The Secret Perfume
The name of ‘Cheektowaga’ is incised upon the Robert Brighton Wall of Fame for many things: its major international airport . . . world-renowned Cheektowagyu™ Beef . . . the irresistible Walden Galleria.
But in Buffalo’s Gilded Age, the town was known mostly for its special brand of ‘perfume’, which some period wags called ‘Essence de Cheektowaga’. Namely, the sweet smell of garbage—raw and cooked.
From its earliest days, Buffalo dumped the majority of its municipal waste into the Niagara River, the Hamburg Canal, the Erie Canal, or the Buffalo River. But by the 1880s, the Hamburg Canal had become an open sewer, the Buffalo River almost thick enough to plow, and the Niagara so choked with garbage that it had become an embarrassment, even for the time. More than forty tons of solid waste per day—everything from chicken bones to cast-off furniture—went flying over Niagara Falls. That’s about ten modern garbage trucks’ worth each and every day, and that’s not counting raw sewage or chemical waste. (Period garbage wagons (an example shown above, taken 1927 or later) had a capacity of four tons per load.)
The underlying problem, and one that could no longer be swept into the river, was that Buffalo was booming, and I mean booming. Between 1880 and 1910, Buffalo added nearly 275,000 residents, an increase greater than the total size of the current city population. By 1886, the matter of garbage was one of such intense debate and worry that at last the city called for bids to collect all of this refuse and get rid of it somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s outside the city limits. Even East Buffalo—the usually preferred location for anything smelly (tanneries, stockyards, the giant Jacob Dold meatpacking enterprise, etc.)—was politically a non-starter.
Thirty-one-year-old contractor William Baynes threw his hat into the ring, pledging to collect Buffalo’s garbage three times a week per address in summer, once in winter, and then dispose of it out of the city and out of sight. His idea was to haul his booty east, to a ‘model garbage crematory’ (incinerator) he would build on William Street, Cheektowaga, just over the Buffalo line.
After long and heady debate, Mr. Baynes was awarded the contract for the tidy sum of $513,500 per annum (about $25 million today). And as promised, he did indeed build the world’s first truly modern garbage-processing facility—one incorporating the newest, high-tech solution of the day: the Merz Reduction Process. The Merz process involved cooking garbage, like a kind of soup, in gigantic open kettles or ‘reducers’. Workers would skim off any floating grease and fat for reuse; remaining cooked-down solids were then soaked in gasoline to extract the last bit of usable lipid.
At its inception, Baynes’s Garbage Crematory was rated at a maximum of 45 tons of garbage per day. This included swill, trash, and solid waste—the mountains of coal ash (ten times the amount as garbage, by volume) were separated and used for road treatment and concrete manufacture. Soon, though, the unabated growth of Buffalo overwhelmed low-bidder Baynes’s best intentions, or at least projections. As early as 1892, his six-acre plant was receiving sixty-five tons daily—which meant that twenty tons of unprocessable stuff was left to decay in the open air–and also made the new garbage plant immediately unprofitable.
This, as you can probably imagine, created a truly eyewatering stench—an indescribable, intolerable reek that was more a taste than a smell. Even passengers aboard the Erie Railroad to or from Buffalo reported hitting a ‘wall of odor’ in passing through Cheektowaga. But what to do? Burying the excess garbage wasn’t a viable option: for one, lots of heavy machinery is required for modern-day landfilling, and such equipment was relatively scarce and expensive in those days; and two, there wasn’t enough room anyway. So . . . the ever-enterprising Mr. Baynes devised a new solution: FREE GARBAGE!
The first beneficiary of the Big Buffalo Garbage Giveaway was the Bogardus family, which owned a large farm on Bailey Avenue, not far from the crematory. For some time they had thought their land might need a bit of fertilizer, and accordingly the generous folks at the garbage works responded with an offer too good to refuse (ha ha)—as much FREE GARBAGE as you like, delivered! Did we say FREE?
But there was a catch, and that was that there would be no sortation of any kind, but simply twenty tons a day of garbage spread over the Bogardus family farm. In the spirit of ‘if it seems too good to be true, it probably is’, the resulting acres of rotting garbage attracted packs of roaming dogs and swarms of mosquitoes. And if anything, Cheektowaga’s special parfum d’égout became even more intense for having been distributed over a larger area.
Worse, surface disposal attracted the poorest of Buffalo’s poor to pick through the refuse for ‘bits of melon and vegetables’ (Buffalo Enquirer, August 23, 1893) or ‘a soggy loaf of bread . . . after cutting off the nasty, stinking outside, [the finder] will eat or carry home the nucleus of the loaf’ (same source). One lucky fellow found a gold horseshoe ring in a heap of rotting goo, and this event nearly touched off a kind of Garbage Rush as people with time on their hands and a spirit of adventure flocked to Cheektowaga to comb through the city’s detritus.
Meanwhile, Buffalo City Scavenger Phillip Beuttner was paid $900 a year (about $45,000 today) to comb the streets and alleys of Buffalo for the carcasses of dead animals. Horses and mules sometimes dropped dead in their traces; the East Buffalo stockyards always had sick or dying pigs, cows, and sheep that were too far gone to slaughter and sell, and stray dogs and cats were often dispatched rather than chased and caught. (Dead pets, by contrast, were considered to be ordinary household refuse and could simply be stuffed into your garbage can for normal collection.)
This spectral Noah’s Ark, along with still-living draft animals past their prime, had value—and so a handful of ‘rendering plants’ (the fabled ‘glue factories’) sprang up along William Street, again just inside the boundary of bucolic Cheektowaga. There, animal carcasses and slaughterhouse waste were boiled down into hide, fat, lard, phosphate fertilizer, glue, and tallow (the lattermost sold to the Lautz and Larkin soap works). These new rendering plants only added to the olfactory nightmare.
By 1900 the situation had become dire, and the good old days of odor-free Niagara dumping were being recalled by aldermen who had never liked the idea of cooking garbage in open cauldrons of gasoline. They may have been partially right, because on October 1st a massive fire burned Baynes’s hopelessly overwhelmed, money-losing garbage plant to the ground, presumably incinerating its last load of schmutz at the same time and at no additional cost.
Yet once again Fortune smiled on William Baynes: The $80,000 loss (about $4 million today) was fully covered by insurance, and so he could rebuild—bigger, better, and just in time for the May 1, 1901, opening of the Pan-American Exposition. Construction delays kept the plant from coming on line until July, and for those eight long months, fifty tons of garbage a day kept arriving in Cheektowaga. This was almost all dumped on the Mullenhoff farm, along Clinton Street. (The Bogarduses had presumably accepted enough FREE GARBAGE by then.)
In case you may be wondering, in current times Buffalo city residents generate about 150,000 tons of garbage per year—almost exactly the same amount as in 1925, when the city’s population was double its current size. The ‘throwaway society’ is quantifiable! Oh, and the animal rendering business is still a good one–accounting for more than $10 billion in annual revenue in the United States alone.
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.