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Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City 1870-1915
Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915
BY BEN CATER
Like many American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Salt Lake City experienced rising morbidity rates from filth-related diseases. Urban and industrial growth, increased pollution, and the lack of effective therapeutics contributed to human suffering, sickness, and death. Sanitation laws existed, including those for disposing of waste and barring animals from grazing in public watersheds, but enforcing them remained difficult, particularly in a farming community rapidly entering the urban-industrial age. Since curbside ditches supplied water for cooking and bathing, residents were appalled at the sight of garbage “choking and obstructing the ditches and defiling the water.” Ditches produced noxious gasses, or “miasmas” thought to cause disease, and they harbored deadly microbes that contributed to diarrhea, cholera, typhoid fever, and diphtheria. As water-borne illness “dominated the health picture,” recalled the physician Ralph T. Richards, citizens demanded sanitary improvements. 1
A Salt Lake City home at the historic address of 130 North and 200 West. As this 1915 image demonstrates, many residents of the Westside faced difficult sanitary conditions.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
This article argues that public health reforms helped to create a health-based hierarchy that informed the city’s shifting cultural geography. Class and race played disproportionate roles in mapping medical improvements, as did religion, which historians have traditionally ignored. As city officials responded to citizen petitions for pure water and, later, sewer and garbage services, they did so mainly to benefit affluent white Mormons and non-Mormon “gentiles,” most of whom lived and worked downtown and in suburban neighborhoods. 2 Religion initially pitted Mormons against people outside their faith and sometimes against each other; over time, such contention diminished, which permitted affluent whites of all religious backgrounds to support both sanitary progress and their claims to superior health and American identity. Conversely, impoverished Chinese, Greek, Italian, and Mexican immigrants who lived in dilapidated Westside enclaves remained segregated from these improvements, causing them to be cast as unclean, unhealthy, and un-American.
Since Salt Lake City’s incorporation in 1847, bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) were responsible for ensuring water supply, purity, and distribution. They fulfilled this charge reasonably well and then, in the 1870s, stepped aside for city councilors and engineers professionally trained in urban planning and design. The central public health problem that these civil servants encountered was growth. Although rainfall remained normal during the late nineteenth century, population growth did not, averaging over ninety percent annually until 1890. Natural increase and the fruits of LDS missionary efforts combined to create a stress on water resources and increase their relative pollution.
Municipal authorities addressed this dilemma by enforcing sanitation laws more diligently and committing themselves to increasing water volume. One plan, proposed by councilman Elijah Sheets in 1864, entailed devoting ditch water to domestic and manufacturing needs exclusively, while building a forty-mile canal to ferry Utah Lake water to city agricultural fields. 3 Mayor Daniel H. Wells and water superintendent Theodore McKean proposed building a waterworks system in City Creek Canyon— the source of ditch water—and the central business district (CBD), only, to save money. 4 The least costly plan called for either boring artesian wells in Salt Lake City’s twenty-plus municipal wards or hiring private contractors to furnish bottled water to paying customers.
While politicians and civil servants debated these plans, water scarcity and contamination continued to undermine community health. Although outbreaks of water-borne disease had occurred before the 1870s, their rate and severity rose to rival that of the nation’s most squalid municipalities, including Philadelphia and Chicago. 5 According to popular lore, Salt Lake City possessed the dirtiest streets in the West after Kansas City. Religious rivalries only complicated the situation, as sanitary services became a bone of contention between city councilors, most of whom were Mormon, and the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune. In April 1871, the Tribune—sensing an opportunity to ridicule city officials—snorted: “Salt Lake City seems like an overgrown and dull country village. There seems to be no public spirit exhibited by the City Authorities, unless it be in hunting down liquor dealers who refuse to pay extortionate licenses.” In May the Tribune continued, “We need first-class waterworks which should place an ample supply of the bright sparkling water of city creek in the house of every resident in the city, to promote health and comfort.” 6
It is conceivable that city officials interpreted these editorials as a grumpy, though welcome, endorsement of the plan proposed by Wells and McKean, both Mormons. In December 1870, they had proposed an $180,000 waterworks system that would be funded by the subscriptions of downtown property owners. However, although residents in the central business district frequently requested permission to lay private water pipes in City Creek, during the spring of 1871 they rejected the mayor’s plan on the grounds that they already paid the majority of municipal taxes. Caving in to this pressure, as well as to that coming from the probusiness Liberal Party, Mayor Wells and the city council agreed to fund waterworks in the district through general revenue and license fees. 7
On September 3, 1872, policemen oversaw prison inmates as they dug three-foot trenches for water mains in City Creek Canyon. Engineer Thomas Ellerbeck planned for the laminated wood and cast iron mains to run south through the canyon before turning west on North Temple and then through and around the central business district until terminating at the Jordan River. Ellerbeck’s plan seemed rational enough—prior to diesel engine technology, gravity, rather than mechanical force, transferred water—and the placement of the mains accommodated the land’s southwestern slope. 8 In October 1876, four years after breaking ground, city fathers opened the City Creek reservoir to allow “good, clean water” to flow to businesses, churches, and homes fourteen miles below. 9
The Deseret News, the official newspaper of the Mormon church, hailed the water mains as an “inestimable boon.” The newspaper touted the system’s benefits to the “Merchants, Bankers, Hotel, and Livery Stable Keepers” who had petitioned city councilors to lower water rates to “10 cents per thousand gallons” (although churches received water free of charge). 10 Clean piped water also served affluent homeowners who, like Victorians nationally, saw indoor plumbing as a way to promote progress and to improve their homes and health. Although Mormons and non- Mormons remained segregated from each other in downtown’s northern and southern ends, sanitary water transcended this religious divide by flowing in and around their stores and homes, delivering “liquid health and comfort.” 11
While waterworks existed downtown, public health remained a concern throughout the community. Polluted water still ran in city ditches, and municipal officials estimated that only “thirty per cent of the citizens have been directly benefitted by waterworks,” even though all of the city’s taxpayers had shared the $283,000 price tag for its construction. 12 During the construction, several dozen residents rose up to protest this partiality and to support a more “just and equitable plan” of taxing property “where the mains are laid” and extending improvements to less affluent areas. 13 Echoing these sentiments, other citizens emerged in the 1880s to lament the fact that public improvements were built for the “wealthy portion of the community” at the expense of the “poor portion of the community.” 14 Accused of class bias, Salt Lake City leaders responded by endorsing a plan that would potentially benefit the entire community.
Constructed between 1879 and 1882, the Jordan Canal traveled from Utah Lake north along the Wasatch Range to an open conduit at North Temple and Main Street, from whence it flowed to the Jordan River. Residents in the southern, eastern, and northern parts of the city tapped into the canal to irrigate their gardens and to power their businesses, particularly grist mills, paper, sugar, and woolen factories. However, while the canal initially seemed to heal social divisions, it exacerbated them when religious and class contention reemerged during construction.
In April 1880, the Salt Lake Tribune accused the Mormon-dominated city council of approving a $250,000 bond to enrich the Mormon church and specifically its president, John Taylor. Taylor allegedly had lobbied the councilors to back the bond, since the Jordan Canal required the
The reservoir at the mouth of Parley's Canyon
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Cottonwood ditch—which Taylor claimed ownership of—to function properly. The council paid Taylor $40,000 for the ditch, and the LDS city surveyor Jesse Fox hired exclusively “Mormon pilgrims arriving from the old country” to construct the canal. In addition, the canal was poorly built, leaking and fouling ditch water in the lower-income Westside. Tribune editor Charles C. Goodwin reprimanded the “jobbers who carried through the corrupt canal scheme” and mixed undrinkable Utah Lake water with City Creek water downtown before carrying it to Westside ditches. He asked, “And of the inhabitants of that whole portion . . . who receive water below the point where the canal discharges? They all have equitable claims for relief in this matter, for a very positive and comprehensive damage has been done there. Even a little foul water will taint a large stream, and the abuse is flagrant.” Yet rather than addressing these critiques, according to the Tribune, the Deseret News brushed them aside to highlight the canal’s success in providing “a steady supply of voluminous water” to the city. 15
Because growth continued to diminish water resources, in 1888 the city council brokered a trade agreement with Parley’s Canyon farmers whereby they agreed to exchange Jordan Canal water for high quality drinking water flowing in and around the canyon. Laborers built a reservoir at the mouth of Parley’s Canyon where a conduit shuttled 8.5 million gallons daily along the city’s eastern bench to a reservoir at 100 South and 1300 East, at which point gravity then carried the water to suburban neighborhoods east of downtown. This “first exchange” was a farsighted improvement in accommodation of growth. It preceded a “second exchange,” wherein the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce worked with city officials to purchase eight to ten million gallons of Big Cottonwood Canyon water in exchange for a similar amount of canal water for farmers. 16
With an abundant supply of pure water, affluent residents in the suburbs requested home service. Suburbs emerged during the nineteenth century as peaceful retreats from the noise and squalor of inner cities. In Salt Lake City, argues Cecilia Parera, suburbs revealed class-oriented spatial growth, in that their occupants belonged to the richest twenty percent who owned nearly ninety-two percent of city property. 17 The Eastern Slope, the city’s first suburb, consisted of non-Mormon businessmen, doctors, and attorneys and to a lesser extent, wealthy Mormons. The slope extended from Main Street to 600 East and from South Temple to 900 South, with its terrain rising steadily toward the Wasatch bench. Electric streetcars provided service to its spacious Queen Anne, Victorian, and Greek Revival homes, as well as to the city’s two major hospitals.
Farther south was Sugar House, a professional and business-class Mormon neighborhood and the site of a speculative real estate boom, which was bounded by 500 East and 2100 East and 1300 South and 2700 South. Salt Lake City annexed Sugar House after the LDS church suspended sugar beet operations there. Fertile land and good air complemented the area’s opportunities for physical recreation such as golfing and tennis at the country club and hunting, fishing, swimming, and hiking in Parley’s Hollow. The Chamber of Commerce emphasized the suburb’s potential for development. 18 Shortly after the first exchange, city officials ordered waterworks construction in the Eastern Slope and soon thereafter in Sugar House, with mains going to homes first and then to vacant lots. Mayor George Scott, a non-Mormon and a member of the Liberal Party, heartily endorsed these plans, stating “nothing more strongly invites improvements than a good water supply.” 19 Not everyone endorsed water service, however. Poor residents, several of whom were African Americans who inhabited the eastern and western edges of the Eastern Slope (commonly called “nigger town”), argued that construction imposed too high a financial burden on them. 20 Per capita costs could equal $275 and $600 for neighborhood mains, the latter of which averaged eighty percent of an annual working-class salary. 21 In 1888, city councilors amended municipal water ordinances to require all beneficiaries to pay three-quarters of home construction costs, plus fifty cents per front foot of home lateral connections. The city also asserted its right to seize property from owners who failed to pay, although in extreme cases permitted payments in two or three installments. Less than two decades after the emergence of waterworks in Salt Lake City, therefore, public health improvements seemed to privilege specific racial, class, and geographic interests, trumping religious differences. In addition to financial and political support, gravity also influenced the construction of water mains in the Eastern Slope and Sugar House neighborhoods. Salt Lake City occupied the former lakebed of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, which formed a natural amphitheater with land rising north and east toward downtown, the Avenues, and the Wasatch bench. Water thus traveled south and west from the northern and eastern benches toward the Jordan River. This fact helps explain why, until the settlement of well-heeled Salt Lakers in the 1880s, the Avenues retained the unflattering sobriquet of the “dry bench.”
Platted in the 1850s, the Avenues neighborhood covered a high sloping bench northeast of downtown, most of it too high for municipal water service. Its earliest settlers included artisans and farmers who gravitated toward the area’s cheap land but chafed against its lack of water; to the extreme southwest lived a few wealthy LDS officials who worked at the Temple Block. To increase their comfort, a few residents dug shallow wells or laid private pipes in City Creek Canyon, while others hired home water delivery via wooden barrels. The majority, however, carried buckets from springs and ditches lower in the city.
By the 1870s, this hardship motivated residents of the area to establish the Dry Bench Committee and lobby city officials to address their problem. In August 1874, Septimus Sears appeared on behalf of eleven hundred people to request public aid. The city council rejected his appeal and redirected him to the county court, which allegedly possessed the sole right to grant legal title to the surplus of Big Cottonwood water. This response did not appease Sears, however, who insisted on equity: just as city residents outside of downtown financed waterworks in the central business district, so should the central business district finance waterworks outside of downtown. Yet the following year, city officials reiterated their historic warning against settling above the waterline, while the county court explained that no means yet existed to transport Big Cottonwood water to the Avenues. 22 The Dry Bench Committee continued to claim that its constituents “suffered in health, comfort, and convenience” and could not fund waterworks themselves. Fortunately, the committee demanded and received a tax refund for previous years. Unfortunately, these refunds were a zero-sum, as the city later imposed taxes for building the Jordan Canal, which Avenues residents were “led to [falsely] believe . . . would bring them relief.” 23
This image of the Thomas Kearns family depicts the opulence that some Salt Lakers enjoyed.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
With mayoral support, in 1884 the city council approved building a water main from City Creek Canyon through Sixth Avenue to the city cemetery. Six years later, another main had increased the water volume by more than half. These mains provided water to the neighborhoods below them, down to South Temple; the residents of this area included mine owners, bankers, attorneys, doctors, and real estate developers, such as Thomas Kearns, Joseph Walker, and George Downey. These people built spacious homes on lands purchased from early Mormon pioneers and normally traveled by streetcar to work, shop, and worship in downtown. As part of Salt Lake City’s nouveaux riches, they remained categorically different from the city’s poorer and less influential residents, some of whom lived above the Sixth Avenue main. Lacking political clout, these persons formed the North Bench Committee in the 1880s to reassert their “unjust discrimination,” which threatened their health and land values. 24 In 1888, relief finally came when city laborers laid a main on G Street that supplied water to North Bench homes and undeveloped lots. Public health conditions in one area of Salt Lake City—Chinatown— revealed both the power of sanitary inequity and how white biases against non-white people could become caught up in the politics of sanitation. In the 1870s, after having labored on the transcontinental railroad, many Chinese immigrants settled in urban ethnic enclaves. Chinese men in these enclaves performed jobs that were culturally and legally open to them, especially laundering, which white men typically viewed as “woman’s work” and appropriate for supposedly less masculine men. Besides its association with femininity, washing also seemed to be unsanitary and unsafe because it brought launderers into contact with dirty clothing. In Salt Lake City’s CBD, Chinese men opened laundries in the “miserable shanties” of Plum Alley and Commercial Street, the location of the city’s Chinatown and its red light, gambling, and drug-trafficking district. This area reeked of filth and opium smoke, while its dark alleys and prostitutes seemed to confirm its inhabitants’ proclivity for dirt and despair. 25
Despite some attempts by evangelical Christian missionaries to convert and purify the “heathens,” some of whom appeared to be “clean,” the Chinese normally rejected their efforts. 26 Rather, many continued to embrace Buddhism, ancestral worship, and cultural pastimes such as smoking and selling non-medicinal opium, which was illicit in Salt Lake City. They also still lived with other men, prostitutes, and pimps in cramped stuffy quarters, domestic arrangements that seemed to portend violence, sex, and drug-related disease. Some whites believed that Chinese laundrymen, who relied on traditional mouth sprayers instead of new steam technology, passed disease to customers. While the Chinese enjoyed access to sanitary water mains by virtue of inhabiting the CBD, that access ultimately could not wash away white biases against them. 27
In 1883, white residents pressured city councilors to write new laws prohibiting Chinese laundries downtown. City attorney Aurelius Miner suggested that the city purchase land “away from the thickly settled portion” of downtown near the Jordan River for “Chinese Wash Houses.” Miner also suggested crafting a “special ordinance” to prohibit Chinese launderers from working outside this space. 28 Miner’s efforts to remove these immigrants from the CBD occurred within the context of the national anti-Chinese movement, which sought to diminish the economic and cultural competition posed by the “yellow peril” and had recently gained federal backing. The Salt Lake Tribune editorialized that Miner’s proposal seemed like a “good suggestion,” which if carried out would keep “poisonous vapors” from harming the “health of the public.” The Tribune also worked to tie physical health to moral health by asserting that the removal of Chinatown’s dope fiends and “houses of ill repute” would also purge the CBD of Chinese prostitutes—“‘the meanest of moral ulcers.’” 29
On September 18, 1883, Jim Lung appeared before the city council to speak on behalf “of the Chinese residents of the city.” Despite his stated mission, Lung asserted that Chinese laundries posed a risk to public health because they used
The city council—likely surprised by Lung’s testimony, but grateful for it— approved his petition, which deepened cleavages in the Chinese community.
The council also listened to the testimony of Henry A. Reed, who represented the white female launderers of the city. Reed cited “many” laundries in California and Nevada as examples and argued that Salt Lake City should also impose a high tax on Chinese laundries, but not on “whites laboring in the same business.” Though he was explicit about his desire to keep “Chinamen” out of downtown, Reed remained quiet about his alleged role in dividing the immigrants. Then on October 30, Jack Fong and eighteen other Chinese immigrants asserted that Lung did not in fact speak for the Chinese community, but rather was likely motivated by “inducements” given by Reed and other whites. 31 Fong stated that Chinese launderers were “hard working men and poor” who leased washhouses, which they kept “as cleanly as possible.” Rather than taking umbrage at health laws, they agreed to “whatever restrictions or regulations might be enacted for the disposition of soap suds or wash water used by them.” 32 To the contrary, claimed the Salt Lake Tribune, some Chinese men installed “fake” sewer pipes to pass sanitary inspections. 33
For reasons unknown, the city council allowed Chinese laundries to remain in the central business district. This decision differed from the actions of Park City, which outlawed Chinese laundries from Main Street and segregated them to “Poison” Creek, the city’s de facto sewer. Yet Salt Lake City’s decision created a situation similar to that of Park City. Although city attorneys were unwilling, or unable, to draft new laws against the Chinese, Chinese laundries gradually disappeared from downtown by the 1890s. Expired or nonrenewable leases, anti-Chinese sentiment, reduced Chinese immigration, and growing competition from white laundries pushed the immigrants out of washing clothes and into other pursuits, especially farming. Moreover, as their lots normally lacked connections to water and sewer mains but were within reach of the polluted Jordan River, they remained dirty and polluted and thus “fit” (in the language of the day) for a supposedly unclean and unhealthy people. 34
Meanwhile, sanitary reforms in downtown and the suburbs made matters worse for Westside neighborhoods, populated mainly by working-class whites—some of them Mormon—but increasingly non-Mormon, non-white foreign immigrants. As the Salt Lake Tribune pointed out, the Jordan Canal fouled ditch water west of downtown, and according to Mimmie Howard, it habitually leaked to threaten lives and property. Her cellar, for example, filled “to the depth of ten inches, which was getting so offensive from remaining stagnant that there was imminent danger of sickness to her children.” Moreover, her tenants said that “they would be obliged to seek other and more healthful quarters unless the water was drained off.” The city council referred Howard’s petition to the Committee on the Jordan and Salt Lake City Canal and feared that the city “could no longer afford to pay legal judgments against it brought by citizens.” 35
Water mains in the east and north also produced increased wastewater, which drained to the Jordan River or remained in vacant Westside lots to create toxic pools. Salt Lake City residents had long recognized the poor drainage of the city’s western portion, which resulted from its clay-based soil and low elevation. Beginning at Main Street—a “regular back-bone, the grades falling east, west, and south,” and the political boundary separating western and eastern wards—the city descended until reaching the Jordan River. 36 The promise of sanitary water in the upper eastern and northern wards thus remained ominous to the Westside. 37
On June 15, 1880, forty-six residents complained of a “stagnant pool of water . . . on South Temple between Seventh and Eighth West Streets,” yielding “effluvia arising from decayed and putrefying matter” that injured “their health and comfort.” In 1893, the city health director, Theodore Beatty, reported to the city council that numerous complaints cited “a large amount of stagnant water on Sixth West Street between South Temple and First South Street,” which created an “extremely offensive and a dangerous nuisance.” Several years later, William Showell, the city sanitary inspector, testified that “foul ditches” near Pioneer Square (300 West) yielded an odor that remained strong enough to “cause every person living on the block a fit subject for the hospital.” Meanwhile, Giovanno Cereghino, an Italian immigrant, requested that the city health department abate the “stagnant pools of water on Eighth South Street, between Third and Fourth West streets.” 38
While Westside canals existed to channel runoff and debris to the Jordan River or north to the Hot Springs Lake, over time they evolved into “open sewer[s]” that became a “menace to public health.” 39 Weeds, leaves, and excrement choked the canals, which also collected garbage because the city failed to provide garbage collection until 1895 and did so then primarily for the CBD. The city also required citizens to dispose of their garbage, but worked with representatives of the Salt Lake Real Estate Association to prohibit dumping on the Eastside. 40 To comply with city regulations and to save money during the 1893 depression, residents of the eastern, northern, and southern suburbs commonly dumped their refuse in western canals. Although Beatty abated some of these “unsanitary” canals by filling them with malodorous but “harmless” horse manure, according to another city health commissioner, William Dalby, in 1895 some of them remained only partially filled, which caused “much sickness in this vicinity.” In response, members of the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs proposed ending canal dumping and creating “more sanitary garbage disposal under supervision of town authorities.” 41
As Westside residents witnessed their living conditions and property values fall during the turn-of-the-century, some, including many lowerincome Mormons, established neighborhood improvement leagues. The Westside Improvement League and the Eight West Improvement League, for instance, emerged to press for sanitary reforms. On June 3, 1907, “one of the sufferers” editorialized:
By the early twentieth century, sanitary divides, as well as organizing for sanitary reform, were becoming increasingly complicated, based on a mysterious calculus of socioeconomics, geography, and race.
Although these complaints resulted in an antidumping ordinance, it was loosely enforced and the city continued to dispose of garbage, filth, and swill in the Westside until 1916. 43 In 1907, Salt Lake City leased a new public landfill that was supplied by a special garbage train, but the cost of transportation was high, ranging from $7.50 to $9.00 per load. Thus to save money, residents and officials alike regularly avoided the landfill and dumped their filth in the Westside, even if it was “not to the best interests of sanitation and health.” 44
If disposing of refuse in the “least desirable neighborhoods” was a national trend, as the historian Martin Melosi has observed, so was showing preference to central business districts and suburbs in the implementation of sewer lines. 45 During the late nineteenth century, Americans increasingly moved to the cities, using city waterworks and overflowing cesspools and privies. Officials worked to regulate waste repositories, but they believed that soil served as a natural filter for excreta whose liquid and solid components fertilized surrounding flora. This theory came under attack, however, as population density and infections increased. In Salt Lake City, health officials understood that wastewater from upper wards drained west to contaminate lower ward wells. In the 1870s, downtown citizens informed municipal officials that water mains were vital because “their wells [were] tainted from the water oozing through the soil in a southwesterly direction.” In April 1880, two dozen residents of the western Eastern Slope testified that it remained “impossible to obtain pure water from their wells, owing to the want of proper sewage facilities.” 46 Their wells contained bacteria that spread typhoid fever, diphtheria, and cholera. Initially, and as with the delivery of water, the debates regarding sewage facilities fractured along religious lines.
A 1909 map of Salt Lake City’s sewer system. Westside residents eventually gained access to the intercepting sewer.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF ENGINEERING SOCIETIES
Throughout the 1880s, morbidity rates skyrocketed, prompting city chemist Herman Harms to conclude that, generally, surface drainage from the “higher portions of the city” infected wells in the lower wards. As he explained, water “filters through cesspools, dry closets, and other places of filth . . . [to carry] germs and impurities directly into wells.” 47 The Salt Lake Tribune agreed, arguing that downtown had become “a breeding place for disease” and that it needed a sewer. By contrast, the Deseret News asserted that health could be promoted and preserved by living in accordance with LDS values, which included maintaining a proper diet and personal cleanliness and receiving the blessings of elders. Moreover, one News reader decried such “nonsensical sanitary talk” and argued that in “no portion of this city [was] the soil unclean, or impregnated with unhealthful effluvia. . . . Such a condition is a scientific impossibility.” 48 In 1883, the sentiment of the Deseret News changed. With backing from the Chamber of Commerce, Deseret News editor and LDS church official Charles Penrose affirmed that the central business district “is so situated that sewage could easily be collected” and that the best outlet for sewage disposal was the Jordan River, and ultimately, the Great Salt Lake. Understandably, this proposal incited Westside anger. Residents there invited “everybody who value[d] their health and homes” to meet and condemn Penrose’s plan as undemocratic and akin to the waterworks plan that benefitted “wealthy men” downtown, “non-tax paying tenants and [the] Chinese.” Residents also proposed alternative plans, including sewage farming, which entailed using liquid sewage to irrigate nutrient-poor lands west of the Jordan River.
Though gladdened by the Deseret News’s change of heart, the Tribune still played religious politics by condemning the city councilors and church leaders—“the damned old elders of Israel”—who had initially resisted sewer construction and instead counseled Mormon religiosity. Rather than supporting modern reforms, they supported “a kind of Asiatic progress.” Rather than advancing a democratic plan, they now advocated one that favored the rich and hurt the poor. Moreover, after city officials approved sewer construction in 1888, the Mormon church allegedly imported converts from throughout the state to build the “Mormon sewer” and, importantly, cast votes for the Mormon People’s Party during the fall 1889 election. 49
In 1890, the city collected over $70,000 in tax revenue to fund sewer construction in the CBD, with the first main being laid on Main Street. Working-class whites and non-whites, especially Greek immigrants, built the sewers, which continued out of the business district into the lower Avenues and Eastern Slope—an area collectively known as “sewer district one.” 50 In 1892, sewer service became mandatory, and officials pressured residents outside of the district to file for connections once residents had paid three-quarters of main construction costs, one dollar permits, and charges for residential hookups. The total cost for individual properties could range from one to several hundred dollars, with the bulk of it coming from main assessments that were calculated at several dollars per property foot. 51
Gravity outlet sewer, Salt Lake City.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Although the construction proceeded slowly, by 1893 the sewer could drain suburban and downtown waste. Waste traveled south through six-foot wide brick and concrete pipes on Main Street and west on 500 South to a sump at the Jordan River, where it entered the Surplus Canal and then flowed to the Great Salt Lake. Yet the pump remained underpowered and carried only forty percent of sewage to the canal. This left sixty percent of the sewage to enter the Jordan River, where it decimated the native duck and trout population and sickened the inhabitants of the riverside.
Thus in 1894, city engineer Abraham Doremus designed a new brick gravity sewer to drain filth from 400 East and 900 South in a northwesterly direction to its westernmost point at 400 West and South Temple, and then to a sewage farm near Hot Springs lake, four miles north of the city. According to the Tribune, the new gravity sewer seemed to be full of promise, as it was adequately powered, expertly designed, and able to serve “the best residence portion and the business center of the city.” However, it only had the capability to receive sewage from the areas east and north of it, or about two-thirds of the city. “The sewage of the west side,” the Tribune noted, “will have to flow into another sewer lying south and north along the Jordan. . . . This is a future consideration however.” 52
The new gravity sewer began operation in 1896, with nearly all of its customers receiving service by 1905. Although it experienced some leaking and cracking, it functioned well enough to remove excreta from the city’s confines. The Salt Lake Herald observed the technology’s salubrious effect, proclaiming, “Salt Lake is growing healthier all the time.” 53 Yet this proclamation overlooked the condition of areas without sewers. Although the city made plans to improve the Westside, known as Sewer District Two, bond sales and construction did not commence until 1906, with sewer service not starting until 1911 and in some cases not until the 1930s. In the meantime, wastewater and excreta from homes in the east, north, and downtown without sewers collected in western wells, lots, and canals. Although health officials such as the physician Martha Hughes Cannon acknowledged this problem, they advocated a short-term solution—using new dry-earth closets and boiling water before consuming it—rather than a more difficult and expensive long-term fix. 54
Beginning in the 1890s and continuing throughout the early 1900s, Salt Lake City experienced an unprecedented level of contagion. Shallow wells appeared to be the main culprits. Between August and October 1894, typhoid fever sickened 103 people, thirty-four of whom died, resulting in the highest mortality rate in the city’s history. While people throughout Salt Lake City suffered, those in the Westside suffered more. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the “vast majority of cases manifest[ed] themselves in the western part of the city where the ground is low and damp and affording, at present, poor facilities for drainage.” 55
Concentrations of several ethnic groups developed in Salt Lake City from roughly 1900 to 1920. The city’s Chinatown predated these enclaves by about thirty years and was in disrepair by 1900.
UTAH DIVISION OF STATE HISTORY
Nine years later, in 1903, an epidemic occurred after Westsiders drank from a well infected with typhoid bacillus. Their symptoms included high fever, abdominal pain, and rashes, although some of these infected people remained asymptomatic and unwittingly passed germs on to others. At the peak of the outbreak, local health officials counted sixty-five victims of typhoid but suspected many more because hiding from officials was a common practice, particularly among the foreign poor who feared deportation. After mapping the disease, health officials concluded that the epidemic had originated from a well at 300 West and 900 South. 56
Finally, in 1909 the city experienced the “most serious typhoid fever epidemic in its history,” with 721 cases in the Westside, 184 in the Eastern Slope, and 268 in the Avenues. Interestingly, the Salt Lake Herald noted that “foreigners dying in Salt Lake largely outnumber[ed] other classes with 376. Natives of the city passing away were 193 in number and 294 were natives of Utah.” Just so, immigrants who sought medical attention had surnames such as Cappucio, Cannochi, Capiccosi, Koukopoulos, Kootsuki, and Skiliris. 57
In response to this outbreak, city officials and civic groups launched a statewide campaign to educate the public about cleanliness, sanitation, and hygiene. The campaign revolved around annual “cleanup crusades,” which lasted throughout the 1930s and evidenced the new science of vector ecology. Crusades were common in cities during the Progressive Era and targeted vehicles of disease transmission, including unwashed bodies, uncovered garbage cans, leaky garbage wagons, unpasteurized milk, impure food and ice, and the housefly—“the worst immigrant.” 58 Educational programs appeared in public schools, while organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs worked to educate—and demean—foreigners in particular about the dangers of dirt and the need for domestic and personal cleanliness. To them, foreigners seemed to be ignorant, unable, or unwilling to embrace American standards of health and progress.
Although environmental and personal health remained connected, the Salt Lake Herald chose to stress individual responsibility alone, saying, “The great majority of the people [in the Westside] pay no attention to sanitation.” The Salt Lake Telegram conceded this point by making scapegoats of domestic servants, many of whom were foreign and black women, for spreading typhoid fever by mishandling waste: “Another point that can be made with justice is that housekeepers are careless about their disposal of garbage. Very few of them know how to handle it.” Nurses at local hospitals agreed with the Herald and privately chastised industrial workers —particularly miners and railroad workers, the majority of whom lived in the Westside—for their “low standards of living.” In addition, public school teachers noted that the “children of immigrants [remained] eager to play but reluctant to wash.” 59
From the early 1900s until the 1920s, Salt Lake City’s non-white immigrant population of Greeks, Italians, and Mexicans swelled to nearly five thousand persons. Pushed by economic and political turmoil in their native lands and pulled by job opportunities in Utah’s expanding mining and railroad industries, these “new” immigrants often settled in ethnic enclaves throughout the Westside. Following the arrival of the Utah Central and Denver and Rio Grande Western railroads in the late nineteenth century, the western half of Salt Lake City evolved from a marginal agricultural space formerly inhabited by people of British and Scandinavian descent (both Mormon and non-Mormon) to an industrial district populated by dark and olive-skinned immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Latin America.
These foreigners typically found jobs in railroad yards and depots, tool shops, factories, mines, and smelters. They settled as families or as fictive kin to offset the high cost of living. Tenements and cheap hotels filled the city’s Greek Town, Little Italy, and Mexican Town, which were bounded by South Temple and 600 South on the north and south and 100 West and 500 West on the east and west. In contrast to the suburbs and downtown, these enclaves witnessed rising dirt and noise due to industrial growth, which combined with fetid canals, poisoned wells, and garbage-strewn lots to drive health and property values down.
White onlookers tended to view these foreigners with a combination of sympathy and disgust. For instance, Katherine Groebli, a graduate student in public health at the University of Utah, studied immigrant housing in the Westside where, she acknowledged, the “contrast between filth and cleanliness was the most evident.” Housing normally lacked shower and toilet facilities, although a few places offered “modern conveniences” for a premium. “Adobe and cheap frame” multi-family units cost less to rent, but they remained “the most unsanitary.” Although the city provided free housing for the sick-poor—especially those with tuberculosis, a “poverty disease” that afflicted the cold and the hungry—this housing usually lacked adequate resources, including hot water and furnaces, and thus exacerbated an “endless chain of misery.” Moreover, white landlords typically charged foreigners higher rent than they did native-born Americans. While immigrants such as the Japanese might be “a clean, energetic and advancing people,” Groebli reasoned, most others were “careless and shiftless.” In particular, she concluded, the Italians and Greeks were willing to tolerate the “most unsanitary conditions.” 60
Yet many circumstances hindered the ability of these people to leave such conditions. Restrictive housing covenants based on race and ethnicity discouraged and prevented people considered to be non-white from owning homes in desirable areas; likewise, meager incomes forced nearly ninety percent of immigrants to rent rather than buy property. If foreigners desired sanitary improvements, they often faced absentee landlords who were unwilling to pay the “oppressive costs” of sanitary improvements. Landlords also frequently hid the “inherent defects” of their property to escape city fines. 61 Thus, Greek immigrants such as Andy Katsanevas remembered cleanliness being an elusive experience. He endured insults such as “dirty Greek” and remembered identifying more as “Greek and not [as an]
The neighborhood of the Denver and Rio Grande railroad, seen here in 1917, served as a locus of much Westside ethnic settlement.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
American while living on the Westside.” Similarly, Mary Mousalimas recalled growing up dirty like a “‘nigger.’” George Zeese, meanwhile, tried to improve his condition by taking showers at the Young Men’s Christian Academy, only to endure the mockery of onlookers. 62
The parents of Rebecca Alvera exemplified the experience of many Mexicans who arrived in Utah after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Alternately taunted as a “greaser” and a “dirty Mexican,” Alvera lived at 602 West and 700 South in an abandoned railroad car whose seats were removed, but which lacked a toilet. The Alvera family suffered the loss of eleven of twelve children, likely due to sanitary diseases, as did the family of John Florez, whose six siblings fatally drank diphtheria-laced “water used by railroad engines.” 63 As water-borne illnesses are often contagious, overcrowding amplifies the problem of poor sanitation. Because the average family size among Salt Lake City’s “poorer classes” was six, population density deepened the crisis created by the lack of waterworks for nearly four thousand residents and lack of sewer connections for nearly fifteen thousand. 64
In turn-of-the-century Salt Lake City, then, sanitation existed as a municipal improvement mainly accessible to the wealthy and the white. Communal in name only, public health ended up serving particular interests. Those parties benefitted greatly from industrial growth and population increases, but they remained unwilling to manage the more unsavory effects of such growth. Salt Lake City’s authorities followed the national trend of delimiting waterworks to certain neighborhoods: first to the central business district (at public expense) and then to the suburbs such as the Eastern Slope, Sugar House, and the Avenues. The perception of these places as “the most healthful portions of the city,” in the Salt Lake Herald’s words, helped to reinforce the city’s shifting socio-cultural map. 65
Religious contention appeared occasionally during water and sewer construction, but it paled in comparison to the more powerful politics of race and class. These considerations became physically manifested in the squalor of Westside neighborhoods and the sickness and death of Westside residents. Affluent Salt Lakers thus presided—knowingly and unknowingly —over Progressive Era–health reforms that created a social-medical hierarchy that placed themselves at the top and less acceptable Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Italian, and Mexican immigrants at the bottom.
Ben Cater, PhD, earned his doctorate in history at the University of Utah in 2012. Currently he serves as an assistant professor of history at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts. He wishes to thank his colleagues, students, and family for their encouragement and support.
NOTES
1 Ralph T. Richards, Of Medicine, Hospitals, and Doctors (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1953), 20. Complete footnotes for this article can be found in Ben Cater, “Health, Medicine, and Power in the Salt Lake Valley, Utah, 1869–1945” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 2012), chapter 1.
2 “Gentile” is a historical category used by and against non-Mormons in the nineteenth century, although it is no longer an acceptable term to delineate religious identity.
3 City Council Minutes, August 9, 1864, Salt Lake County Recorder’s Office, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter SLCRO).
4 “Theodore McKean,” MS 2050, box 20, fd. 2, no. 1, p. 8, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter CHL); City Council Minutes, October 25, 1870, February 23, March 15, 1872, April 1, 1873.
5 Ralph Richards calculated more than 14,000 cases of typhoid fever in Salt Lake City before 1904, with a mortality rate of about 6.5 percent. From 1911 to 1915, that rate increased to 13.2 percent against the national average of 16.38 percent among cities with populations of 100,000 to 125,000, and then to 18.1 percent versus 10.9 percent among the same segment in 1917. Richards, Of Medicine, 167; JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 70 (March 16, 1918): Table V, 778; D. C. Houston and Rey M. Hill, Health Conditions and Facilities in Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Planning Board, 1936), 15.
6 Salt Lake Tribune, April 27 (first quotation), May 19, 1871 (second quotation).
7 City Council Minutes, February 13, 1871, SLCRO.
8 Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1907 (Salt Lake City: Century Printing, n.d.), 206–207.
9 Deseret News, October 6, 1876.
10 Ibid.; City Council Minutes, October 12, 1875, August 1, 1876, May 18, 1880, SLCRO.
11 City Council Minutes, April 24, 1877, SLCRO.
12 Ibid., April 15, 1884.
13 Ibid., June, 15, 1878.
14 Ibid., October 3, 1888; Deseret News, September 12, 1888.
15 Salt Lake Tribune, April 4, 1880, July 27, July 30, 1882, July 1, 1899. The Deseret News quotation comes from the Salt Lake Tribune, July 30, 1882.
16 Map #8491, “Sketch Showing Principal Sources of Water Supply to Salt Lake City,” June 28, 1932, LeRoy W. Hooton Jr. Public Utilities Building, Salt Lake City, Utah; LeRoy W. Hooton Jr., “The Jordan and Salt Lake City Canal,” typescript, MSS A 3229, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter USHS); Salt Lake Tribune, February 3, 1891, March 18, 1892, February 2, 1894.
17 Cecilia Parera, “Mormon Town Planning: Physical and Social Relevance,” Journal of Planning History 4 (2005): 170.
18 Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, “Salt Lake City and Surroundings” (Salt Lake City: Tribune Printing and Publishing Company, 1889), 35.
19 Annual Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1891 (Salt Lake City, 1892), 12, Series 4882, USHS.
20 City Council Minutes, November 29, 1881, SLCRO; Margaret May, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Nurses Oral History Project, MS OH 02228, p. 4, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. In circa 1890, about 220 African Americans lived in Salt Lake City, mostly on Franklin Avenue on the western edge of the Eastern Slope. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, vol. III, Population, Table IV, “Composition and Characteristics of the Population for Wards of Salt Lake City” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), 890; George Ramjoue, “The Negro in Utah: A Geographical Study in Population” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1968), 10; James Boyd Christensen, “A Social Survey of the Negro Population of Salt Lake City, Utah” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1948). For a white perspective on racial segregation in Salt Lake City, see “Interviews with Caucasians in Utah,” box 1, fd. 14, p. 13, MS 483, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah (hereafter JWML).
21 City Council Minutes, September 27, 1887, August 1888, SLCRO. On construction costs, see April 15, May 24, 1884. I based the average annual working-class salary on three dollars per day, at five days a week, totaling $720 per year.
22 City Council Minutes, March 30, 1875, SLCRO.
23 Ibid., January 16, February 6, December 11, 1877, January 29, 1878, February 20, 1883, SLCRO.
24 Salt Lake Tribune, March 22, May 22, 1885; City Council Minutes, March 21, 1876, April 9, 1878, SLCRO.
25 Richard T. Page and J. J. Bloomfield, Evaluation of the Industrial Hygiene Problem of the State of Utah, 1938 (Washington, D.C.: Division of Industrial Health, National Institutes of Health, United States Public Health Service, 1938), 27; Salt Lake Tribune, November 15, 1879, October 2, 1899, October 15, 1900.
26 Salt Lake Tribune, May 25, 1884, January 4, 1885; “Reports, 1932–1933,” box 49, fd. 1, MS 558, Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs Records, JWML; Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Reid Neilson, eds., Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 272.
27 Salt Lake Tribune, November 15, 1879, August 10, September 19, October 11, 14, 1883, May 25, 1884, September 11, 1885, January 20, 1886, September 10, 1892; City Council Minutes, August 18, 1874, October 23, 1883, October 30, 1883, SLCRO; Salt Lake Herald, November 11, 1883; Daniel Liestman, “Utah’s Chinatowns: The Development and Decline of Extinct Ethnic Enclaves,” Utah Historical Quarterly 64 (Winter 1996): 80–83; Michael Lansing, “Race, Space, and Chinese Life in Late-Nineteenth Century
28 Salt Lake City,” Utah Historical Quarterly 72 (Summer 2004): 219–38; “Hiram Clawson Jr.,” MS D 1776, CHL; Paul Siu, “The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1953), 80. Salt Lake Tribune, August 10, 1883. The Deseret News, February 2, 1882, lists “A. Miner” as a city attorney. For a short biography of Miner, see History of the Bench and Bar of Utah (Salt Lake City: Interstate Press Association, 1913), 98.
29 City Council Minutes, August 7, 1883, SLCRO; Salt Lake Tribune, August 10, 1883; Liestman, “Utah’s Chinatowns,” 77 (final quotation).
30 City Council Minutes, September 18, 1883, SLCRO.
31 Salt Lake Tribune, October 11, 1883.
32 City Council Minutes, September 18, October 9, 30, 1883, SLCRO.
33 Salt Lake Tribune, July 24, 1890.
34 City Council Minutes, October 31, 1893, SLCRO. On this date, the city attorney reported the difficulty of drafting a law specifically against Chinese vegetable peddlers. On September 11, 1885, and January 20, 1886, the Salt Lake Tribune ran stories on boycotting Chinese laundries. Walter Jones, “Chinese Vegetable Gardeners in Salt Lake City: A Study in Ethnic Dispersion and Short-Term Residential and Economic Integration” (paper, American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch, Tucson, AZ, August 3, 2002); “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Salt Lake City, 1898,” sheets 71–74, 78–79, JWML.
35 City Council Minutes, July 27, June 8, 1886, SLCRO.
36 Salt Lake Tribune, September 1, 1888.
37 Historically residents identified the Westside as the land west of Main Street, an elevated north/south axis that ran along the east side of the Temple Block, the literal and spiritual center of Salt Lake City. Although some Westsiders settled north of the Temple Block, in the early twentieth century most of them built homes and businesses between it and 2100 South, the southernmost edge of the city.
38 City Council Minutes, June 15, 1880, March 28, 1893, October 20, 1896, March 16, 1897, SLCRO.
39 Ibid., November 18, 1889, March 18, 1884; Salt Lake Telegram, August 17, 1906.
40 City Council Minutes, February 19, March 12, 1906, SLCRO.
41 Ibid., September 26, December 12, 1893, January 30, February 13, April 27, September 11, 1894, August 27, 1895; “Three Decades of General Federation Work,” box 66, fd. 4, Women’s Clubs Records, JWML.
42 Salt Lake Herald, June 3, 1907; see also, Salt Lake Herald, March 17, 1902, January 1, 1905, March 6, 1908, September 19, 1913.
43 In 1906, city health commissioner M. R. Stewart, city sanitary inspector W. H. Margetts, and four city garbage wagon drivers were arrested for “creating a nuisance” at the corner of 1000 West/300 South. Municipal Journal and Public Works 21, no. 8 (1906): 186.
44 Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1915 (Salt Lake City: Western Printing, 1916), 543; City Council Minutes, April 1, 1907, SLCRO; Salt Lake Telegram, January 20, 1911; Message of the Mayor 1907,199; Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1911 (Salt Lake City: Century Printing, n.d.), 354.
45 Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban American from Colonial Times to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 115–16.
46 City Council Minutes, April 29, 1879, June 22, 1880, SLCRO.
47 Salt Lake Herald, August 27, 1903, October 24, 1901, November 23, 1902, January 27, August 13, 29, September 6, 1903.
48 Salt Lake Tribune, May 23, 1888; Deseret News, September 10, 1881, November 14, 1888.
49 Deseret News, November 4, 1887, May 9, 11, 16, October 24, 1888; Salt Lake Tribune, May 8, 23, 1888, September 24, October 2, 1889, August 6, 14, 1890, November 5, 1893.
50 Historically, Americans contested what it meant to be “white,” particularly during the late nineteenth century. As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson writes, “The ascendant view among native-born Americans in the 1890s” was that “Southern European, Semitic, and Slavic immigrants held as poor a claim to the color ‘white’ as the Japanese, and therefore ought to be turned away at once.” Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 76–77.
51 Second Annual Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1889 (Salt Lake City, 1890), 13–15, 63–71, Series 4882, City Documents, no. 2, USHS; Deseret News, October 17, 1888; “Interviews with Greeks in Utah,” Mr. and Mrs. Michael Bapis, box 1, fd. 7, p. 3, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Borovilos, fd. 11, p. 2, MS 479, JWML; Deseret News, October 25, 1892; Salt Lake Tribune, June 1, 1892.
52 Salt Lake Tribune, December 28, 1895, January 11, 1894; Message of the Mayor with the Annual Reports of the Officers of Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Year 1893 (Salt Lake City: Salt Lake Lithographic, 1894), 55–56, 117.
53 Salt Lake Herald, November 23, 1902.
54 Salt Lake Telegram, February 5, 1910; “Sewerage System of Salt Lake City,” Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies 42 (1909), map; Message of the Mayor 1893, 55–56; Sherilyn Cox Bennion, “The Salt Lake Sanitarian: Medical Adviser to the Saints,” Utah Historical Quarterly 57 (Spring 1989), 125–37; Mari Grana, Pioneer, Polygamist, Politician: The Life of Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon (Helena, MT: Twodot Press, 2009), 95.
55 “Samuel A. Woolley,” boxes 1–2, MS D 1556, CHL; Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 27, 1895. For instance, the son of Samuel A. Woolley succumbed to the disease; the Woolleys lived at 405 South and 300 East.
56 Salt Lake Herald, August 29, 1903.
57 Ibid., September 21, February 3, 1909. Helen Papanikolas recalled that Greek women were “very secretive” and “frantic” over contracting tuberculosis. “Interviews with Greeks in Utah,” Helen Papanikolas, box 2, fd. 3, p. 12.
58 Richards, Of Medicine, 196; “A Brief History of Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1912–1950,” October 1912–October 1914, box 1, fd. 1, Women’s Clubs Records, JWML; Salt Lake Herald, January 24, 1909.
59 Salt Lake Telegram, December 30, 1903, July 9, 1910, September 4, 1903; Ramjoue, “The Negro in Utah,” 21; “Interviews with Japanese in Utah,” Jasuo Sasaki, box 3, fd. 4, p. s1:15, Accn. 1209, JWML.
60 Katherine Elizabeth Groebli, “On the Housing Problem in Salt Lake City” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1915), 3, 5, 15, 18, 22, 46; Thirteenth Census, Table IV, 890.
61 Deseret News, November 14, 1890, August 20, 1905; F. C. Kelsey, “Map of Salt Lake City, Utah, City Engineer’s Office, Showing Sewer System” (1896), in author’s possession; “Minutes of the Meetings of the Salt Lake County Board of Public Welfare, August 28, 1935,” September 6, 1935, Salt Lake County Welfare Board Minutes 1933–1946, 1937–1942, 03-522, box W-1, Salt Lake County Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah. In one case, the Welfare Board found that a “landlord would not make basic sanitary improvements because the renting family was too poor to pay anything.”
62 Message of the Mayor 1893, 117; “Interviews with Greeks in Utah,” box 1, fd. 12, pp. 5, 56, Mary Mousalimas, box 3, fd. 5, p. 22, JWML; Helen Papanikolas, A Greek Odyssey in the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 287.
63 “Interviews with Hispanics in Utah,” box 1, fd. 4, fd. 9, pp. 4–5, s1:3–15, Accn. 1369, JWML.
64 Report of the Utah–White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, April 6 and 7, 1931 (Salt Lake City, 1931), 1–2; J. Wesley Noall, “Quality of Water Supply of Salt Lake City,” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1931), 48; David C. Martin and Arnold M. Marston, “Well Development for Salt Lake City Water Supply,” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1931); D. C. Houston and Rey M. Hill, Health Conditions and Facilities in Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Planning Board, 1936), 40–43.
65 Salt Lake Herald, September 21, 1900.
