Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [94]
This also applied to the “scientific” method of ice distribution Roosevelt developed. The night before, the police had cut the ice into greatly varying sizes. In some parts of the city people received only five pounds, while elsewhere people left the precinct houses with fifteen or twenty pounds. Roosevelt described his remedy for this: “All the ice delivered weighs in the neighborhood of 200 pounds to the cake. In order that all may be treated alike, I shall instruct the Chief to inform his Captains and commanding officers to have each cake of ice cut in twenty pieces or blocks. This, you see, will give to each about ten pounds.”
On the one hand, it was slightly absurd that the president of the Board of Police Commissioners was issuing orders about the cutting of ice. On the other hand, such concern again reflected his obsession “that all may be treated alike.” For Roosevelt, this should not be left to chance or to the whims of local precinct captains. Establishing a fair standard of distribution was the role of his authority and city government in general: to establish the framework of fair play that helped New York’s most underprivileged and powerless get a fair shake, a “Square Deal.”
The city appropriated a total of $5,000 to be used for the free distribution of ice, and as of Friday, August 14, had used only a fraction of the money—just as the heat wave ended. Still, from newspapermen to politicians, all agreed that the city had displayed unprecedented largesse in seeking to alleviate the suffering of the poor. One writer spoke of the “unrestrained joy of the tenement dwellers all over New York,” especially the “women and children in the reeking East Side tenement-house district, where a stray breeze is a rare luxury.” The Tribune offered a description of the “motley crowds” clamoring for ice similar to that of the Times: “They came long before the ice itself had reached the stations, and jostled and crowded about the steps, beating their tin pans to impatient tunes, and making of the neighborhood a veritable babel. The crowds were largely composed of children of Hebrew, Italian, and Greek nationalities, with startling variations in costumes and some contrast in the way of complexion, but all thoroughly voluble and for the most part unwashed.” These “unwashed” multitudes of varying complexion “stretched half a block in length,” and “piled three or four deep.” The “combined banging of their pans, and the grind of shrill youthful voices would have given to a third-rate organ-grinder an attack of nervous prostration.”
Roosevelt was not the only one to speak at the second mayor’s meeting of department heads on August 14. Mayor Strong noted that he had received numerous complaints about the dead horses in the streets, many of which had been allowed to fester for several days. One such complaint had come from the offices of the Anchor Brewing Company, asserting that “in no small town or City . . . would a dead animal be allowed to decompose for four days as occurred under our office window last week, notwithstanding the fact that it was three times reported to the ‘Board of Health.’”
Directing his pointed comments at Wilson of the Board of Health, the mayor repeated what newspapers, and Wilson himself, had been saying for days: that the horse carcasses were “a menace to the public health.” Wilson replied that the heat had killed about 1,000 horses during the past week and that the offal contractor had simply not been able to remove them as fast as they died. Wilson estimated that about 180 horses still lay in the streets as of Thursday. While the contractor endeavored to remove them, the Health Department had been conducting a disinfecting campaign, “using as much bromine as it was safe to use to destroy the sickening odors.” The mayor asked Captain Gibson of the Street Cleaning Department whether he could help the Health Department in the emergency. Gibson replied that he would try; he left the mayor’s office to call the Street Cleaning Department’s stables to order two teams with trucks to