Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [63]
New York, though, remained the capital of despair. “Manhattan Island was an inferno of brick and stone,” the Journal observed, “radiating heat deadly in its intensity. And over all, gray as the presence of death which it held, was the pall of humidity.” Like the fabled desert city of Is, the sound of whose bells could be heard at sunset, rising up through the sand, New York from a height also seemed to be “in the depths of an opalescent sea.” “But the sound that came from this city under the gray sea was not the vague music of bells,” the paper concluded, “but the heart-stirring dissonance of bereavement and anguish.”
Death and suffering had greeted the Weather Bureau’s man Dunn every day of the heat wave. After a week of unbearable heat, he had altogether stopped answering his phone to give the hourly official readings to the newspapers. In fact, it was reported that on August 10, he had left the city altogether. A reporter had observed him out at Montauk Point on Long Island. The same reporter dryly observed that relatively cool Montauk Point is “at the extreme easterly end of Long Island” and “swept by ocean breeze.” Officially Dunn was out at Montauk Point to inspect the instruments of another weather observer there. However, he had been seen in the company of two boys “riding a tandem.” At that very moment, scores of people were being treated for heat exhaustion in the city hospitals, while city coroners were working overtime on the dead. “When Dunn quits his post things must be in a bad way,” the reporter for New York World wrote. “And they are.”
CONSIDERING THE HUNDREDS of deaths and hundreds more prostrated in the street daily, the hospitals and ambulances were severely overtaxed. Roosevelt Hospital sent word to all of its affiliated physicians to assist the ambulance corps, and medical students were pressed into service. Even after Theodore Roosevelt arranged for police wagons to serve as extra ambulances, one-third of the calls for ambulances still went unanswered. At Roosevelt Hospital every wagon and ambulance that rolled up contained two victims of the heat. The superintendent noted, “We have sent word to the police to get sufferers here by any conveyance at hand—trucks, wagons, cabs, and even wheelbarrows if they cannot do better.” The superintendent of Hudson Street Hospital also admitted that ambulance calls were going unanswered, “but we are finding great relief that our suggestion that carriages be used as much as possible is being freely followed.”
The coroner’s office was tragically overworked. Coroners and their staff were working from sunrise until two in the morning each day. On Monday, August 10, one of the clerks in the coroner’s office collapsed from heat prostration. Amid such heat, the examinations of the dead were necessarily cursory—the quickly decomposing bodies had to be buried, and fast.
A week into the heat wave relatives of the deceased were beginning to complain that no official from the coroner’s office was able to come to their home and issue a death certificate until the body was in the first stages of decomposition. When a reporter asked Coroner O’Hanlon about this complaint, he countered by criticizing the habit among the poor of seeking relief at night on their tenement roofs. “The people of the lower east side especially, think that after a day of torture, relief is to be found on the roofs of houses that have been baking for a day and perhaps, as in the present case, a week,” the coroner observed. “They and their families go to the tin roof and sleep, or try to, and the heat that is pouring up all around them, the residue after the sun has finished his day’s roasting, either makes them victims at once or prepares them for destruction in a day or two.”
O’Hanlon’s grim mood was understandable.