From National Public Radio,
August 11, 2010:
...Prologue
"The Heated Term"
On
August 15, 1896, while preparing to depart for a three-week vacation
out west, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his sister Anna, whom he called
his Darling Bye. "We've had two excitements in New York the past week;
the heated term, and Bryan's big meeting," he wrote. "The heated term
was the worst and most fatal we have ever known. The death-rate trebled
until it approached the ratio of a cholera epidemic; the horses died by
the hundreds, so that it was impossible to remove their carcasses, and
they added a genuine flavor of pestilence, and we had to distribute
hundred of tons of ice from the station-houses to the people of the
poorer precincts." Roosevelt, then 37 and president of New York's Board
of Police Commissioners, was describing one of the most historic weeks
in the city's history....
During the summer of 1896, a 10-day heat wave killed nearly 1,500
people, many of them tenement-dwellers, across New York City. Many
thousands of people were crammed into tenements on the Lower East Side,
with no air conditioning, little circulating air and no running water.
Families were packed together -- with five to six people sharing a
single room. Extra space on the floor was rented out to single men --
many of whom worked six days a week doing manual labor out in the sun.
"It
was so densely packed that most people couldn't even live inside the
tenement itself," says Ed Kohn, a professor of American history at
Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. "The streets in front of
tenements, and the rooftops and the fire escapes were ... filled with
people all of the time because there was no room for everybody to fit
inside."
Kohn is the author of Hot Time in the Old Town, which chronicles the fatal heat wave.
"This was 10 days [with temperatures reaching] 90 degrees at street
level and 90 percent humidity, with temperatures not even dropping at
night," Kohn says. "No wind -- so at night there was absolutely no
relief whatsoever."
At the time, there was a citywide ban on
sleeping in New York City's public parks. Kohn says one of the simplest
things the city could have done was lift the ban -- giving people a
place to sleep away from their squalid tenements, which might have
prevented many of the deaths.
"They took to the rooftops, and
they took to the fire escapes, trying to catch a breath of fresh air,"
he says. "Inevitably, somebody would fall asleep or get drunk, roll off
the top of a five-story tenement, crash into the courtyard below and be
killed. You'd have children who would go to sleep on fire escapes and
fall off and break their legs or be killed. People [tried] to go down to
the piers on the East River and sleep there, out in the open -- and
would roll into the river and drown."....
...
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