Fleeing persecution, poverty, and famine, millions of 19th-century Europeans arrived in a place that seemed worse than what they’d escaped—a seething Manhattan in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. This program uses eye-opening computer reconstructions to envision what waves of immigrants had to accept. It was a city consumed by filth and corruption, with a massive populace crammed into the slums of Lower Manhattan. The film looks at some of the disease-carrying parasites that thrived in overcrowded tenement buildings and shows what it was like to cook with improvised 19th-century ingredients—clothes dye and floor cleaner—to disguise the taste of fetid meat. But viewers will also marvel at feats of engineering that transformed the sullied New York landscape into a metropolis worthy of the world’s esteem. A BBC/Discovery Coproduction. A part of the series Filthy Cities: A History of Public Sanitation (or Lack Thereof). (49 minutes)