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When New Yorkers Were Menaced By Banana Peels

Slipping on a banana peel is a cliché, a vintage vaudeville gag. But its origins weren’t just slapstick comedy. Before it became a comedy trope, banana peels menaced New Yorkers for decades.

When bananas first arrived in New York City, it was a triumph of logistics and planning. After the Civil War, writes Dan Koeppel in Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, bananas in the U.S. were like caviar: expensive and hard-to-find status symbols. After all, sailing the tropical fruit from the nearest banana-producing area, Jamaica, could take three weeks by schooner, which was longer than the banana’s shelf life. But once an entrepreneur realized that leaving bananas on-deck kept them cool and unspoiled, it sparked a banana bonanza. Soon, networks of factories were providing ice to cool bananas in transit, and the fruit became a ubiquitous and cheap snack stateside.

But it came at a cost. Vendors touted banana skins as “sanitary wrappers” and sold them as a street food. Sure enough, New Yorkers discarded the wrappers onto the street, and the pages of turn-of-the-century New York City newspapers contained accounts of shockingly serious banana-related injuries.

“A wealthy merchant, aged 75 … slipped on a banana peel in front of his home and broke his right leg near the hip,” the Times reported in 1884. “He is not expected to recover.” More than 30 years later, an article headlined “Banana Peel Causes Death” described how a factory worker slipped and fell into the street, where a truck hit him.

A lone banana peel on a sidewalk—its yellow color practically a hazard sign—doesn’t seem very threatening. But in the late-19th century, trash in New York City piled up ankle- or knee-deep. The city did have a Department of Street Cleaning, created in 1881. But this was the era of corrupt, Tammany-Hall politics, and jobs were handed out on the basis of party loyalty, often to absentee workers who misused funds.

Accounts and photos from the time are stunning. New Yorkers threw their trash in the street, where no one picked it up, leading the city to release wild pigs to eat the refuse. Dead animals lingered in gutters for days. In this environment, discarded banana peels rotted into slippery messes and mottled into a camouflaging brown.

Orange peels and potato skins caused slips and falls too, but pedestrians feared bananas, which scientists have since confirmed rank among the slipperiest of fruits. Letters to the editor demanded harsh penalties for discarding peels. Theodore Roosevelt, then New York City’s chief of police, declared war on banana peels, and gave a public address to his captains and sergeants on “the bad habits of the banana skin, dwelling particularly on its tendency to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific force on the hard pavement..."