Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [83]
COLLIS’S IDEA TO shorten the workday and confine working hours to the coolest parts of the day was not repeated citywide. Only the mayor could have issued such an order, and there is no evidence that other department heads followed Collis’s lead. In fact, New York City displayed a sort of bureaucratic inertia in response to the heat wave.
When a reporter suggested that the Parks Commission should also limit the work hours of its men, Commissioner McMillan, rather than taking action, consulted the counsel for the city about the legality of permitting men to work fewer hours while charging for a full day. The literal-minded parks commissioner acknowledged it would be “an act of humanity” to cut down the hours of manual labor but doubted that this would be accepted by the city comptroller, as state law mandated an eight-hour day. Corporation Counsel Scott replied that he did not believe the city comptroller would “quibble over such a matter” as “a man could not be driven to his death, even by an act of the Legislature.” Scott even cited the example of Collis and the Department of Public Works, illustrating Collis’s leadership in making an emergency decision during the crisis.
Still, most city departments made no changes, and city workers suffered terribly as a result. Roosevelt’s police were among them. The overworked police force, constantly responding to calls of prostrated citizens and helping remove horse carcasses, had not been allowed to make any changes in their heavy regulation summer uniform. On Monday alone 208 officers had been sent to the hospital and another 85 sent home ill. In the past few days 6 policemen had died. Theodore Roosevelt’s end-of-the-year report to Mayor Strong would note that doctors had been called to station houses to treat sixty cases of severe heatstroke in 1896. In 1895 the number was only ten. Moreover, Roosevelt reported ten police deaths during the two-week August heat wave, more than in any other entire month that year.
During the ten days of the heat wave, the city refused to lift the ban on sleeping in parks. On August 8 the drunken John Hughes fell from his roof, while baby Lewis Citron fell from the fire escape where he and his father were sleeping. Both died. Desperate New Yorkers had little recourse but to seek comfort on the tenement roofs or down at the piers. On August 10 several people drowned, and others continued to fall from their buildings’ rooftops and fire escapes. All of these victims of the heat wave were seeking the slightest relief from their suffocating apartments. The New York World noted the problem and the city’s ultimate responsibility for these deaths. “The suffocating heat at night has driven thousands of people to piers on the East and North Rivers,” the paper said, using the Dutch name for the river on Manhattan’s western shore before the British renamed it Hudson. “It is not permissible to sleep in the parks at night. Over in Brooklyn the park officials have suspended their regulations so that thousands of men and women, in whose apartments the temperature approaches that of a Turkish bath, have been allowed to take quilts and pillows into the parks and stretch themselves under the trees for a cool sleep.”
The paper held out the slim possibility that “the sleepy Park Commissioners of this town may awake to the fact that humanity demands something of them in this emergency.” It continued, “There was a record yesterday of more than a dozen persons who fell from roofs and fire-escapes, whence they had gone to gather whatever breeze was blowing and to secure