Problem.

In the late eighteenth century city streets were filthy. With no regular trash collection or sewer system and with horses as the primary means of transportation, the streets were filled with household trash and manure. Medric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint- Mery, a French visitor to New York City, complained of "evil odors" and noted that "in 1791 the sewage around the wharfs was thought to have caused the epidemic of yellow fever at the time." In smaller towns and villages the problems of public sanitation were not so severe, and in the colonial period hogs had found city streets to be promising grazing areas. But in the case of Philadelphia during the early national period, as it became a crowded city tied more to international commerce than to agriculture, its streets posed a health risk as flies and rats flourished on the garbage...