Industrial New York. Filthy Cities

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Description

Fleeing persecution, poverty, and famine, millions of 19th-century Europeans arrived in a place that seemed worse than what they'd escaped-a seething Manhattan in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. This program uses eye-opening computer reconstructions to envision what waves of immigrants had to accept. It was a city consumed by filth and corruption, with a massive populace crammed into the slums of Lower Manhattan. The film looks at some of the disease-carrying parasites that thrived in overcrowded tenement buildings and shows what it was like to cook with improvised 19th-century ingredients-clothes dye and floor cleaner-to disguise the taste of fetid meat. But viewers will also marvel at feats of engineering that transformed the sullied New York landscape into a metropolis worthy of the world's esteem. A BBC/Discovery Co-production.