Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [100]
COCKRAN WOULD ALSO be aided by the temperature, which was rapidly sinking to more temperate levels. Still, reminders of the heat wave remained, including piles of horse corpses that still littered the streets. In desperation, some New Yorkers had taken to lighting fires in the streets—not to dispose of the bodies but to keep the smell at bay. Such fires harkened back to the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century and were motivated by the same fear of pestilence.
Pressed by Mayor Strong at the August 14 meeting of department heads, President Wilson of the Board of Health promised the mayor that all carcasses would be removed within the next twenty-four hours, as the contractor sought to remove the final fifty or so bodies. Stories abounded of people and businesses suffering as the result of rotting horses. On the previous Wednesday evening, August 12, a horse had died in front of Pierce and Company’s grocery at Warren and Washington Streets (an intersection that no longer exists because of the West Side Highway built during the Great Depression). Despite requests to have the horse removed, by Friday morning the grocery employees were forced to stop work as a result of the horrible smell. The business closed at a large loss of income. Some wag had placed a sign on the body: “The Board of Health Will Meet Here at 2 P.M.; Mayor Strong is invited to attend.”
The carcass problem was no joke, however. Thomas White, the contractor responsible for removal, had suffered losses among his men and horses during the heat wave. In attempting to remove the estimated 1,500 dead horses on the streets the previous week—nearly the number he removed during an entire year—White lost eleven horses and had six of his men prostrated. White had never seen anything strike down the horses of New York like the current heat wave. And he would know. For thirty years the White family had held the city contract for removing dead animals, which they took to their other family business on Barren Island: rendering plants that transformed the dead horses into fertilizer and glue. It was this business that was primarily served by the city contract to remove the horses. The heat wave ensured a windfall of raw material for the Barren Island plants.
For most New York businesses the heat wave proved a disaster equal to, if not greater than, any hurricane or flood. Losses totaled in the millions of dollars. Retail dry goods stores, whose merchandise was immune to the effects of heat, lost a formidable proportion of their profits simply because of lack of customers. During the heat wave, shoppers stayed home. One store manager claimed that sales at his store during the heat wave decreased by half, and one-third of the store clerks had been given two weeks of enforced vacation. By one estimate, dry goods retailers in the city lost about $720,000 during the heat wave, not including lost wages.
The price of ice meant that storing fresh beef became so expensive that many of the large butchers refused to sell meat except early in the morning. Sales of beef by butchers dropped 70 percent, and many city abattoirs simply stopped work entirely. The estimated 850 retail butchers in the city lost an estimated $230,000 during the heat wave, while wholesale butchers lost another $400,000, both because of the general disposition to stop buying beef during a heat wave and because the retail butchers refused to close contracts made before the heat wave began. Hotels that normally made money through their restaurants also found a sharp drop in trade. During the heat wave hotel restaurants that might usually serve between 250 and 350 diners per night counted only a dozen or so customers.
Green grocers found it impossible to keep their food fresh, and the common custom of spraying the vegetables