Plague, cholera and tuberculosis worked on cities slowly. They forced change because people believed the diseases would return or never leave
the occasional wailing siren, New York City is eerily quiet—so quiet that you may be woken by birdsong, says Beatriz Colomina, an architectural historian. The city looks different, too. Pedestrians have taken to the roads, which are almost empty of moving cars. Those widely spaced walkers can look up and see things that they missed before. For Ms Colomina, it is an ideal time to appreciate buildings.
Until about a century ago many cities levied such a heavy “mortality penalty” on their inhabitants that they would have shrunk had migrants not kept pouring into them. In 1847 a Scottish doctor, Hector Gavin, estimated that Londoners gave up eight years of life compared with the English average, whereas the inhabitants of Liverpool lost 19. This was probably an underestimate, he added.
A few tried to do more. By the 15th century the great Italian cities were creating “lazzaretti”, or pesthouses, to quarantine the sick during epidemics. Milan’s could hold 16,000 people, packed into small rooms with chimneys to vent noxious emanations. Conditions there were dreadful. In 1629 a public-health official “went into a dead faint for the stinking smells that came forth from all those bodies and those little rooms”.
In France an official report written in 1834 noted that cholera had struck the poor hardest, and argued that was partly a result of their environment. Disease was festering in Paris’s narrow streets and alleys; to prevent it from erupting again, wider streets and public squares with trees were needed. These would “finally spread light and life in those obscure quarters where half the population vegetates so sadly, where dirt is so widespread, the air so infected”.
Others were reaching the same conclusion. By the late 19th century American urban reformers were focused on the densely packed rooming-houses known as tenements. These were regarded as breeding grounds for cholera and, especially, tuberculosis—a disease that by the 1880s was known to be caused by a bacterium. New York insisted on the construction of air shafts, which led to buildings that were wide in front, facing the street, and wide at the back, but narrow in the middle—known as dumbbells.
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