Arthur Miller: Before Air-Conditioning

[babylonsister]

American Summer
Before Air-Conditioning
by Arthur Miller
June 22, 1998



Exactly what year it was I can no longer recall—probably 1927 or ’28—there was an extraordinarily hot September, which hung on even after school had started and we were back from our Rockaway Beach bungalow. Every window in New York was open, and on the streets venders manning little carts chopped ice and sprinkled colored sugar over mounds of it for a couple of pennies. We kids would jump onto the back steps of the slow-moving, horse-drawn ice wagons and steal a chip or two; the ice smelled vaguely of manure but cooled palm and tongue.

People on West 110th Street, where I lived, were a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes, but around the corner on 111th and farther uptown mattresses were put out as night fell, and whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear.

Even through the nights, the pall of heat never broke. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake. I can recall only white people spread out on the grass; Harlem began above 116th Street then.

Later on, in the Depression thirties, the summers seemed even hotter. Out West, it was the time of the red sun and the dust storms, when whole desiccated farms blew away and sent the Okies, whom Steinbeck immortalized, out on their desperate treks toward the Pacific. My father had a small coat factory on Thirty-ninth Street then, with about a dozen men working sewing machines. Just to watch them handling thick woollen winter coats in that heat was, for me, a torture. The cutters were on piecework, paid by the number of seams they finished, so their lunch break was short—fifteen or twenty minutes. They brought their own food: bunches of radishes, a tomato perhaps, cucumbers, and a jar of thick sour cream, which went into a bowl they kept under the machines. A small loaf of pumpernickel also materialized, which they tore apart and used as a spoon to scoop up the cream and vegetables.

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http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/06/22/1998_06_22_144_TNY_LIBRY_000015831?currentPage=all

[Warpy]

1. Boston in the 60s and 70s featured stoop sitting

with all the neighbors congregated on the stairs in front of the buildings. Fire escapes were rickety enough that they were saved for fires. There was one older cop who'd stop by, take a deep toke off the joint being passed around, and tell the drinkers to cover their cans and bottles with paper bags, open carry applying to alcohol and Boston not having it.

Yes, some of us used to form groups and sleep out on the banks of the Charles River, the fog settling on us during the night giving an illusion of coolness as our flats remained ovens.

When window AC units got cheap enough, stoop sitting ended, the old cop retired, and something rather precious was lost.

[raccoon]

2. Ah, distinctly I remember summer in SC without AC. Not something I'd care to return to. nt

[LiberalElite]

3. In the '50s in my apt. bldg. in the Bronx

we propped open the apartment door to get the cooler air from the hallway.