Hot Time in the Old Town by Edward P. Kohn

Author:Edward P. Kohn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

CONSIDERING THE HUNDREDS of deaths and hundreds more prostrated in the street daily, the hospitals and ambulances were severely overtaxed. Roosevelt Hospital sent word to all of its affiliated physicians to assist the ambulance corps, and medical students were pressed into service. Even after Theodore Roosevelt arranged for police wagons to serve as extra ambulances, one-third of the calls for ambulances still went unanswered. At Roosevelt Hospital every wagon and ambulance that rolled up contained two victims of the heat. The superintendent noted, “We have sent word to the police to get sufferers here by any conveyance at hand—trucks, wagons, cabs, and even wheelbarrows if they cannot do better.” The superintendent of Hudson Street Hospital also admitted that ambulance calls were going unanswered, “but we are finding great relief that our suggestion that carriages be used as much as possible is being freely followed.”

The coroner’s office was tragically overworked. Coroners and their staff were working from sunrise until two in the morning each day. On Monday, August 10, one of the clerks in the coroner’s office collapsed from heat prostration. Amid such heat, the examinations of the dead were necessarily cursory—the quickly decomposing bodies had to be buried, and fast.

A week into the heat wave relatives of the deceased were beginning to complain that no official from the coroner’s office was able to come to their home and issue a death certificate until the body was in the first stages of decomposition. When a reporter asked Coroner O’Hanlon about this complaint, he countered by criticizing the habit among the poor of seeking relief at night on their tenement roofs. “The people of the lower east side especially, think that after a day of torture, relief is to be found on the roofs of houses that have been baking for a day and perhaps, as in the present case, a week,” the coroner observed. “They and their families go to the tin roof and sleep, or try to, and the heat that is pouring up all around them, the residue after the sun has finished his day’s roasting, either makes them victims at once or prepares them for destruction in a day or two.”

O’Hanlon’s grim mood was understandable. On Monday, August 10, alone he had seventy-seven cases on his list for investigation, with over fifty of the cases requiring climbing more than two flights of stairs. The situation had deteriorated such that Coroner Fitzpatrick was moved to write an emergency appeal to Mayor Strong asking for more staff. A further request illustrated the dire situation the city faced: Fitzpatrick asked that the law requiring bodies to be left uncared for until viewed by a coroner be suspended, “as the force of Coroners is altogether inadequate, and the enforcement of the law only works hardship on the friends of the dead and endangers the health of the survivors.”

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