Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [81]
From the beginning the tailors’ strike had unhappily coincided with the heat wave, making their suffering all the more acute. Now it looked as if the heat wave would assist in ending the strike. Reports today indicated that all the men planned to be back at work the very next day. The tailors had achieved some success as many contractors had signed new agreements with the tailors’ union. Moreover, tailors had opened several “co-operative shops” that received work directly from manufacturers, perhaps frightening some of the contractors. Almost 3,000 men were still on strike as of Thursday. The New York Times noted that “many of these have suffered from insufficient good food during the heated term and the closely packed mass meetings they have daily held, often for hours at a time.” With the contractors caving, the suffering of the tailors had not been in vain.
Violence was still a problem: A “small riot” had broken out in the shop of Samuel Klein, as strikers had tried to oust nonunion men. And the combination of the heat and the strike may have pushed one tailor over the edge. Christopher Prausch had been suffering greatly for days. Wednesday night, unable to sleep like so many New Yorkers, Prausch had instead paced the apartment he shared his wife, holding his hands to his head. Early in the morning, as his wife made breakfast, Prausch suddenly rushed at her, seized her by the throat, and stabbed her with a penknife in the arm and abdomen. He then ran into the street with the knife and confessed his crime to a policeman, saying that a crowd was following and trying to kill him. Officer Logan at first did not believe the clearly demented man, but when they returned to Prausch’s apartment, Logan found Mrs. Prausch faint from loss of blood. While a doctor tended to the wife’s wounds, Christopher was taken away. As he was presented to the magistrate, Prausch suddenly shrieked and threw up his hands before collapsing in convulsions on the floor. The examining doctor declared him “crazed by the heat,” and Prausch was taken to the hospital.
Although the small break in the heat lessened the toll on horses, New Yorkers continued to complain about the remaining carcasses littering the streets. In many cases they had been left to rot in the street for several days while the city tried to keep up with the demand for removal. Public health concerns still existed, and the Tribune optimistically predicted that with falling temperatures, the city would be able to “cope with this peril successfully.” This was optimism indeed, as for over a week the city had done virtually nothing to respond to the grave health crisis created by the heat wave.
VI.
STRANGE AND PATHETIC SCENES
ONLY WHEN THE heat wave had reached its end did New York City’s government make even the smallest efforts to relieve the plight of the poor. As the heat wave had settled on the city, Mayor Strong had done nothing, not even calling an emergency meeting until almost the very end of the ten-day crisis.
If there were two public officials who might be considered the heroes of the heat wave, they were Charles Collis of the Department of Public Works and Theodore Roosevelt of the Board of Police Commissioners. Right from the beginning Collis experimented with altered work hours for his men. He also instituted the practice of “flushing” the steaming streets of the Lower East Side using teams of men with fire hoses. Roosevelt, too, took some individual initiative in responding to the crisis. He ordered that police wagons