In some parts of the city there was room for outhouses. But in the downtown, houses were crowded together. Many people had no toilets of any kind. They would use a chamber pot or a bucket. Nightsoil carts came around to collect raw sewage from people who had no toilets, just as household garbage is collected today. But some people just threw their sewage into the streets. Many streets had lots of raw sewage, waste left by horses and household garbage. These are all good places for bacteria to grow. The flies that carry bacteria around grow in the same places. Diseases can spread very quickly when raw sewage and garbage is left lying around.

Electricity
St. John's did not have electricity until the 1880s. At first, electricity was only used for lighting. There were no washing machines. People did not have refrigerators until much later. Most people did not have them until after the 1930s. It was hard to keep food fresh without refrigerators. Some people had iceboxes. But many people could not afford an icebox, or the ice that had to be replaced every few days to keep it working.

Housing
In those days, there were no laws to make landlords repair the houses they owned. Many houses people rented were not fit to live in. In fact, when the first housing inspections were done in 1916, the city inspector found people living in 369 houses that should have been torn down. The people who rented these houses could not make the landlords fix them.

Gilbert Gosling was mayor of St. John's from 1914 until 1920. In his New Year's message for 1915, he wrote about this problem.³ Gosling worried about the way poor people had to live. There were hundreds of houses in St. John's with leaking roofs and walls that did not keep out the wind. Many of these houses were falling apart. Some houses on hill sides were always damp because water from the houses above ran through them. The basements of some of these houses were rented to poor families. Mayor Gosling ended his New Year's message with this story: