Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [70]
With the Herald Square thermometer again hitting 103 degrees, while the official reading by Mr. Dunn reached a laughable 92, New Yorkers suffered through their ninth day of killer heat. Perhaps 200 New Yorkers perished from the heat in Manhattan alone, with the total number of deaths easing only slightly from the record of 386 the day before. New York’s laborers continued to bear the brunt of the heat wave, although fifty infants under age one died on Tuesday, August 11.
As the airless, windowless tenements baked their inhabitants, the heat wave decimated entire families, like the Russells of Brooklyn. At 228 West Nineteenth Street, one black and white crepe streamer and one deep black streamer hung from the doorbell, announcing to visitors the double tragedy that occurred. The five members of the Abbott family—the widowed mother, two sons, and two daughters—occupied an apartment on the second floor. By all accounts they were an exceedingly close and happy family, especially the relationship between the mother and her son Edward. Thirty-four years old and a driver for the milliners H. O’Neill and Company, Edward had returned home from a hard day’s work on Saturday feeling tired but not seriously ill. No one in the Abbott house was particularly worried as Edward was young, with a strong physique and excellent health. The next evening, however, Edward suddenly fell ill from the heat and lost consciousness. The summoned physician tried to revive him, but after only five hours Edward Abbott passed away. Within only twenty-four hours, then, the young Abbott went from feeling merely tired to dying. It was a shocking example of how quickly the heat could claim an otherwise healthy young man.
With the family gathered around Edward’s bed, sixty-two-year-old Mrs. Abbott now complained of feeling ill, and a physician was once again summoned. With their mother in bed and attended to by a doctor, the remaining Abbott children made arrangements for their brother’s funeral to take place the morning of August 12 at St. Francis Xavier’s Church. At eight o’clock the evening of August 11, Mrs. Abbott died. In the morning a 10:00 AM mass for the repose of the souls of both mother and son was said, and their bodies were later buried together. Until the time of the mass, the bodies of mother and son lay side by side in the stifling tenement they had called home. Flowers and small tokens brought by friends and relatives lay on the two coffins. One observer noted that between sobs of grief the mourners asked one another, “Who shall be next?”
The treacherous swathe of pavement in front of city hall, recently come to be known as “Death Pass,” continued to claim victims that day, as a “shabbily dressed” man succumbed on the hot asphalt. His identity was unknown, as was true for many victims. New York Hospital alone recorded four cases of deaths without any names associated with the bodies. One man who died suddenly at Broadway and Murray could only be described as having “dark hair and sandy mustache” and wearing a “dark coat and vest and striped trousers.” It was a telling commentary of life in the rapidly expanding city, one filling up with tens of thousands of additional immigrants every year.
While the city fostered associations of every kind, from fraternal orders to reading clubs, from St. Patrick