The daily morning journal and courier. [volume] (New Haven, Conn.) 1894-1907, 1896-12-30
EUROPEAN STREETS.
Colonel Warnings Observations at Blu
dapest.

dapest.
In the matter of the sweeping Of
streets and sidewalks and of the collec-
ton of household wastes, the methods
here are substantially the same as in
Vienna, save that the sweepers are ac-
tive young men and are much more in
dustrious, Other differences are only
| in details OF little importance, except
with regard to the cab-stands, which
are many and are actively used. These
are generally little lower than the
street, are graded to a sewer inlet, and
are asphalted. They are swept and
thoroughly flushed several times day,
so that the usual odor and untidiness
of such places are entirely obviated.
The area of paved streets is equal to
about one hundred and fifty miles of
New York streets. The cost of snow
removal in the winter of 1856 was one
hundred and sixty thousand gulden.
Wages are one gulden per day. The
entire cost for all cleaning. snow reno
val, transportation of wastes and
street sprinkling averages about eight
hundred thousand gulden per year.
In the matter of final disposition,
Budapest is very instructive and inter-
esting. Everything is hauled to sta
ton some three miles away. Here the
wagons. night son vans, etc, are
dumped into cars standing in a tunnel
under the dumping platforms. The
loaded trains run out about three miles
further, to Kleinpest, point remote
from all population, save for the two
hundred and fifty men, women and
children working about the disposal
plant. They are curious community.
The works have been in operation for
some thirty years. Nearly all of the
handling and separation of the materi-
al is done by machinery, only the GULL
ing out of the salable wastes requiring
manual labor
The apparatus is contained in large
four-story brick building, with ample
steam power-unsalabe rubbish being
the fuel used. The railroad cars are
unloaded into small tram wagons,
which are hauled by an endless chain
from a tunnel under the track up
steep slope to the top of the building,
where they are dumped into the mouth
of a coarse revolving screen, which
holds back large sticks, boxes, old bas-
kets, broken watermelons (this is the
land of the best and cheapest water
melons in the world, and other large
objects. What passes through the
wide meshes of this screen runs int
another with q very close mesh. This
takes out the dust and the fine horse
manure as ground up by the wheels
and the sweepers in the streets, and
sends it to the wagons running to the
manure dumps. The next screen di-
yides the remaining material, roughly,
into two grades, for easier hand-psck-
ing.
The picking tables, which are very
long are furnished with endless aprons
of heavy hemp cloth about two feet
wide These move slowly between two
rows of women and children, who Sc
lect the various treasures to which
they are assigned, each after its kind.
The white-bottle boy let's the green
bottles pass, and the bone woman
pays no attention to the small bones;
these meet their fate further on. One
group of children devotes itself entirely
to corks, another to nails, another to
strings, and so on. AS the cloth finally
turns over the end of the table it drops
all of it's rejected material into a con-
veyer, which carries it to the manure
wagon In the heap to which it is add
ed there goes on a process of ''bacteri-
olysis' that reduces it all to the condi-
ton of fine compost, fit for the fields.
Curiously to us, no use is made of pa
per or rags save as they are required
for fuel The wood-pulp industry and
the German tariff on paper stock have
robbed them of all commercial value
This, too, in the face of minuteness OF
economy that is careful not to let a
single old cork escape, although the
only sale for the corks is to make fen
ders for the use of the boats on the
Danube. Nothing that has the slight
est selling value is allowed to escape
and what cannot be sold in it's present
form is turned over to the microbes OF
the compost heaps.-Harpers Weekly