Jackson's Hollow

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Jackson's Hollow

This is a large tract of land in the Seventh Ward, comprising some fifty acres or more, and existing as a sort of running sore in one of the pleasantest parts of Brooklyn, just south of Myrtle avenue, and east of Clinton.¹ It is entirely unregulated, unpaved, unlighted, uncleansed, and carefully avoided by persons any way particular about smells. It is indeed a fester, a well-populated blotch, an immense raw to that part of our beautiful city.

At present, if you circuit around the outside of Jackson's Hollow, the high grounds at the edges, and look away over "the Hollow," and down into it, you see hundreds of meandering streams, winding their sinuous courses according to the equalities and inequalities of the land, and bringing up at last in hundreds of spreading ponds, some of them quite little, some quite large.² Perhaps you suppose these to be the poetical brooks, along whose sides "love-sick youth" delights to wander. Not at all. They are the putrid drippings of the numberless residences of the hogs, cows, and goats, that (in part) inhabit that Arcadian region. These cow-stables are contrary to law—but many of the Seventh Ward policemen live in "the Hollow," and the cows occupy their stables in happiness and security—and the swill-carts come and go, and the drippings send up their morning and evening incense, and the hundreds of stagnant brooks wind on their way, and supply the hundreds of ponds—giving out such a scent, of a warm day, when the wind blows toward you—O, such a scent! The whole surface of the land is interlined with these rotten and black streams, and by these cow and hog ponds.

We mentioned the other day that our Brooklyn Board of Health had formally organized themselves "en permanence," for the good of the people, for the summer. What a mockery!

It is well known among physicians that endemical diseases (diseases from local causes, bad air, &c.), are the ones most to be dreaded in summer, in cities. Putridity, poisoned air, that is what penetrates the whole body, the blood, every part of one. It arouses and aggravates what would otherwise be a trifling malady, and makes it a serious contagion, depopulating neighborhoods, and sometimes large wards, towns, or cities. Starting from one little point (like "Jackson's Hollow"), it may spread, in a capricious but deadly manner, over regions miles distant. Such are the curious and invisible movements in the air, affecting individual and public health, and resulting in the "weekly reports of deaths," whose categories of disease do not begin to tell the story of the real causes of those deaths. The names given there are but the forms taken by death, at the conclusion. The beginnings of many deaths would be vastly different, truer, and would put in the lists of mortality many new, and equally mortal sources of the human end-all here—for instance, "Jackson’s Hollow."

We forgot to say that it is well known by the shrewd politicians of the part of Brooklyn treated of, that "the Hollow" controls the elections of the Seventh Ward. As goes "the Hollow," so goes the ward. We are ashamed to mention, in conclusion, as a proof what a discontented thing the human soul is, that it has also been said (in whispers, when no strangers were near), that the reason why the common ordinances of our mother, the City, vital for her decencies and health, do not descend into the ravines of Jackson's Hollow by the august hands of her ministers (the policemen), is, that the Mayor and Alder——But we dare not give currency to the monstrous supposition!

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