Talk:Great horse manure crisis of 1894

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The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 (GHMC) is an internet myth put forward by Stephen Davies in an article posted online in Sept, 2004 [1]. No online references to the GHMC can be found prior to this date. While horse manure was a problem in major cities[citation needed], the GHMC makes three major claims:

1. The Times of London predicted that in 50 years the streets of London would be covered in 9 feet of manure. This claim is contradicted by the London Times, who has no record of publishing this quote [19]. 2. The first international conference on urban planning was stymied because there was no solution to the most urgent problem of manure disposal. No name or date is ascribed to this conference and there does not appear to be any records of it. Multiple sources cite America’s first urban planning conference as the First National Conference on City Planning help on May 21-22, 1909 in Washington, DC [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 14]. Britain’s first urban planning conference was the Town Planning Conference, held from October 10-15, 1910 in London [6, 7]. Proceedings or transactions for both can be found online [15, 16]. Neither mention an 1898 conference nor list manure as a discussion topic. 3. The advent of the automobile caught the contemporary experts unawares. There is no evidence for this claim, and articles refuting this claim have been published [20, 21].

As for the crisis, manure was a real problem, but government action could help. For example, New York City hired George E. Waring Jr in 1895 to clean up the streets, which he largely accomplished by 1896 [17].

History of the GHMC: The first reference to the GHMC appears to be in Davies’ article in Sep 2009 [1]. The next large exposure appeared in Access Magazine when Eric Morris include a version of it in a school publication [8]. The Access Magazine version was then picked up by Levitt and Dubner in their best-selling book SuperFreakonomics [9]. Since then, other sites repeating the story include Elizabeth Kolbert’s critique of SuperFreakonomics in The New Yorker [10], Levitt and Dubner’s BytesDailty blog [11], Amanda Erickson’s article on the history of urban planning [12], and an oft-cited article from Historic UK, an online tourist web site [13]. There are now over 200,000 references to the GHMC online.

No version of the GHMC provide a primary, contemporary source. Many are unsourced, and those that are sourced lead back to Davies. As is typical with urban legend, the details change as the story is retold. Nine feet of manure in London becomes thirty feet in New York and so on. None can be verified. The New York Times provides an online tool [18] allowing users to search the archives from 1851 to present time. Using this tool there is no evidence of manure as a crisis level topic in 1894, nor evidence of a major international conference hosted by the city in 1898.

References: 1. Stephen Davies, “The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894,” 1 Sep 2004, 2. Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890, University of California Press, 10 February 1972. 3. John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America. A History of City Planning in the United States. Princeton University Press, 15 June 1992. 4. Jon A. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840-1917 (Creating the North American Landscape). Johns Hopkins University Press, 6 August 2003. 5. Susann S. Fainstein, “Urban Planning,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 6. 7. Richard LeGates, Early Urban Planning V 9. Routledge, 11 November 2004. 8. Eric Morris, “From Horse Power to Horse Power,” Access, Number 30, Spring 2007, 9. Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, William Morrow, 20 October 2009. 10. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Hosed is there a quick fix for the climate?” New Yorker, 16 November 2009. 11. “The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894”, Bytesdaily online blog, 16 July 2011. 12. Amanda Erickson, “A Brief History of the Birth of Urban Planning,” from The Atlantic Citylab, 24 August 2012, 13. Ben Johnson, “Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894,” January 2015. 14. Jon A. Peterson, “The Birth of Organized City Planning in the United States, 1909-1910.” Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 75, No. 2, Spring 2009. 15. Proceedings of the First National Conference on City Planning 16. Town Planning Conference, October 10-15, 1910, Transactions 17. Wikipedia -- George Waring Biography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_E._Waring_Jr. 18. New York Times Search Tool. 19. 20. 21. Kgarfield2019 (talk) 03:32, 19 March 2019 (UTC)