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4.
H
EAT WAVES OF THE FUTURE
.
…heat waves sometimes leave us with an exceedingly narrow margin of safety evenhere in…America. When heatstroke begins to appear in the hospital, a rise of another 5◦F…would produce a holocaust of deaths.
1
THE
1896
H
OT
W
AVE
:
Many people hope improvements in technology will protect us fromextreme climatic conditions in the 21
st
century. Improved air conditioning,some think, will completely eliminate the minor problem of urban heat waves.Few know that heat waves are the greatest environmental killer. The coming century will only intensify the vast destruction that history shows they havealready had in North America.If you believe in technological progress, 1896 was just a step or twofrom the doorway into our modern age. That year saw the introduction of dialtelephones and x-
rays photographs. Still, the country‘s agricultural origins
remained obvious in the fetid litter that turned American pavements intounhealthy thoroughfares. Four years before the dawn of the 20
th
century, only 25
automobiles had been built in the United States. When exceptionaltemperatures burned the streets in late summer, nineteenth century Americans were often torn between staying inside or wandering abroad with pockethandkerchiefs pressed to their faces against the mephitic stink of rapidly
decaying horse manure. The dilemma was captured by Scribner‘s magazine:
7878
when the heat came and the sun on the pavements began to look
white…the breath from the streets was such that no one knew
which was worse, the hot, foul air outside, or the close foul airinside.
2
In some areas of New York, conditions were especially gritty during the
dog days of summer: ―The huddled and packed crowds on the east side…live
in the street, sleep on the roofs, and endure the
heat in silence,‖ wrote a young member of one of New York‘s founding families in a memoir that contains few
other criticisms of his beloved home.
3
The lower east side was ablaze during the heat wave of 1896, so ColonelGeorge Waring opened his heart and
the city‘s fire hydrants to the huddledmasses. New York‘s newly appointed Commissioner of Street Cleaning ordered
the streets flushed daily in an effort to sanitize and cool the city.
4
But despite
the success of Colonel Waring‘s efforts, the nearly 7,000
lbs of horse manure
and 160 gallons of horse urine that littered New York‘s streets daily left the
reek of decay throughout the overheated metropolis:
The effect of…temperature upon the refuse and filth of thestreets, courts and alleys…the air in close p
laces, in the tenementhouses, and upon the tenants themselves is soon
perceptible…foul gases of decomposition fill theatmosphere…and render the air of… unventilated places stifling;
while languor, depression and debility falls upon the populationlike a widespread epidemic.
5
Still, not everyone gagged and wilted in the summer heat. Newpapers
describe ‗heat refugees‘ who left for the seashore or the mountains, and
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Cornelius Vanderbilt II enjoyed a privately scrubbed and air-conditionedatmosphere at his townhouse on West 57
th
St. In 1893, air conditioning pioneer, Alfred Wolff, installed this first residential cooling system at the Vanderbilt home after creating an ice-cooling system for Carnegie Hall in 1889.
The ‗90s were a decade of extreme summer hea
t in New York, and as
the leading designer of a technology so new it had not yet been named ‗airconditioning‘, Wolff‘s star rose. In 1899, he constructed a cooling system to
prevent cadavers from decaying at the 1
st
Ave campus of Cornell MedicalCollege. The system worked so well that, on hot days, school administrators
propped the dissecting room door open to provide ‗comfort cooling‘ for the
rest of the college. Before his death in 1909, Wolff successfully created cooling systems for the homes of Andrew Carnegie and J.J. Astor, as well ascommercial systems for the New York Stock Exchange (1902), and theCollege of the City of New York (1905).
6
But outside the small world of Cornell‘s corpses and Wolff‘s rich
clientele, summer conditions simmered. In the country, cows stoppedproducting milk and chickens died in swarms as always happens during extremeheat events. Within the city, draft horses were among those affected most. Acontemporary study noted that for horses,sunstroke is manifested suddenly. The animal stops, drops itshead, begins to stagger and soon falls to the ground
unconscious…breathing is [noisy]…pulse is very slow and
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