Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [115]
Total deaths (death certificates filed):1 386
Number identified as heat-related:2 217
Immigrant or child of immigrants 3: 317
Native (white): 42
Native (nonwhite) 4: 4
Unknown: 23
Tenement: 267
Other: 57
Unknown: 62
Male: 233
Female: 152
Manual laborer: 6 196
Other: 7 171
Unknown: 19
Over sixty: 51
Age one to sixty: 261
Infants under age one: 63
Age not given, but not listed as infant: 11
Profiles of Some of the August 11 Heat Victims
RICHARD CROKE, fifty-four, was just one of many Irish-born laborers who died during the heat wave. According to his doctor, he died in his tenement home of “sunstroke.”
JOHN A. MAGEE, forty-seven, was born in England, worked as a lumber-man, and lived in a tenement. He collapsed on the street that morning, and several passersby and a patrolman went to his aid. Before he lost consciousness, Magee gave the patrolman his name and residence, but when he arrived at Hudson Street Hospital, he was entered in the record as “Unknown.” When Magee’s brother saw John’s name in the evening paper among the list of victims of heat prostration, he went to the hospital, only to be told that no one of that name had been admitted. After visits to several other hospitals and the city morgue, Magee’s friends returned to Hudson and demanded entrance. There they found Magee unconscious on a cot. He was still listed as unidentified, although among his effects was a pocketbook containing letters and lumber bills that would have easily established his identity, including the name and telephone number of his employer. He died the same day of “insolation,” with the contributing cause of death listed as “shock.” The hospital superintendent told reporters they had simply been overwhelmed, having attended to over three hundred patients that day.
CLARENCE BRUSH was that rarity, a son of native-born New Yorkers. Better off than most families who suffered tragedy during the heat wave, eight-month-old Clarence lived in a flat and might have survived the heat wave had he not begun teething. The doctor attending him listed “heat exhaustion (teething)” as the direct cause of the infant’s death.
MARGARET HARVEY, fifty-six, was born in Ireland and lived with her husband in a tenement. In addition to dying from “exhaustion,” her doctor noted that she died of “hyperpyrexia due to heat.” Probably the doctor sacrificed accuracy trying to be fancy, as hyperpyrexia occurs when the body’s temperature is not just elevated but actually set at a higher temperature. Margaret most likely died of simple hyperthermia.
The experience of EDWARD HILDEBRANDT after he died illustrated the confusion in the coroner’s office during the heat wave. Examining and processing hundreds of bodies inevitably led to mistakes. Both Manhattan coroners examined Hildebrandt, who was in his mid-thirties, lived in a tenement at East Ninety-Seventh, and died at Bellevue. But each coroner listed his age differently (one said thirty-four, the other thirty-six) and gave Hildebrandt different occupations (one said “carver,” the other “fireman”). Both coroners agreed on the cause of death: “insolation.”
JOHN SULLIVAN, sixty-five, was a widower from Ireland who at one time worked as a watchman. Like many elderly in the late nineteenth century without family or means of support, he ended his life destitute. John lived and died at the Home for the Aged of the Little Sisters of the Poor on Seventieth Street, a Catholic charitable order that cared for nearly five hundred men and women over sixty years old. He died from “asthemia.”
EDWARD M. TEIN had been appointed a New York police officer less than a year earlier. Only thirty, married, and the son of native-born American parents, Edward died of “insolation,” one of three policeman to die that day.
KATHERINE BRENNAN, sixty-six, a widow originally from Ireland, lived in a tenement. No occupation was