Today, the stretch of Hell’s Kitchen around Eleventh Avenue and 39th Street doesn’t make much of an impression—the stoic facade of the Javits Convention Center, idling buses, a dull roar of Lincoln Tunnel traffic.

But in the 1860s, the Manhattan neighborhood was a beastly wonderland of stenches, bloody parades, and diseases from which to horribly perish. Among its meatpacking-focused highlights were slaughterhouses, gut-cleaning and fat-boiling outfits, towering manure heaps, and stables devoted to the production of “swill milk”—the squeezings of frequently diseased cows that were consumed by the poor, to their detriment.

The area’s stinking history was recently highlighted by the New York Public Library’s Map Division, which posted this map of “Bone Boiling and Swill-Milk Nuisances" from 1865’s Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens' Association of New York Upon the Sanitary Condition of the City.

While the source document does little to explain what a “hog drove yard” or “skin factory” were—the latter could be a term for a leather-making facility—one of its authors, sanitary inspector James Little M.D., did offer a wealth of information on the neighborhood’s other gruesomeness. There was a pork-packing building at 39th Street where “blood and liquid offal flows the distance of two blocks before it empties into the river,” Little wrote. “This, during the summer weather, undergoes decomposition, which gives rise to a very offensive odor, and certainly must exert a very injurious effect upon the health of those living in the vicinity.”

The place was alive with “gutters running with blood and filth, and the constant passage of offal and dead animals to the offal-dock,” the good doctor continued. “And scattered through the midst of these nuisances, which are constantly contaminating the atmosphere with their noxious exhalations, and surrounding them on all sides, are the crowded and ill-ventilated tenant-houses. Cases of fever are constantly occurring in this neighborhood, and cholera infantum and dysentery are by no means strangers to this vicinity.”