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Throughout most of the history of New York City, and [[New Amsterdam]] before it, the East River has been the receptacle for the city's garbage and sewage. "Night men" who collected "night soil" from outdoor privies would dump their loads into the river, and even after the construction of the [[Croton Aqueduct]] (1842) and then the [[New Croton Aqueduct]] (1890) gave rise to [[Tap water|indoor plumbing]], the waste that was flushed away into the [[Storm drain|sewer]]s, where it mixed with ground runoff, ran directly into the river, untreated. The sewers terminated at the slips where ships docked, until the waste began to build up, preventing dockage, after which the outfalls were moved to the end of the piers. The "landfill" which created new land along the shoreline when the river was "wharfed out" by the sale of "water lots" was largely garbage such as bones, offal, and even whole dead animals, along with excrement – human and animal.<ref>Steinberg, 23–28, ''passim''</ref><ref>Burrows and Wallace, p.185</ref> The result was that by the 1850s, if not before, the East River, like the other waterways around the city, was undergoing the process of [[eutrophication]] where the increase in [[nitrogen]] from excrement and other sources led to a decrease in free [[oxygen]], which in turn led to an increase in [[phytoplankton]] such as [[algae]] and a decrease in other life forms, breaking the area's established food chain. The East River became very polluted, and its animal life decreased drastically.<ref>Steinberg, pp.118–19</ref>
In an earlier time, one person had described the transparency of the water: "I remember the time, gentlemen, when you could go in twelve feet of water and you could see the pebbles on the bottom of this river." As the water got more polluted, it darkened, underwater vegetation (such as [[photosynthesis|photosynthesizing]]
Because of these changes to the ecosystem, by 1909, the level of dissolved-oxygen in the lower part of the river had declined to less than 65%, where 55% of saturation is the point at which the amount of fish and the number of their species begins to be affected.<ref>Steinberg, pp.161, 163–64</ref> Only 17 years later, by 1926, the level of dissolved oxygen in the river had fallen to 13%, below the point at which most fish species can survive.<ref>Steinberg, p.177</ref>
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