Dirty Politics: Public Employees, Private Contractors, and the Development of Nineteenth-Century Trash Collection in Pittsburgh and New Orleans

Abstract

Nineteenth-century Pittsburgh and New Orleans were a mess: trash filled the streets impeding travel, hindering commerce, and spreading disease. City officials in Pittsburgh turned to private contractors to collect trash at public expense while in New Orleans they relied on city employees (through the mechanism of widows carts). Like Pittsburgh and New Orleans, nineteenth-century cities faced a mounting garbage problem and, like Pittsburgh, northern cities more often chose contract while southern cities more often chose city collection. In this paper, we look in depth at how Pittsburgh and New Orleans chose contract and city collection, what those solutions looked like in practice, and how these two cases might shed light on the North-South difference. We find that both cities rebuffed offers of assistance that may have led to better trash collection and instead based their collection practices on politics. Moreover, the solutions in practice defied the dichotomous labels of public and private and the assumptions that underlie each.