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In the summer of 2003, July and August were relatively mild in comparison to previous summers with the notable exception being a couple of weeks straight when the temperature and humidity both hovered near 90. Does not ring a bell, huh? Well, then, perhaps you remember August 14, 2003, when the lights went out in a large expanse of the Northeast United States and Canada because high demands for electricity to run air conditioners and refrigerators (along with poor engineering) knocked out the power grid. Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and New York, along with everywhere else in between, were cloaked in darkness. Now what does this have to do with a bottle digging article . . . we will get there.

Dave, Winston and Andy start pounding a hole in the concrete to begin digging the privy.

My friend Scott Jordan is always scouting out renovation and construction projects in New York City in an effort to salvage the contents of old outhouses before they are destroyed or sealed forever buried below manicured urban oases. One evening in early August, Scott left an excited voicemail message at my office asking for a return call as soon as possible. That evening, I called him from my cell phone while sharing drinks with my wife Joan and her multitude of girlfriends at their favorite local outdoor bar in Washington, DC. Scott proceeded to relay that after numerous visits to a construction job on West 21st Street in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, where the owners of the site (a father and son team) were turning an abused four-story 1830s row house into a seven-story apartment building, he had finally secured permission for us to dig the outhouse. The only hitch was that, despite the ridiculous heat and humidity, the privy had to be dug by the end of the week because the portion of the lot where the privy was likely located would be excavated in short order for the new foundation. Turning around on my stool to look at

Joan, who was sitting there with a knowing look since I was talking with Scott in such an animated tone, I received the thumbs up and was instantly relieved of my social duties for the end of the week. And so right there, in the midst of the heat wave, I accepted without hesitation Scott's invitation to dig a privy in Manhattan on what would turn out to be the two hottest and most humid days for New York in 2003.

Portion of wall map by Mathew Dripps, City of New York, executed in 1852, that shows the rough location of the privy dig.

Calling my understanding boss, I immediately cleared my work calendar for the next two days so I could set out for New York early the morning. After a quick bite with Joan and the ladies, I headed for home to pack my bags and load the truck for my trip the next day. Into bed early that evening, I awoke before my alarm (set to let loose at 5:30 a.m.) because of nervous excitement from a night of dreaming about digging a privy laden with iron-pontiled sodas and open-pontiled rectangular colored medicines. Before 6:00, the wheels in my truck were spinning on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and the radio was playing my favorite tunes including the Lovin' Spoonful.

On the drive northward, I thought about my destination. Specifically, West 21st Street which is located in the heart of a thriving and vibrant part of Manhattan called Chelsea. This neighborhood is bounded by Broadway to the east and the Hudson River to the west, 14th Street to the south and 34th Street to the north. Its name stems from Captain Thomas Clarke's country estate he called Chelsea. At the time it was built in 1750, the Chelsea mansion and grounds were three miles from the hustle and bustle of developed New York City. Clarke's widow inherited the property and then passed it on to her daughter, Charity, who was married to Benjamin Moore, the Episcopal bishop of

New York and the president of Columbia College. In 1813, the couple deeded the land and its buildings to their son, Clement Clarke Moore. The younger Moore started the transformation of the family holdings from a country estate into a suburb of New York. Moore is perhaps better known as the author of A Visit from St. Nicholas that starts with familiar refrain: "T'was the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring B not even a mouse."

Moore was also a businessman who understood the benefits of good urban planning and its wallet-enhancing impact upon real estate development. With his friend James N. Wells, a local real estate broker, Moore divided his lands in accord with the new street grid adopted by the City of New York and sold it as residential lots to individuals and speculators. To establish suitable neighbors, in 1825, he donated an entire block to the General Theological Seminary (whose buildings and grounds are reminiscent of Ivy League colleges) and gave land on West 20th Street to St. Peter's Episcopal Church for a rectory and a sanctuary. These planning efforts spawned other speculative row house construction in the adjacent blocks stretching north and south of Moore's property and further east to Sixth Avenue. Today the Seminary is surrounded by Italianate and Greek Revival row houses in brick and brownstone that date from the 1830s to the 1850s; their mass and style demonstrate the faithful investment of early developers who knew that Chelsea was an up-and-coming New York neighborhood.

The author handing up out of the outhouse his freshly excavated and prized colored, pontiled hair bottle.

Along West 23rd and 24th Streets, Moore and Wells oversaw the construction of a key element in their real estate plan by developing one of New York's premier residences. On the shady West 24th Street frontage they built the Chelsea Cottages as wood-framed, two-story structures for working people. In contrast, the entire West 23rd Street frontage was improved with 36 grand brownstone row houses, all set well back from the manure-strewn streets behind hedges and trees. Each dwelling was designed in the Greek Revival style, creating a uniform vista of three-storied pilasters and recessed spandrels with classic Greek key carving. Completed in 1845, the development was called London Terrace. Moore insisted on high-quality construction knowing it would raise the value of his remaining property; consequently, he razed the family manse across from London Terrace in 1853 and likewise sold the land for residential development. On the site, facing the relatively new London Terrace, elaborate row houses were built in the Italianate style and quickly earned the nickname "Millionaires' Row."

By the 1870s, the neighborhood transformed again into Manhattan's Theater District (before the theaters moved uptown in the 1880s and 1890s to Herald Square and then to Times Square).

Little remains of the theaters now, but the Chelsea Hotel that has housed many actors, writers, artists, and bohemians still stands today. Built in 1882 as a luxury cooperative apartment house with New York's first penthouses and duplexes, it never attracted affluent tenants because they were already moving further north on the island of Manhattan. Since its conversion to a hotel in 1905, the Chelsea Hotel has been the undisputed watering hole of struggling, outrageous, and reclusive artists. Mark Twain and Tennessee Williams lived here; Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas floated in and out during New York visits. Actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Lilly Langtry resided here around the turn of the century. In 1951, Jack Kerouac, armed with a special typewriter and, no doubt, lots of drugs, typed nonstop the first draft of On the Road onto a 120-foot roll of paper. The Chelsea Hotel also bore witness to William Burroughs completing Naked Lunch, Arthur C. Clarke writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Thomas Wolfe cobbling together one of his indecipherable novels. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol haunted the halls and made a film called Chelsea Girls. Rock and rollers also treated the Chelsea as their home away from home: Jimmy Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Patti Smith, and various members of the Grateful Dead occupied rooms. Bob Dylan wrote songs in and about Hotel Chelsea as did Joni Mitchell who, as a result of her time there, was inspired to craft Chelsea Morning.

Scott and Winston sifting all of the dirt back into the hole. Many cool artifacts and a significant amount of restored potter were recovered in the screen.

Even before the Chelsea Hotel became the residence of choice for reclusive or fringe-living artists, Moore's London Terrace went into steep decline and was eventually demolished in the 1930s to make way for the London Terrace Apartments. The Apartments, designed as two rows of buildings a full city block long and surrounding a private interior garden, had the misfortune of being completed in 1930 at the height of the Great Depression. Despite a swimming pool and doormen decked in London police uniforms, London Terrace stood empty for several years and was not occupied by tony residents for more than half a century. The reason for this relative anonymity was the departure of the Theater District and the flight of wealthy residents to the posh Upper East and West Side neighborhoods (developed in the 1860s on through the turn of the century). Throughout Chelsea, formerly expensive one-family homes were subdivided into rooming houses and tiny apartments; Chelsea did not need a luxury apartment building. From the 1920s onward, Chelsea transformed into a solid lower and middle class Latino and African-American neighborhood in addition to becoming a haven for struggling artists and idealists. On its fringes, and in particular its western and northern edges, Chelsea became the site of large industrial, warehouse, and manufacturing facilities along with a mix of high-rise housing projects.


Winston and Dave getting ready to haul more buckets out of the concrete-capped privy.

Today, Chelsea is one of the premier residential and commercial areas of Manhattan and has become a major center of gay and lesbian life in New York. In the late 1990s, as SoHo (a district of 1850s cast iron buildings south of Houston Street and above Canal Street) became more of a destination retail area rather than an artist's community, many of the art galleries that once thrived there moved north to Chelsea, pushing the neighborhood further west into what had long been strictly industrial and commercial blocks. Many of the buildings have been converted into residential and mixed use. The Chelsea Market Building, where the first Oreo cookie was baked over 70 years ago, is now an important hub for new media companies, including the Food Network and Oxygen Media. London Terrace Apartments is now known as “The Fashion Projects” (per the New York Times), as much for its designer, photographer and model residents (including Isaac Mizrahi, Annie Leibovitz, and Deborah Harry) as for its proximity to Chelsea's real public housing projects just to the south and east. Chelsea's main drag is Eighth Avenue, where the transformation of the neighborhood is most pronounced with the arrival in the last five years of trendy bars and restaurants, health food stores, gyms, bookstores, and clothing shops in response to the needs of the swank new urban dwellers.

The buildings in Chelsea reflect the social, ideological, and architectural changes in New York in the last two centuries. Scott and I had dug many privies in this historic neighborhood, especially as it was rapidly gentrified in the 1990s, including our first dig together back during another hot August week in 1996. The finds in these pits ranged from poor to excellent with the majority being of decent quality and containing pottery and bottles galore. At the same time, I recalled that virtually every pit was a humongous digging endeavor due to the size of the outhouses; most privies took three full days to dig and fill. Scott was hoping to avoid a lengthy dig this time because of the developers' deadline, so he invited two other diggers, Winston Kreiger and Dave Cutler, to tackle what we were sure was going to be another monster outhouse.

As an aside, for years Dave has worked where Chelsea's nineteenth century structures meet the modern era, specifically, around the corner at West 22nd Street and Tenth Avenue, in a 1930s art deco style, aluminum-clad eatery appropriately called the Empire Diner. As I cruised past Baltimore on I-95 and then sped along the New Jersey Turnpike, I could not wait to catch the always awe-inspiring skyline of New York; shortly after rush hour my horizon scanning was rewarded and I knew that in less than half an hour I would be digging in a New York backyard surrounded by the masonry walls of dozens of other buildings. Whiling my way through the Holland Tunnel, and then darting uptown, my excitement continued to build.

When I arrived at the front of the construction site graced with six stories of scaffolding, I was impeded by a cement truck pumping concrete through a hose into the building where we were scheduled to dig. I pulled up asked the crew to keep an eye on my truck so that I could go see what Scott and Winston were doing in the backyard. Winding my way through the construction maze, I walked out into a sunny yard and one that was already being trenched! What? Scott greeted me (and told me that he was shocked to see me so early in the day since I had just driven almost 300 miles) and conveyed that the owners were so concerned about staying on schedule that they had decided to commence their excavation for footers that day. We were allowed to dig, however, despite the fact that it was likely our dirt pile would occupy virtually the entire backyard, as long as we did not interfere with the portion of the trench almost completed on the right-hand side of the lot. Winston and Scott had already dug test holes along the back lot line in the center and on the left-hand side of the yard, but with all of the construction debris they had yet to locate any signs of an outhouse and were watching the clock, and awaiting my arrival and my allegedly trusty probing technique.

We decided to unload some of the tools from my truck and park it in a lot before the meter maids could nail me with a ticket. Scott and Winston hauled in my sledge, probe, sifter and some smaller hand tools along with a change of clothes and a case of water. Skirting through the streets, I entrusted my truck to a parking lot attendant (for the princely sum of $28) and ran back to the construction site. By this time it was close to 10:30 in the morning and the sun was already beating down on the digging crew: Scott was shirtless and glistening with grit-collecting sweat, Winston was beet red and dripping dirty beads of moisture from his forehead, and I was not far behind them. In fifteen minutes, I verified that there was not a privy in the middle or left-hand side of the yard. Twenty minutes later, I confirmed my dreaded suspicion: sitting on the property line and directly under the trench already containing wet cement, lay the walls to our missing pit. It appeared our Chelsea permission was going to be a bust.

As we started to fill in our test holes and prepared to leave, I remembered that Scott said the developer owned the two adjacent buildings, which were also slated for reconstruction. Without hesitating, I wandered into the yard next door and confirmed that the privy we had located did in fact straddle the line. And then, for reasons I do not know, I ventured into the next yard furthest from our botched attempts. Stepping down from a wall, I surveyed the yard and saw that it was paved with concrete as well as covered with piles of construction equipment. Not wanting to give up, I considered looking for the cistern but then recalled that in this neighborhood most of the cisterns are located inside the buildings. Instead, I wandered over toward the back of the yard. This lot was boxed in by two neighboring structures that abutted the back property line and portions of the right-hand side of the yard. Scanning back and forth for dips in the concrete, I spotted a small hole about the size of a quarter located about 10 feet off the back lot line and 6 feet from the right lot line. This was an odd spot for an outhouse but, I figured, so were the locations of the two other privies we had located that morning. I pushed my probe into the opening and almost fell flat on my face. The probe had careened down a stone wall and there was no doubt in my mind that this was the privy.

Now the task at hand was how to get permission for what was a tidy yard being used as a staging ground for construction. I hustled back to where Scott, Winston, and newcomer Dave were corralling the equipment and trying to enjoy an early lunch after figuring we were about to pack it in for the day. Up to that point, I had not formally met the owners so I asked Scott to introduce me. He asked why and I said because we have a pit to dig. In response, Scott laughed and said that he did not think the owner would let us dig the pit in the trench. And with a wide grin, I promptly told them all that I had probed out a privy two houses over and that we were going to dig it B they all doubted that I could have found a privy so quickly. Since the owner was not available at that moment, I escorted them to the other yard and the spot that I thought was the wall of a stone lined privy. Now they were all convinced I was crazy because everybody knows privies in Chelsea are invariably along the back lot line and I was showing them a hole well away from the yard's rear. They were also doubly sure (and Winston particularly) that there was no way the owner would let us destroy the concrete patio. Energized and optimistic, I again asked Scott to introduce me to the owner.

Ten minutes later, the owner and I were chatting about how big a hole I would punch in the concrete so we could excavate the privy; without much ado, he told us to have fun but to remember the site was locked up at 5 p.m. on the dot. This meant we had less than six hours to make serious headway in our pit ... not to mention the fact that I still had to convince my digging companions that this was really a privy and not some odd pipe trench. Grabbing the sledge hammer, Winston and I alternated at starting a hole in the concrete large enough to dig a test hole. Scott and Dave moved the tight-packed construction materials to craft a place to put the dirt we would hopefully pull from our hole. About an hour later, we were standing waist deep in the test hole from which we extracted shards of kaolin clay pipe bowls and pottery contained in an ash matrix. Twenty minutes later, were able to see that a large area had settled below the concrete, indicating a stone-lined square box. Finally, the boys were excited and convinced that we were going to be digging a Chelsea privy that day B gone were the disappointed scowls that lined everyone's faces earlier in the day.


Some of our recoveries are laid out on a dirt pile.

We enlarged our opening in the concrete just enough (perhaps 3.5 feet by 2.5 feet) to haul buckets out and to exchange diggers. The top few feet of fill dirt, which I had probed through when I found the pit, was a matrix of light ash and household trash. Bottles started surfacing almost immediately. Scott went into the hole and pulled out two different cream sodas, which are similar to miniature blob sodas, from the 1860s. They were embossed "Morgan, Bros. & Co. / 145 W. 35th St / N.Y." and "D.L. Ormsby & Son / No. 423 / West 16th St. / N.Y." A few minutes later, Scott pulled out a crude aqua medicine almost 8 inches tall that said "Dr. L.B. WRIGHT'S / SCROFULOUS ANTIDOTE / NEW - YORK." My time in the hole produced a large aqua medicine embossed "E.F. COOKE / WETHERSFIELD, CON." embossed in a shield. As we worked our way down, we realized that the outhouse extended to both the rear and side lot lines, which meant that our pit was about 10 feet long by 6 feet wide and that we were in for some serious digging. With the extreme heat and humidity, we all were beginning to get dehydrated and exhausted.

Despite our discomfort, with only about an hour left to dig that day and a hole now big enough for two, we decided to put both Winston and Dave into the pit so as to hustle and make substantial progress before it was quitting time. Scott and I would stay on the surface to haul and dump the buckets as fast as possible.

This was no easy task because Winston and Dave both kept running into piles of household trash and ash now mixed with clean brown fill. Winston soon handed up an intact and mint "Congress Water / Congress & Empire Spring Co. / Hotchkiss Sons / C / New York / Saratoga, N.Y.," and a green squat soda embossed with "deMott's" and stars which hailed from across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Almost in tandem, Dave passed out a pair of dated aqua sodas from New York B an 1862 "John Hecht" and an 1861 "Morgan Bros." From the bottles and pottery being brought to the surface, Scott surmised that the privy was filled in the 1860s. This theory was confirmed when the boys in the hole tossed up a couple of criers: a base-damaged internal-thread amber whiskey from Whitney Glass Works and a "Oak Orchard Acid Springs" in amber with loads of shoulder and base embossing indicating the bottle was manufactured by F. Hitchins Factory in Lockport, N.Y. By the time we left the site that evening, we had excavated a cavity under the concrete that was 10 feet long by 6 feet wide by 8 feet deep, and all of us were filthy and completely exhausted. The guys all headed for Queens and I trekked off to my parents' house about an hour north of the City. Before separating, we agreed to reconvene at 8 a.m. when the site opened.

The next morning, I arrived early and as I removed the covering from the pit, had an opportunity to think about our progress and our privy. In my opinion, we had moved a significant amount of dirt but were still not through the cap dirt and into the nightsoil. It also was apparent to me that this was not a typical outhouse: it was rectangular instead of round, filled with an ash cap instead of clay, and was constructed of brownstone instead of fieldstone. This was a strange beast indeed and, if we could judge the likely depth from prior digs in Chelsea, we were just halfway down into the privy. The only other rectangular privies we had excavated previously in Manhattan were older than the 1820s and were down near South Street Seaport and the Bowery; we were not near those areas in distance nor in age.

Winston and Scott soon joined me and said they likewise had been befuddled by this privy for the same reasons. We all concurred that by the end of the day we would have the answer to the question as to the age of the outhouse but that standing around talking about it was not going to get us any closer.

It was my turn next in the hole. As I prepared to jump through the opening in the concrete, Scott suggested that I take half of the privy down to try and located the nightsoil layer and perhaps come up with a good bottle. In return, I said that my job was just to fill buckets but if a keeper did pop up I was hoping it would be a colored pontiled medicine. About an hour later, and after all of my clothing (from my socks to my pants to my shirt) was soaked with sweat, I had removed the rest of the ash fill in half the privy and come to a thin band of darker, sterile soil. Below this sterile layer, I finally hit nightsoil and it was chock full of broken bottles and pottery. The first intact bottles, which straddled the sterile soil and the nightsoil, were a pair of smooth-based bottles embossed "Lanman & Kemp Cod Liver Oil." Then a series of intact and broken hair bottles started pouring out of the ground; however, we had entered another age since all of them were pontiled. Although it is hard to recall exactly what intact bottles I found as opposed to what others found in the remainder of the hole, the bottles were the classic aqua hair pontils found in New York privies: "Barry's Tricopherous for the Skin and Hair," "lyon's Kathairon for the Hair," "Phalon's Chemical Hair Invigorator," and "Cristadoro's Liquid Hair Dye" including a "No. 1" and a "No. 2." As I worked down, the layer quickly became older; more plain utilities and flint glass bottles were showing up as were pieces of black glass ales. We elected not to sort through the artifacts while digging in the hole but instead to sift all of the nightsoil at the end when filling the outhouse.

Unlike most other Chelsea pits there was a greater number of broken than intact bottles. Still I persevered in the hopes of finding a bottle worthy of taking home. Scraping aside some shards of a slip-decorated redware plate, my digging stick glanced off an intact bottle. Although it was dank, dark and dusty in the hole, at that point I knew this was an unusual bottle. Not only was it thick but it was also a dark color. Extracting the bottle, I lifted it towards the opening in the concrete to show the guys and saw that it was a tombstone shape with beveled corners, olive green with an early snap pontil, and sporting an applied lip. I also could feel through my gloves that it was embossed on the side panels. Not wanting to scratch the bottle, I carefully used the back of my glove to wipe the panels and saw that it was embossed "GUERLAIN / EAU LUSTRALE." My hands were shaking and the guys were yelling at me that it was time to get out of the privy, so I handed up the bottle and scooted out in the hopes of checking the bottle in the daylight. We were all excited but I must admit that everything after that is basically a blur.

Our recoveries after my colored pontil find were not on par but we did manage some other nice relics including a massive brass skeleton key we surmised came from the very house we were digging behind. We also found a nice, black transfer pot lid for Roussel's Shaving Cream by X. Bazin, a black hard rubber douche, a number of J. Hauel snap pontil flint glass bottles, a few umbrella inks including one in green, and a cobalt pontiled soda also embossed "deMott's." Winston had the pleasure of digging off the base of the pit his first black glass rum that dates from the 1830s and Dave managed to find an amber open-pontiled master ink or utility likely from a New England or early New York glass works. Scott turned up a high-style fluted and footed cup in flint glass with a ground pontil along with some early black glass and the embossed flint glass utilities. All told we found about 80 intact bottles. Our sifting produced a large amount of pottery shards which Scott later reassembled; the best of the ceramics were some nifty slip-decorated redware plates and an intact early 1830s blue and white egg cup.

Coming back to the keeper of this sweaty dig, little is known about the Guerlain bottle. Don Fadely, author of Hair Raising Stories, states that he Abelieve[s] this was the product of the French Perfumer [Guerlain]. Perfumer Eugene Roussel was selling the product in Philadelphia for a while. . . . It was a Hair Restorative. Because of the fame of Guerlain's brand, many of the early American perfumers sold an Eau Lustral (or Lustrale) of their own." The one thing I do know is that despite those who would label me foolish for digging on those two steamy and disgusting days, getting all dirty and gritty, it was an absolute pleasure to dig with Scott, Dave and Winston and the rewards were immeasurable. Frankly, I will always accept any in

vitation to dig a privy in New York City even on the hottest days of the year.....

Another view, showing the side panel and pontil of the Guerlain Eau Lustrale bottle.

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