Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [101]
Almost every city trade suffered during the long heat wave. Candy manufacturers and retailers could not keep their wares from spoiling. Bicycle rentals, an enormous business in late-nineteenth-century American cities, calculated an estimated loss of over $100,000. Out-of-town visitors to the city’s downtown wholesalers postponed their trips during the heat wave, causing a loss of as much as $8 million.
Not every business suffered. Charles Morse’s great Consolidated Ice Company did a booming business during the heat wave. Morse’s company had delivered 15,000 tons every day during the week, a Herculean task requiring seven hundred carts and more than 2,000 men working from early morning to late at night. Three men and twenty horses working for Morse died as a result. In comparison, all the smaller ice concerns combined sold only about 5,000 tons daily. In all this meant that approximately 200,000 tons of ice—the equivalent of about fourteen Brooklyn Bridges—had been delivered during the heat wave, solely within the confines of New York City. Hotels and hospitals consumed much of this supply, with hospitals using large amounts for treating cases of heat exhaustion.
The ice business was an exception to the economic disaster visited upon the city. New York was not alone in claiming great financial loss from the heat wave. Estimates in Chicago ran to $10 million, and a million and a half dollars was lost in Philadelphia. In St. Louis, residents compared the human and financial losses to the killer tornado that hit the city in May, killing as many as four hundred people and destroying millions of dollars in property. Such a comparison to a recent natural disaster that took an enormous toll in both lives and property reflected the view that the heat wave and tornado shared similar killer and destructive characteristics, despite the fact that the heat wave did not constitute a single “event” that left obvious property damage. While later Americans ignored heat waves as natural disasters because they did not kill with such drama and damage, those who experienced the 1896 heat wave evidently would have considered the tragic week comparable to killer earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes in the nation’s history.
ALTHOUGH LESS THAN one week separated them, Bryan and Cockran’s Madison Square Garden speeches contrasted sharply. For the Cockran speech there was no police cordon and no mad rush for seats. Top politicians from both parties attended the speech as one of the most noteworthy political events of the year. The New York press showered Cockran with the laurels it had withheld from Bryan. And the temperature that Tuesday evening, August 18, was one of the coolest of that August.
With the Cockran speech scheduled for Tuesday, Roosevelt remained in the city on Monday consulting with Acting Deputy Chief Moses Cortright concerning the police preparations. The next day Cortright would have under his command about four hundred policemen at the Garden. However, unlike the Bryan speech, no streets to the Garden would be blocked and no police line established. No police passes, such as the ones issued for the Bryan speech and subsequently ignored by the police, would be issued. Five different entrances would be used by ticket holders to avoid any crush, and any unoccupied seats would be available to the public. As many as 16,000 people were expected to attend, which would be a crowd greater than any before seen in that auditorium. Now that the heat wave had broken, the police did not bother to take the same precautions to deal with cases of heat prostration at Tuesday’s Garden speech. No hospital was established in the basement, no stretcher bearers were to be placed among the crowd, and no flags with a red cross were to be waved in case of a prostration.
In the days before Bryan’s speech, the heat itself had been the city’s