As late as 1828 Coleman complained that pigs were met everywhere in the lower part of the city. In his campaign against them he gave full space to the accidents they caused. A not untypical mishap occurred in 1819. An alarm of fire in Maiden Lane brought the firemen and the usual crowd of boys racing down Broadway with ropes hauling a fire-engine. As they were at top speed a large hog darted into their path, the whole line went down, and the heavy engine passed over several. The corporation had already passed an ordinance (effective Jan. 1, 1818) making it illegal to let hogs go unpenned, but it was flagrantly violated. “Although every street in the city is thronged with hogs, yet none could be found who were individual owners,” said the paper soon afterward. When efforts were made to send “hog-carts” along the Bowery and other infested streets, angry owners gathered and overset the wagons. In the spring of 1829 three thieves were actually arrested for driving into the city, collecting fourteen fat shoats from the streets, and starting for the country; they intended to bring them back as prime corn-fed country pork. How long, asked the _Evening Post_, would the shameful indifference to the ordinance endure? It was necessary to keep up an incessant fire of complaint against the wretched street-repair and street-cleaning systems of the time. As early as 1803 the _Evening Post_ declared that the streets should in part be flushed, and that it would hence be well “if the waterworks were the property of the public, as was originally intended; and not of a private company, who are attentive only to their individual interest.” In the summer of 1807 Coleman, who was fond of a horse and gig, wrote that the Broadway road was in “such a state of neglect and ruin that no one could drive through it after dark but at the hazard of limbs and life,” that after a heavy rain horses sank up to their girths, and that serious accidents had occurred, one rider breaking his thigh and another his shoulder-bone. The ways were then crossed at intervals by open gutters, sometimes so deep as to be a serious impediment to traffic; even in front of St. Paul’s, in the heart of the city, Broadway when the _Evening Post_ was founded was traversed by one almost impassable. A campaign had to be begun by the press for covered sewers.