Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [82]
Not only did Roosevelt go along with this course of action, but he took it on himself to personally supervise the distribution via police precinct houses, attempted to stop any fraud from taking place, and made a point to see how the city’s poor used the ice. Through his distribution scheme Roosevelt in effect busted the ice trust controlled by Charles Morse, and he came into intimate contact with the poor’s suffering during the height of the heat wave. The heat wave, then, had a profound effect on the future progressive president and trust buster.
Hundreds of victims of sunstroke and heat exhaustion filled the city hospitals during the week. Bellevue Hospital reported its busiest day in years. Its Sturgis Pavilion, generally used for operating cases and closed during the summer, was opened specifically to deal with heat cases. Soon it was filled with patients wilting on cots and buried in ice baths. Students from the Training School for Nurses left their classes to assist Bellevue’s doctors. Meanwhile, the coroner’s office could not keep up with all of the new cases being brought in and soon had a backlog of sixty bodies awaiting examination and determination of death.
Still, the official response to the heat wave remained almost non-existent. Only Commissioner Collis seemed to understand that the city must adjust to the crisis, temporarily change policies, and perhaps introduce new ones.
Pulitzer’s New York World took credit for another of Collis’s innovations during the heat wave, one that certainly brought some relief to the working poor of Lower Manhattan. The commissioner’s son Lloyd, the World claimed, had read the paper’s “graphic accounts of midsummer misery among the dwellers in tenement districts,” and had devised a plan to hose down the streets of the Lower East Side, cooling the burning asphalt and flushing away the rotting and stinking detritus. The commissioner had approved the plan and had passed it along to the acting commissioner of Street Cleaning, Captain Gibson, who served in the absence of Colonel George Waring. With Gibson’s approval, Collis had marshaled the twenty-five men of his department’s hydrant gang and split them into five divisions of five men each, with each group equipped with a horse and wagon and fifty feet of hose.
At eight o’clock on Monday evening, August 10, the teams assembled at the corner of Canal and Ludlow, near William Seward Park. Collis addressed his troops: “By 12 o’clock tonight we shall have thoroughly washed every street in this section between Houston and Division streets. Let each gang take a street. Hitch on to every fireplug and don’t spare the water. It’s a terrible night, and many lives may depend upon the way you work. Flood the streets and cool the air. Now go ahead.” With hundreds of boys playing in the hoses’ streams and their parents watching from the sidewalks and tenement windows, the street cleaning men washed down five miles of streets by midnight, cleaning the gutters and cooling the air. “Down went the mercury a good ten degrees,” the World claimed. The next night three times as many men were to be employed flushing the streets around Mulberry Bend and Chinatown.
Collis sent Mayor Strong a report regarding the “flushing” of the streets the night before. “It was a great boon to the poor people in the tenement district,” Collis wrote. “Parents literally brought their children in the street to have the water poured on them and there was at least 50,000 little ones to whom it was a perfect holiday. Many of the adult citizens thanked me and everybody seemed to think it was a good thing.”
Collis’s department continued its plan of watering the streets on the Lower East Side. During the night, about ten miles of asphalt below Houston were hosed down. “The work thoroughly nullified the retentive