Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [53]
By August 9 the young man could not take any more. In the bakery’s cellar Pumper tied a short leather strap to a water pipe overhead, stood on a stool, and hanged himself.
Cobell, his landlord, declared, “It was the heat that did it. Lewis came from a country where there is little or no hot weather, and to come right into this terribly hot spell and have to work in that hot bakery fairly drove the boy to desperation. There was no other reason for his act.” Perhaps Cobell did not want to consider the effect on Pumper of living in his basement without access to sunlight or fresh air.
FOR THOUSANDS OF sweltering New Yorkers, the only sensible action was to flee the city altogether. Out on Long Island and at the Jersey Shore, hotels were filled to capacity, as were the excursion boats and trains bringing bathers to the region’s beaches. Newspaper declared Sunday, August 9, the greatest day in Coney Island’s history, with an estimated 200,000 people visiting the shore, dwarfing even the Fourth of July celebrations of the month before. Over 100,000 went bathing in the ocean, and the beaches were described as “black with people for a distance of three miles.”
While Theodore Roosevelt was privileged with the ability to escape to his Long Island home to enjoy the breeze off the Sound, visitors to Coney Island were mainly the working-class families of New York. Fares on the steamboats and many railroad lines serving Coney Island were kept low to draw tourists who would spend money in the beachfront hotels, restaurants, bathing pavilions, and various amusements. Originally designed as an opulent playground for the wealthy, Coney Island had long ago transformed from a luxury destination to a popular one. Now visitors could espy the construction of a new amusement park being built along Surf Avenue. Steeplechase Park would be the first of three new large parks built over the next several years, with Luna Park opening in 1903 and Dreamland opening in 1904. By 1907 visitors to Coney Island were commemorating their weekend visits by sending 250,000 postcards across the country. In the meantime, the beaches and streets were dotted with many smaller concerns selling shaved ice, offering cold drinks, taking photographs, giving children pony rides, and even featuring vaudeville shows.
Yet during the heat wave, most people seemed to eschew the offered pastimes and stuck close to the shore and the surf. As one paper described it: “They went to the seashore to seek relief, not amusement. They wanted some little surcease from the awful heat of the past five days. The workers had been looking forward to a day’s outing where it was cool. They awoke very early . . . to find it as hot as ever. Their first thought was of the breeze. When they saw that it was from the sea they knew that Coney Island would be cool and delightful.” The number of people leaving the city was enormous, and the trolleys and steamboats were packed. “People fled as from a plague-smitten city,” the same paper recounted.
With such overcrowding of the transportation network to Coney Island, and the crowds of people at the beaches that Sunday, it was a miracle that people did not collapse by the score on the railroads. Still, tragedy occurred. Reports of drowning came from all over the region. Fifteen-year-old William Brown was swimming in the Hudson with some friends when he suddenly threw up his hands and went under. As all the boys had been playing games and “cutting all sorts of antics,” no one paid much attention until his friends noticed that he had not come back up for air. They tried diving for Brown, but unable to find him, they ran to a nearby police station for help. His body was soon recovered. Two died in Newark, bodies were found in the North and Hudson Rivers, and a little girl nearly