Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [86]
Despite these efforts, and despite the aid of charitable institutions, the city’s gravediggers “work over-time, and little coffins are stacked mountain-high on the deck of the Charity Commissioners’ boat when it makes its semi-weekly trips to the city cemetery.” Sadly, the coffins of little Mamie Brandy and Garret Kirwan joined dozens of other little coffins making their final journey.
WHEN ROOSEVELT ATTENDED meetings in Mayor Strong’s office, as he did on August 13, he may well have contemplated that this was an office he might have occupied. After all, Roosevelt had been offered the chance to run for mayor in 1894 as he had in 1886. Only his wife’s concerns about money stopped him from running as a reform Republican. Instead the mantle had fallen to William Strong, a millionaire merchant and banker who had no such financial restraints. Strong, too, was a reform Republican, and he won the grudging support of party boss Thomas Platt. Strong’s election was aided by the Lexow Committee’s report on city corruption, especially in the police department. Vowing to run the city on business principles and heedless of patronage, Strong’s appointments of Colonel Waring to the Street Cleaning Department and Roosevelt to the Police Commission signaled to the Good Government Clubs and Citizens’ Committees a commitment to reform. Various forces would conspire to unseat Strong after only one term, including voters’ grave displeasure with Roosevelt’s own war on Sunday drinking.
Strong came to the conclusion to call a meeting only after speaking to the Health Board’s president, Wilson. Wilson recounted for Strong the death statistics of the previous week, noting that they were comparable only to the epidemic of Asiatic cholera that had struck the city forty years earlier. Apparently it was Wilson who first raised the subject of distributing free ice to the poor. At the mayor’s meeting an emergency appropriation of $5,000 was made in order to purchase ninety-five tons of ice. As Roosevelt occupied seats on both the Board of Health and the Police Commission, it is quite possible that he had a hand in the decision as well.
Aside from the ice appropriation, however, little that was new came from the meeting. Flushing the streets, keeping the floating baths open all night, and the changed work hours in some city departments were steps already taken by individual department heads. The only other new decision possibly resulted from the critical Tribune article of the day before attacking the city’s “sleepy Park Commissioners.” Now the city decided to throw open the parks at night and ordered the police not to prevent people from going on the lawns or stretching themselves out on park benches. “This order refers, of course, to persons seeking relief from the excessive heat,” the order sent to police stated. “Officers are instructed to be vigilant in preventing mischievous boys and disorderly persons from abusing the privileges set for them in this order.”
Responding to the criticism directed at the Park Commission for lagging so far behind its counterpart in Brooklyn, Park Commissioner Samuel McMillan told the press that day that the city was only formalizing what had been unofficially understood by police for some time. McMillan said that the Commission had long ago instructed police officers that if people wanted to sleep in the parks during the “hot spell,” they should not be discouraged from doing so. “Why, we’ve been doing this ever since the hot weather set in,” McMillan told a reporter. “We don’t intend to make a practice of it. We were in a position where we could afford to be lenient with those who were sufferers from the heat. But we are not going to throw the parks open for the benefit of those who are covered with disease and vermin. It won’t do to have such persons sleeping on