Along with America in the 1870s, New York City had just been turned upside-down by the Civil War (1861-1865). When Susan arrives it is facing multiple problems.

There was crowding to a degree never before seen, leading to partitioning of houses and cheap, unsafe tenement blocks.. Many people blamed this crowding on the great wave of poor immigrants, which had paused during the war but was now bigger still. They came mostly from Europe, and within Europe mostly from Germany and Ireland. People thought the Germans were busy and law-abiding, often setting up small businesses like rug-seller that Susan runs into first thing. But the Irish had a reputation for rowdiness and heavy drinking, not helped by the mostly Irish anti-draft riot that had overwhelmed most of Manhattan for a week in the middle of the war and killed several hundred people. Prejudice against the Irish, and the poor in general, focussed not only on their fighting a lot, but also on their being dirty and spreading skin diseases and lice. In fact both hot water and privacy were in limited supply, expecially if you had to choose between washing up and food. Susan is surprised when she gets more sympathy for not seeming poor. She also realizes she needs to conceal her own Irish roots, and admires the pluck of her Irish ally.

With time the crowding problem was alleviated by efficient transportation (see the My Favorite Period post). But even the elevated steam railroad had only entered the planning stage in the month Susan arrives. The other kinds of transportation all involved horses: horse cars on rails, omnibusses, Hansom cabs, private carriages, and riding. Horses were the biggest crowd of all, 100,000 of them, requiring a thousand tons of fodder and leaving fifteen hundred tons of manure every day. And horses got sick just like people. The great epidemic (technically epizootic) of horse flu during Susan’s trip meant many fewer horsecars ran for a while.

There were coal-burning steam trains, of course. Cars just a little shorter than modern ones were pulled all over the country on newly cheap steel rails. But coal-burning automobiles or busses would have been awkward to run and filthy to be near. “Burning oil” (kerosene) began to be refined from petroleum in 1858, and was being tried as a way to power steam vehicles, but this strategy was overtaken by a method of exploding a kerosine-like fuel (petrol, or gasoline) with electric sparks (1886). The resulting internal combustion engine led to a bigger explosion than anyone imagined, but not until the new century. Susan basically has to walk.

New Yorkers were mostly satisfied with gaslight. Gas from heating coal without letting it burn was routinely piped around cities by 1872. However, its light flickered badly until the introduction of a cheesecloth-like mantle in the 1890s, so Susan reads and plays the piano by lamp light. Whale oil for lamps was getting impossibly expensive as whales were hunted nearly to extinction, but kerosene came to the rescue just in time (and made Rockefeller his first fortune). Susan could even see a magic lantern show powered by a noisy but brilliant electric arc, which had to rely on expensive batteries. The chemical reactions in batteries also powered the telegraph, but heavy-duty electric power had to wait for mechanical generation by the dynamo, in 1884.