Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [84]
Lifting the ban on sleeping in parks constituted perhaps the simplest gesture the city might have made in response to the heat wave and one that could have saved lives. Not only had the “sleepy Park Commissioners” done nothing, few city officials had taken steps to relieve the plight of New Yorkers during the crisis. “Up to this time the only city bureaus which have taken any cognizance of the heat plague are the Street Cleaning and the Public Works departments,” the paper noted, referring to the flushing of the streets specifically. “When men, women and children are forced to the roofs and the fire-escapes and to the hard planks of a pier in order to obtain a night’s rest,” the writer concluded, “it certainly seems as if the time had come to throw away ‘Keep off the grass’ signs in the parks and to suspend any rules or regulations which prevent the public from resting in the parks after dark.” It was a rare call for government action during the heat wave and might have pressed the mayor to finally call an emergency meeting of departments the very next day.
Other city departments had been dealing with the demands of the heat wave all week. In the twenty-four-hour period ending at noon on Wednesday, August 12, more deaths were recorded than ever before in New York’s history. The filing of these 335 death certificates placed a great burden on the two clerks in the coroner’s office, who themselves risked prostration from their increased workload. “The filing of certificates,” said the city registrar, Dr. Tracy, “is somewhat a matter of physical capacity. Most of the time we have two clerks busy writing burial permits. They can write so many permits and take in so many certificates in twenty-four hours and no more. Their full capacity is taxed now, and many persons are waiting in line for permits most of the time.”
Desperate measures had to be taken to get the job done. Even the coroners had been drafted into doing clerical work, simply to allow families to bury their dead. In a poor bit of timing, Coroner Hoeber was on vacation during much of the heat wave, making even more work for the personnel who remained. Hoeber’s secretary, Joseph Cassner, pitched in to take up the slack, and by noon on Wednesday had worked thirty hours straight. Throughout the city funerals were delayed as the four coroner’s physicians could not keep up with requests to visit every home with a corpse and make a ruling on the causes and circumstances of death. The four men made heroic efforts to crisscross the city, visiting tenements often miles apart while climbing hundreds of flights of stairs. All of this exertion, of course, occurred during the most extreme heat any of them had ever experienced.
The dedication of the men of the coroner’s office illustrated the readiness of some city officials to make sacrifices and even risk their own health to address the current crisis. While there was no central authority directing efforts from the mayor’s office, virtually every city department was forced to accommodate itself and its personnel to the heat wave in some way. With the Board of Health’s contractor responsible for removing dead horses completely overwhelmed, the city’s sanitary superintendent, Dr. Charles F. Roberts, was forced to take other extraordinary measures. On Wednesday, August 12, he wrote to the chief inspector of the Division of Contagious Diseases, Dr. Charles S. Benedict, with instructions to have the entire disinfecting corps of his division stop their normal work around the city and focus instead on disinfecting and deodorizing the bodies of dead horses. Clearly Roberts worried that the current “heat epidemic” might lead to a true epidemic and an entirely new health crisis. With a great pile of twenty-seven dead horses at the Second Avenue car stables, this was a real and frightening possibility.
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