garbage to heat water for public baths, and to make steam to run the machinery of laundries.
Well managed cities take all this waste away every day, or at least three times a week, and they do it early in the morning. Street sweeping is done at night when there are few people about. Then big, rotary sweepers, drawn by horses, whirl the street soil up into covered wagon boxes. In the day time, men go over the streets with long-handled brush brooms, dust pans and carts and water cans. They work all the time. Horses make soil, produce wagons and peddlers drop vegetables and fruits, coal wagons scatter lumps and dust, untidy people throw away papers, fruit skins and cigar stumps. Sometimes streets have to be scraped. Asphalt and cement walks and roadways are washed with a big hose. In Paris, miles of beautiful avenues are washed every morning before breakfast. The water carries the dust into the sewers. In most cities street car companies must keep the streets on which their tracks run, clean. They must sprinkle the tracks in summer to lay the dust, and clear away snow in the winter. The city sprinkles the roadways of the parks and boulevards, and waters the grass. House owners, on well-kept streets, pay for having sprinkling done.
Snow is one of the hardest things in a city to deal with. It cannot be allowed to lie on the ground as in the country, where it packs into hard, white roads. In cities snow is soon cut up into dirty slush, freezes into ruts and blocks the streets. In the crowded business parts, snow must be shovelled into wagons and carried away. Snow plows and scrapers go over avenues and through parks. A heavy snowfall costs a city thousands of dollars. Besides its stopping traffic, if it should melt all at once it would flood basements and sewers. That would force sewage into the streets and houses, and poison the people.
Street cleaning is only a part of city housekeeping. The health department’s business is to see that all the people have pure air, pure water, pure food, and are protected from contagious diseases. The people pay taxes to build water works, and then pay for all the water they use. They pay taxes to lay sewer pipes. Gas companies are given the right to lay gas pipes in the streets. They make money from this right, so they have to obey special laws. Owners of houses, stores and factories, get rent from the people who use them, so they are forced by law to keep their property in good, healthful order.
