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By Root 1141 0

heads continued to make small but important decisions affecting the lives of New Yorkers. By order of Commissioner Collis of the Public Works Department, the free baths in the East and Hudson Rivers were ordered to remain open all night to provide relief from the heat, with separate times given to men and women. “The City’s Free Baths to Be Never Closed,” one headline announced on Wednesday. This was another move by the city that reflected the seriousness of the heat wave, as the floating baths in the rivers were designed expressly for hygiene and not recreation. For now, the ability of the poor to find some relief via the floating baths all night long, although counter to their original hygienic purpose, probably saved lives. Once again, a small step made by a single department head, without reference to the mayor, made a significant difference in the quality of life of New York’s suffering poor.

Commissioner Collis continued to take the lead among city officials in addressing the heat wave in other areas. On Wednesday, August 12, he doubled the number of men in each of the five “gangs” to ten, and they continued their work hosing down the blistering asphalt over almost an entire square mile of streets and alleys between Houston and Grand. Moreover, Collis maintained the changed work hours for his men, limiting work to the coolest hours of the day and suspending any work that necessitated laboring in the sun. Unfortunately for this hero of the heat wave, in later years inefficiency in road repairs along Park and Fifth Avenues, as well as his close association with the Platt political machine, would leave the commissioner of Public Works open to harsh criticism.

ALTHOUGH POLICE COMMISSIONER Roosevelt remained at home on Long Island during the height of the heat wave, his police continued to be in the vanguard of city employees responding to the crisis. When a man or woman fell in the street due to heat prostration, a policeman was called to attend the victim and find some conveyance to a hospital, putting serious stress on the heavily dressed police force. On August 11 alone six patrolmen and one police captain fell victim to heat exhaustion while on duty.

The police continued to hunt down “mad” dogs in the street, while turning a blind eye to the frolicking of small boys in the city’s public fountains. They also responded to the many strange incidents that accompanied the heat wave. On August 11 police had been called by Mrs. William Grimm to a tenement on West Forty-Second Street. Mrs. Grimm had left her baby in its carriage on the sidewalk as she went to get her husband his supper in their ground-floor apartment. When she returned, the carriage was empty. A neighbor, David Wheeler, passing by the carriage sitting in the sun on one of the hottest days of the year, believed the infant on the point of collapse. He took the baby up to his room one floor above, stripped it, and placed it in a bath.

When another neighbor told her that Wheeler had taken her child, Mrs. Grimm ran up the stairs and found her baby lying naked on a cot in Wheeler’s room. Although Wheeler told his downstairs neighbor of his good intentions, Mrs. Grimm refused to believe him and summoned the police to report her baby’s kidnapping. The judge hearing the case dismissed it after hearing of Wheeler’s benevolent actions, and the New York Herald agreed with its article title, “Samaritan After All.” It was not recorded whether the judge reprimanded Mrs. Grimm for leaving her baby unattended on the sidewalk on a day when the temperature in the sun hit 135 degrees. Inside or outside of the tenement, the heat wave meant suffering and death for New York’s children.

Even so, many observers noted great improvements in caring for the very young as representatives of the Board of Health went door to door checking on children’s health. Only on Tuesday did the Times give credit to the Board of Health for “securing the improvement in the construction and sanitary appurtenances of tenement houses.” The “terrible mortality among young children,” the paper asserted,