Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [87]
Most of the responses to the heat wave had not challenged the basic tenet that charity must be left to private interests. Flushing the streets, changing work hours, and leaving open the parks and public baths constituted fairly mild responses that fell squarely within the purview of the city departments. Giving away free ice was an exception.
Private interests, including a city newspaper, had been giving away free ice for some time. For the city to enter the field previously occupied only by private charity, and to actually give something away, was new in its history. Certainly this foray into public charity reflected the seriousness of the heat wave. It also reflected the growing belief that would mature during the Progressive Era that government did indeed have a duty to address the suffering of the city’s poor, whether through tenement reform or health and sanitation measures. Finally, the decision to give away free ice probably had something to do with the recent establishment of a New York “Ice Trust” that had raised the price of ice to the level of a luxury for the city’s poor.
Never in its history had New York City witnessed such a sight. Roosevelt had instructed policemen to inform local residents of the ice distribution as they made their rounds. Roosevelt, the police, and the journalists who covered the giveaway were shocked at the turnout. Hours before the ice even arrived at the precinct houses, hundreds of men, women, and children crowded around the stations clamoring for free ice. “It was to them better than bread to the starving,” the Journal said. “Mothers with sickly babes in their arms jostled with weary men, while children begged for a piece of ice to take home to the sick room.” The Times estimated that 20,000 people had been served ice, so that managing the enormous crowds became a tricky task for Roosevelt’s police.
Such vast numbers desperate for ice complicated the logistics of the giveaway. At first the police had tried to give away the ice on the sidewalk, but they soon moved the ice down into the cellar to better manage the crowds. “The applicants for the ice came with towels, aprons, bags, boxes, baskets, tin and wooden pails, and in fact any and every sort of receptacle,” one witness noted. “A man drove up to the Eldridge Street Station in a wagon, evidently expecting to get all the ice he wanted. He found that it took him nearly two hours to get twenty pounds.”
Roosevelt was right in the thick of things during the evening’s distribution of ice. He made his rounds from station to station around the East Side, including Eldridge station, the precinct house for the neighborhood of the striking tailors. There the police found it difficult to spread the five tons allotted them among the massive crowd of people gathered around the station. In less than half an hour, the entire amount had been distributed. If each person received on average a twenty-pound block, then approximately five hundred people went away with ice. This represented only a tiny fraction of the residents of one of Manhattan’s most densely packed tenement districts.
Near the end of the distribution, the situation became a bit dicey. When the crowd was told that the ice was gone, they refused to leave. Women begged for even the smallest piece of ice for their sick children at home. The scene was repeated throughout the Lower East Side, as ice supplies quickly ran out before even a small portion of the people could be served. Witnessing