When the digging began, the work proved nowhere near so difficult as it had been in Brooklyn, but much more disagreeable, for the caisson was standing in the middle of what for years had been New York’s principal dumping ground. Moreover, a street sewer was still emptying into the river close by. The ground itself was a clay silt turned black by sewage and thick, with the putrid remains of animals, garbage, and what Farrington called “sewage abominations.”
