Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [80]
Even as the heat wave departed, it continued to devastate the city. The delayed effects of hyperthermia meant that even as temperatures dropped, New Yorkers continued to die by the score. The lower temperatures only gave the illusion that the crisis had passed. Meanwhile, in the tenements, those laborers who had taken to bed sick with the heat days before only now began to die. Continuing deaths among lower temperatures was one of the heat wave’s cruelest tricks.
Thinking the worst was over, New Yorkers began to step back and assess the crisis. The “terrible spell of hot weather,” Whitelaw Reid noted in a letter to a friend on Thursday, “has left everybody in a dispirited and demoralized state.” In a special section the New York Journal noted in a headline, “THE HEAT MORE DEADLY THAN A GREAT DISASTER.” The paper referred to the heat wave as “the greatest plague of heat ever visited in this vicinity, the longest and most fatal,” and compared the five worst days of death to other American disasters. Individual days of the heat wave had killed more people than the Great Chicago Fire, the Great Blizzard of 1888, and even the St. Louis tornado of 1896.
Nevertheless, like every other paper of the time, the Journal greatly underestimated the actual number of deaths. The paper claimed that only 39 had died from the heat on August 9, when the actual number was closer to 170. August 10 was listed as having seen 71 deaths, but the number was closer to 250. Even the most deadly day of the heat wave, August 11, witnessed only 213 deaths, according to the paper. The number was actually closer to 340. The total number of heat-related deaths given by the Journal was approximately 600. This represented well under half the actual number of heat-related deaths during the heat wave, yet still an enormous figure. Even this number would have made the New York heat wave of 1896 one of the worst natural disasters of the nineteenth century. Still, within only a few years the tragic week seemed to have been lost to history.
The fall of even a few degrees of temperature was front-page news in a city enduring ten days of killer heat. “When the heat has been so terrific for so many days,” the Tribune observed, “a slight fall in the temperature is most welcome and readily noticed and appreciated. . . . The change was apparent early in the day. The early riser noticed at once that the air was not so dead and enervating as it had been for the week past. There was a little breeze stirring, too, while in the distance could be seen clouds that held out a hope of rain later in the day.” Except for a few drops falling uptown, however, the promise of rain was not fulfilled. “The great difference that a fall of even a few degrees makes in the comfort of the community when the mercury has been over 90 degrees for more than a week was well illustrated, for the sufferings of the inhabitants of this city were visibly less than they had been Wednesday.”
Yet the city was still in the grips of extreme heat and still coping with the aftermath of the deadly week. One indication of this was the great traffic jam at the East River ferries caused by the eighty-three hearses awaiting transport. The Thirty-Fourth Street, Twenty-Third Street, Tenth Street, and Astoria ferry houses were completely “blockaded” from eight in the morning until eight at night by funeral processions. Police tried to keep the processions in line and orderly, but no sooner had one funeral procession departed by ferry than another one turned off First or Second Avenue bound for the ferry houses. Some hearse drivers even tried to work their way through the crowd heedless of leaving the mourners behind them. The funeral processions spilled out onto First Avenue, blocking a section of that major city thoroughfare