter of the District was at the intersection of 6th Avenue and West 58th Street,  a site today nearly equidistant from an Italian restaurant offering choice charcuterie called Quality Meats, Park Avenue Smart Lipo, and an equestrian statue of Simón Bolívar.  On January 26th, 1857, two columns of police and irregulars carrying "pistols, clubs or daggers" advanced on the inhabitants of the District, whom the Times reporter covering the action refers to simply as "the enemy."  Of Patrick Bohen's complex of shanties on 56th St., between 6th and 7th Avenues, our correspondent writes, 

the officers of the law entered, and, amid the barking of dogs, the jabbering of Hibernian females, the noise of falling rubbish and the grunting and squeaking of swine, plied thier pickaxes and crobars, scattered the disinfecting agent by the pailfull, and drove out the pigs.

The ambiguity is apparently deliberate.   

Mrs. Thomas Glennan, who lived down the street with her husband, had already sent their hogs for sale; but the armed priesthood of Hygeia tore down the building anyway.  The reporter records her eulogy for the piggery: 

'Very poor revinge,' said she, 'to tear down people's buildings afther the pigs is sent away intirely.  Very shabby for gentleman; gentleman wouldn't do it.'

The Piggery District

Despite the miserable life expectancy enjoyed by the people born into places like Seneca Village and the Piggery District, there were presumably many former inhabitants of both who were old enough to remember their destruction in 1857 when they witnessed the arrival of the Southdown flock at Sheep Meadow in 1871.  It is difficult enough to imagine what new immigrants, whatever their origin, would have made of these wooly symbols of the eugenicist oligarchy's fantasy of rural paradise; but what pithy analyses might Mrs. Glennan have offered of the politics of artiodactyl husbandry in the age of monopoly capitalism?

The pillar supporting the sign from which I learned of the Sheep Meadow's prior glory and restoration stood near a gate in the Park's western side.  I realize now that as I read it, I was standing within a hundred yards of the foundations of Seneca Village, whose existence I did not at that time suspect, and that while I did remark the plump vigor of hundreds of daffodils, and that many of the skeletal trees around me were putting out tiny, exquisite buds, I did not recognize that the virtue of  the soil beneath my feet which gave rise to this emergent rhapsody of spring had been supplied by generations of unselfish and forgotten swine.