Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [0]
Title Page
Dedication
PROLOGUE:
Introduction
I. - CHOLERA INFANTIUM
II. - SLAUGHTER ALLEY
III. - ENEMY’S COUNTRY
IV. - INFERNO OF BRICK AND STONE
V. - BRYAN FELL WITH A BANG
VI. - STRANGE AND PATHETIC SCENES
CONCLUSION: A PHENOMENON
EPILOGUE:
POSTSCRIPT
Acknowledgements
APPENDIX A: - DEATH CERTIFICATES FILED, AUGUST 4–17, 1895 AND 1896
APPENDIX B: - WHO DIED: MANHATTAN, TUESDAY, AUGUST 11
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Copyright Page
For
my family
PROLOGUE:
THE HEATED TERM
ON AUGUST 15, 1896, while preparing to depart for a three-week vacation out West, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his sister Anna: “We’ve had two excitements in New York the past week; the heated term, and Bryan’s big meeting. The heated term was the worst and most fatal we have ever known. The death-rate trebled until it approached the ratio of a cholera epidemic; the horses died by the hundreds, so that it was impossible to remove their carcasses, and they added a genuine flavor of pestilence, and we had to distribute hundred of tons of ice from the station-houses to the people of the poorer precincts.” Roosevelt, then thirty-seven and president of New York’s Board of Police Commissioners, was describing one of the most extraordinary weeks in the city’s history.
The “heated term” was an unprecedented heat wave that hit New York over ten days in August 1896. Temperatures in the 90s were accompanied by high humidity. For the duration, thermometers never dropped below 70 degrees, even at night, and over the course of a week and a half the heat wave wore New Yorkers down. The eventual death toll numbered nearly 1,300.
Yet the 1896 New York heat wave remains one of the forgotten natural disasters in American history. It is in the nature of heat waves to kill slowly, with no physical manifestation, no property damage, and no single catastrophic event that marks them as a disaster. For that reason the heat wave is only infrequently remembered, even though it claimed more victims than the 1863 New York City draft riots or the 1871 Great Chicago Fire.
Our collective failure to remember this disaster may also have something to do with the identities of the victims. While the very young and very old were the most vulnerable, the heat wave took a terrible toll on the working poor, the death lists containing the names of hundreds of surprisingly young men who were literally worked to death.
The living conditions of New York’s poor were dire. By August 1896 the entire country had been suffering through a severe economic depression for three years. Millions were out of work. New York, experiencing a wave of massive immigration, seemed particularly hard hit. The tenements of the Lower East Side teemed with recent arrivals who could scarcely afford food or medical care. The combination of poor living conditions, poor working conditions, poor diet, and poor medical care, with temperatures inside the brick tenements easily reaching 120 degrees, killed hundreds of New Yorkers.
Roosevelt compared the heat wave to a cholera epidemic for good reason. Although the heat wave was not an epidemic by any medical definition, the slow unfolding of the tragedy resembled the periodic outbreaks of cholera that had plagued New York throughout the century, more than it did such spectacular disasters as the Great Fire of 1835 or the Blizzard of 1888. Like cholera, the heat in August 1896 struck quietly and undramatically.
New Yorkers remembered 1832’s cholera epidemic as the worst they had ever experienced. That summer the disease had swept through the city. Those who had the means to leave town did so as quickly as possible, leaving New York almost half-empty. For the poor souls that remained—quite literally, the poorest of the inhabitants—some neighborhoods took on the cast of Bruegel’s Triumph of Death. Pedestrians risked being trampled by the hearses that plied the streets day and night. The air was hazy from the burning of the sick’s bedding and clothing. Dead bodies lay in the street untouched by the living, who were scared to