Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [52]
The combination of alcohol and heat can be dangerous. As a diuretic, alcohol promotes dehydration. Alcohol also hinders the body’s ability to control its temperature. Both heat and alcohol dilate the blood vessels, making a person even more likely to become overwhelmed and pass out. On August 9 a thirty-year-old Irish laborer named Patrick Reilly died from the heat. Even so, the doctor listed “alcoholism” as a contributing cause of death. It can never be known how many more heat-wave deaths were caused at least in part by alcohol.
The heat continued to foster strange and aggressive behavior among New Yorkers. At the corner of Bleecker and Macdougal streets, Joseph Belinni drew a knife and stabbed John Carroll. Apparently Carroll was just a spectator to the row between Belinni and his friends caused by the question “Is it hot enough for you?”
Ralph Ethington beat coworker Henry Brown unconscious because he thought Brown had him fired. Jeremiah Donohue stabbed his friend John Cockley three times after an argument. William Hall received permission to drive his wagon through Twenty-Fourth Street, where asphalt was being laid, but one of the workers there, William Brodus, refused to recognize the permit. During the ensuing altercation Brodus slashed Hall with a knife across the cheek. At her restaurant on Greenwich Street, Sarah Jane Grant served a drunken Henry Britton dinner. When Britton demanded a drink, Sarah Jane replied, “You’ve had enough.” “Oh! Have I?” Britton asked, scooping up the silverware and bolting out the door. He was swiftly arrested.
The combined stress on both mind and body from the extreme heat and humidity took its toll in various ways and in at least one case complicated assigning a cause of death. Thirty-year-old Ludwig Grobolowitz was overcome by the heat in the evening and died before the ambulance from Bellevue Hospital arrived. Although he seemed to be just another victim of the heat, the ambulance attendants soon discovered that the deceased also suffered from four stab wounds, one under each eye, one in the right temple, and one in the right breast. Days earlier Grobolowitz had fought with another tenant, Michael Franey, in the hallway of their Second Street tenement. Assuming he was the culprit in Grobolowitz’s death, police arrested Franey, but though he admitted fighting with his neighbor, Franey confessed only to kicking the deceased in the leg and certainly not stabbing him. “Sunstroke or Homicide?” the New York Tribune asked, reflecting the macabre choice for citizens in the afflicted city.
By Sunday, August 9, New Yorkers were already suffering through their sixth day of temperatures in the 90s and suffocating humidity. While the Weather Bureau marked the official temperature at 90 degrees, thermometers throughout the city added several degrees as the humidity hit 89 percent. “It was the combination of heat and humidity that swept the town like a plague,” one newspaper reported, “and while the sun was in the zenith it was unbearable.” The combination of heat and humidity would have made the temperature feel like 130 degrees. Some found it too much to bear.
Lewis Pumper, a fifteen-year-old recent arrival from Poland, had joined his two older brothers in America only two weeks earlier. In the current economic climate, Pumper was fortunate to secure work in the bakeshop of John Schwartz on Clinton Street, where he took his meals before returning each night to his subbasement rooms in the home of Joseph Cobell. Arriving just in time for the heat wave soon turned Pumper despondent. The combination of living in nearly airless rooms at night and working in the burning heat of the bakeshop during the day engendered a deep depression that his brothers were not able to relieve. According