![\"A](\"https:\/\/ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/bananacart1902newyorkcityvendor.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBut tthe city\u2019s police force, led by robust crimefighter Theodore Roosevelt<\/a>, decided to crack down on another troubling offense: discarded banana peels on public roadways.<\/p>\n No, it wasn\u2019t a gag invented by vaudeville theater and silent films. People in the turn of the century city really did used to slip on banana peels tossed into the gutter, often resulting in serious injuries. <\/p>\n Stories of pedestrians felled by slimy, mushy, days-old \u201cbanana skins\u201d regularly made headlines. <\/p>\n \u201cDavid P. Cardel, aged 60, of No. 42 Vandewater Street<\/a>, stepped on a banana-skin at the corner of Houston and Mott Street last night, slipped and fell, striking his head on the curb,\u201d the New York Times<\/a> reported in 1878. \u201cHe was taken to the Chambers Street Hospital in a dying condition.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cMrs. Theresa Hafensberg, of No. 135 Boerum Street, slipped on a piece of banana peel near her residence yesterday afternoon, and falling sprained her left hip,\u201d stated the Brooklyn Eagle<\/a> in an 1883 article headlined \u201cThe Baneful Banana Peel.\u201d<\/p>\n Bananas weren\u2019t the only thing New Yorkers slipped on as they navigated the city. <\/p>\n The streets and sidewalks were notoriously filthy\u2014the resting place for rotting discarded fruit and other perishable foods, not to mention horse manure and dead animals.<\/p>\n But now that the once-exotic banana had become a popular street food sold by vendors from wood carts across the city, enormous numbers of peels would be tossed carelessly, posing a hazard to unseeing pedestrians. <\/p>\n Newspapers began to call for some kind of action.<\/p>\n \u201cNow that a young man has broken his leg by a fall caused by stepping on a banana skin, the police ought to be instructed to look out for people who peel bananas in the street and fling down their skin,\u201d wrote the New York Herald<\/a> in January 1896. <\/p>\n A month later, Roosevelt (third image) began his \u201cwar on the banana skin,\u201d as the New York Times<\/a> dubbed it.<\/p>\n After assembling police captains, sergeants, and roundsmen, Roosevelt \u201cread from the city ordinance about those who littered fruit or vegetables in the street, noting they could be fined up to $5.00,\u201d explained the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library<\/a>. <\/p>\n Offenders would also \u201cserve 10 days in jail . . . he told the police officers to enforce those laws regarding litter and clean up the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n Five dollars in 1896 would be about $200 today, per the TR Presidential Library.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just police enforcement of the littering ordinance that made a difference. The city\u2019s ineffective Department of Street Cleaning<\/a> gained a new leader, George Waring, a Civil War colonel and sanitary engineer.<\/p>\n Waring revamped the department and mandated that the men where white uniforms to signal hygiene and cleanliness\u2014hence their nickname, the White Wings<\/a>. <\/p>\n Under Waring\u2019s guidance, the White Wings helped clean up New York\u2019s streets of all kinds of litter, including banana peels. <\/p>\n Of course, discarded banana peels didn\u2019t disappear completely. Litter will always be with us in New York, and pedestrians continued to slip, fall, and injure themselves. <\/p>\n But as the 20th century approached, victims began taking the now-routine step of filing a lawsuit\u2014as one passenger did after he attempted to board an elevated train<\/a> in 1900 and was tripped up by a banana peel on a stairway.<\/p>\n [Top image: Wikipedia<\/a>; second image: The Plano Conservatory at the Interurban<\/a>; third image: Alice Austen via NYPL Digital Collections<\/a>; fourth image: Evening World; fifth image: Fine Art Storehouse<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"River pirates, sneak thieves, pickpockets, confidence men\u2014New York City in 1896 was grappling with rising rates of relatively…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364653,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-364652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n