At the turn of the last century, two out of every three New Yorkers lived in a tenement. Day-to-day life inside most of these overcrowded, shoddily constructed buildings meant navigating dark hallways, communal bathrooms, trash-strewn backyards, and airless rooms.
But perhaps the worst of all was trying to sleep inside a tenement in the summer, when a heat wave could turn interior rooms lacking ventilation into ovens reaching 120 degrees.
Getting a good night’s rest indoors was virtually impossible during scorching days in July and August. New Yorkers with money and means fled the city, while the poor and working class stayed behind.
During the day, city officials gave away blocks of ice; public baths extended their usual hours. But after dark, options were limited. The only recourse many tenement dwellers had was to leave their stifling flats and find another place to bed down—sometimes with tragic results.
One sleep solution was to take a blanket and pillow to the tenement roof. Under the stars six stories in the air, it was possible to catch a breeze cool enough to help you nod off. The danger, unfortunately, was rolling off the roof to the pavement below.
Newspaper headlines every summer told tragic stories. “Rolled Off Roof and Was Killed” read one article from the July 1, 1901 edition of The New York Times. “John Terrell, living at 23 Duane Street, fell from the roof of the four-story building at 104 Park Row yesterday and was instantly killed. Terrell went on the roof on account of the heat, fell asleep, and rolled to his death.”
Dragging a mattress through an open window to the fire escape was another option. But again, sleepers risked falling off. “Eleven-year-old Dennis Brophy, of 57 Kent Avenue, is in a dying condition at Eastern District Hospital as a result of falling 30 feet from a fire escape to the ground,” wrote Brooklyn’s Standard Union on July 11, 1912. “”His mother placed him on the landing last night to get some air.”
A safer place to sleep would be a park. Though it was illegal to sleep in a public space at night, the law was eventually lifted at all city parks during heat emergencies to help sleep-deprived New Yorkers survive. (Below, Battery Park around 1910)
On August 12, 1922, six thousand people slept in Central Park, with the largest crowds beside the East Drive close to 86th Street—perhaps residents temporarily fleeing the tenement districts of Yorkville.
“There were hundreds of babies sleeping in their carriages, while the parents lay on the grass nearby, many of them with newspapers under them and with coats or shawls for pillows,” the New York Times reported. Extra police were on hand all night to protect the sleepers.
The sands of Coney Island were also crowded after sundown with New Yorkers seeking cool air and a bit of peace, as this photo above shows. On July 3, 1911, five thousand people slept on the beach at Coney, guarded by 25 extra cops to make sure “no thieves could rob the sleepers,” the Times wrote.
Where else could a tenement dweller cool off enough to catch some shuteye? One of the many piers that lined the East and Hudson Rivers.
This group of city residents at an unidentified East Side pier are trying to hold out. The two small kids on the right with blankets beneath them, however, have already drifted off to dreamland.
[Top image: NYPL; second image: New York Times; third image: Bettmann/CORBIS; fourth image: Bain Collection/LOC; fifth image: Getty Images; sixth image: Bain Collection/LOC]
Ephemeral New York 