Municipal Trash Removal (from reports in 1881, 1882, 1884, 1888, 1893, 1896, 1897)
In the early 1880s, “men and teams were employed by the day or week” and “volunteer collectors” hauled garbage in wagons owned by the borough. It was collected daily during the summer and twice a week during the winter. The cost eventually drove the borough to contract garbage collection for $1500 a year, but this “speedily developed serious objections” about “filthy and leaky” wagons and the “slovenly and neglectful” contractor. In June of 1893, the Board of Health was given the responsibility to supervise garbage collection. They ordered the contractor to upgrade the system, and recommended that the borough invest in “metallic receptacles with tight covers”, and “smaller, metal wagons that could be dumped instead of shoveled.” Complaints resumed by 1896.
In 1882, garbage was dumped in “pits four feet deep and four feet six inches wide, and these covered, daily, with earth ... about three miles from our borough limits.” In 1896, garbage was dumped “in adjoining sanitary districts” and rubbish was dumped “on the borders of the headwaters of Deal Lake”. The beginning of a tradition: two landfills, now closed, were sited decades later in the headwater tributaries of Deal Lake. The one off West Bangs Avenue in Neptune Township drains into Hollow Brook, and the former M & T Delisa Landfill, now Seaview Square Mall, drains into Deal Lake Brook. In 1897, the Board considered, for four pages, a recommendation first made in 1893 to build a “suitable furnace” “within one-half mile of the borough boundary for the cremation of garbage”. But the city never built an incinerator, at least during Bradley's tenure.
Municipal Lighting (from reports in 1880, 1886, 1887)
In 1880, kerosene was the most common source of residential lighting. The Health Department was responsible to see if retailers were selling kerosene that was so flammable it would ignite at temperatures below 100o F. In 1887, the Department examined “every merchant in the borough (39 samples), and all samples were found to flash above 100o” . By 1886, “gas and electric light have to a considerable extent superseded kerosene as a means of lighting streets and dwellings”. In 1888, “forty arc-lights, of 2,000 candle-power each” were placed throughout the borough at an annual cost of $4,000. According to a Facility Registry Service report by the EPA, the property that is now a Boys and Girls Club of Monmouth County at 1201 Monroe Street, presently owned by JCP&L, is the site of the former Asbury Park Coal Gas plant that operated from 1885 – 1899. Coal gas, also known as town gas, was used for street-lighting, cooking, and hot water. It produced a creosote-smelling byproduct known as coal tar. Removing or treating the Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in coal tar became the focus of nationwide clean-ups in the 1980's. The NJ Department of Environmental Protection is now overseeing the remedial investigation for this site, identified in the New Jersey Environmental Management System as NJEMS-G000000006 (its Preferred Identification number).
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Disease and Preparedness: Isolation Hospitals (from reports in 1880, 1881, 1883, 1894, 1900, 1902, 1904, 1908)
The science of bacteriology was developing at the same time as local boards of health in NJ. Robert Koch identified Vibrio cholerae in 1884, and Louis Pasteur first used his rabies vaccine in 1885. Almost every report by the Asbury Board grows longer by the year with descriptions of disease investigations and eventually, morbidity and mortality statistics. On page 152 of the 1896 report there is a dot-map of Asbury Park showing illness and death from diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid, and measles. One of the typhoid cases was traced to a cross connection between the public water system and a valve at a fish market submerged in “waste fluids and excremental matter from leaky drains” (a drawing of the valve is on page 158). It's very much in the tradition of John Snow's map of a cholera outbreak that had convinced London officials in 1854 to remove a pump handle from a polluted well on Broad Street.
In 1881, 259 people were vaccinated in Asbury Park for smallpox. In spite of the clinics, the city had an outbreak of smallpox in 1884. The next year Bradley donated the first of several buildings that would be used as a quarantine hospital “for the reception and care of cases of scarlet fever, diphtheria, and the milder forms of contagious disease ...” The next outbreak didn't happen for ten years. In May and June of 1894, it spread through one family of nine, killing an unvaccinated four-year-old boy. An isolation hospital was “hastily constructed” in Neptune and shared by the Neptune and Asbury boards. The 1894 report gives a detailed account of the Health Department performing case investigations, isolating the family in their home, and destroying “hundreds of dollars” of bedding and furniture (that couldn't be disinfected because, it was noted, the department lacked the funds for a “steam chamber”). Pictures of the “detention” hospital, and a “smallpox” hospital built in 1894 are provided on page 160 of the 1896 report. On April 6, 1900, they both burned down.
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Two years later, work began on a new hospital on 75 acres in Spring Hill in the Whitesville section of present-day Neptune by Neptune Boulevard and Hollow Brook, near the Richardson farm on Sand Hill (the Sand Hill Indians). The city completed one unfurnished “pavilion” that year, and in 1903 added a drinking water system that pumped water from springs on the property to an elevated tank. There are three pictures of the buildings on pages 138-142 of the 1902 report; one is of a nurse in a luminous white habit, turned towards the dark unfinished smallpox pavilion. The “Asbury Park Municipal Hospital for Contagious Diseases” opened in 1904, complete with detailed rules, and fees “for those who could afford it.” A second “Scarlet Fever” pavilion, with “furnishings” supplied by the “ladies of the Present Day Club”, was finished in 1908.
By then the “pioneer sanitarian” had left the Board. Things had changed: in 1903, a year before he retired, Asbury Park successfully sued Bradley for control of the sewer system that he'd built in 1881. In their book, Asbury Park: A Brief History, Joseph G. Bilby and Harry F. Ziegler introduce him as someone “who had long outlived his time” when he died on June, 21, 1921.
The Asbury Park Health Department lsted for about 100 years until it was absorbed by the Monmouth County Health Department in 1985. The last Health Officer was Martin S. Chomsky of Ocean Township, who passed in 2006.
In 1904, the State began phasing out the local board reports, and stopped publishing them four years later. In Part 3 of this blog, the links are included with the page numbers listed for the Monmouth County reports from 1880 through 1908.
