Summer among the tenement houses in 1879

“Among the tenement-houses during the heated term—just before daybreak” reads the caption to this 1879 illustration of New York’s poverty-stricken slums in the summertime.

Under a gaslight, adults and kids try to catch a breeze and sleep on the front steps of a rundown grocery, as well as on the roof and beside open windows.

In July and August, any New Yorker who could left the city for cooler weather in the country. These residents remained behind to deal with the oppressive heat made worse by the airless rooms of tenement flats.

They don’t even have fire escapes to sleep on, which 20th century city residents used as beds for hot summer nights.

The best place for swimming in the East River

Swim in the East River? Without a wet suit, no adult would do it today, let alone allow their child to take a dip there.

Yet even after the river became the dumping ground of the city’s untreated sewage, lots of people cooled off in its bracing, choppy waters.

Perhaps no group of New Yorkers relied on the river during the hot summer months more than poor tenement kids, who often faced overcrowded public swimming and bathing facilities or preferred the freedom of diving off a city pier with their pals.

One of those tenement kids was Alfred E. Smith (below, in 1877), future governor of 1920s New York. In his 1929 autobiography, Up to Now, he reminisced about his boyhood summer days in the river.

“The East River was the place for swimming, and as early as April and as late as October the refreshing waters of the East River, free entirely at that time from pollution, offered the small boy all the joys that now come to the winter or summer bather on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean,” he wrote.

Smith was born in 1873 in a house on South Street. His river swimming days were in the 1870s and 1880s.

“The dressing rooms were under the dock. Bathing suits were not heard of,” stated Smith.

“In fact, it would have been dangerous to suggest them, for fear you might be accused of setting a fashion that everybody else could not follow.”

That explains not only the many photos that exist from the era of unclothed boys jumping into the river but also George Bellows’ famous 1907 painting, 42 Kids.

“The popular swimming place was the dock at the foot of Pike Street, built well into the river, and there was a rather good-natured caretaker who paid no attention to small boys seeking the pleasure and recreation of swimming in the East River.”

Pike Slip (but no dock) still exists—almost entirely in the grimy shadow of the Manhattan Bridge.

“In the warm summer days it was great fun sliding under the dock while the men were unloading the boatloads of bananas from Central America,” wrote Smith.

“An occasional overripe banana would drop from the green bunch being handed from one dock laborer to another, and the short space between the dock and the boat contained room enough for at least a dozen of us to dive after the banana.”

[Top image: New-York Historical Society; second and fourth images: 1910 and 1912, George Bain/LOC; fifth image: from 1937, via Stuff Nobody Cares About]

Music and magic at the city’s first roof gardens

After the Casino Theater on Broadway and 39th Street opened its spectacular roof garden (below) in the 1880s, a rooftop entertainment craze swept the city through the early 20th century.

Now, the “stay-at-homes,” as New Yorkers who couldn’t retreat to the seashore or mountains during the sweltering months were called, had a way to stay cool while socializing.

“[W]ithin the last few years skyline theatres and skyline restaurants have sprung up here and there,” wrote Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper in 1904.

“[T]heir owners have grown rich with the money which tired, heat-tortured mortals have gladly given in return for the cool breezes and a dainty mid-air supper served on the top of a lofty building.”

[Right: American Theater roof garden, overlooking Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, 1898]

Since this was the Gilded Age, no gaudy expense was spared to draw the rich and powerful (or money-spending tourist) and blow away the competition.

The Casino roof top was actually partially covered with a sliding glass top to keep the party going even when it rained.

The Madison Square Garden rooftop theater (second photo) had 300 tables, multicolored electric lanterns, and the best views in the city, thanks to the Garden’s 300-foot tower.

The New York Theatre, on Broadway and 44th Street, hauled in cherry trees under a glassed-in roof and called the rooftop theater “Cherry Blossom Grove” (above).

Willie Hammerstein’s Paradise roof garden (above) incorporated the roofs of two separate theater buildings on 42nd Street.

True to its name, it had kind of a Coney Island Dreamland magic to it.

Theater roof gardens were soon joined by hotel roof gardens, turning the high-in-the-sky view of the twinkling lights of an electrified city into kind of an entertainment of its own. Perhaps the most famous was the Hotel Astor’s roof garden, above in the early 1900s.

The hotel, on Broadway and 45th Street, was built in 1904 and its roof was instantly popular—remaining an A-list place to dance, dine, and enjoy the magic of summer night through the Jazz Age.

[Photos: MCNY Digital Collection; second photo of Madison Square Garden from Lost New York via Untapped Cities]

How to outsmart the heat in summer 1899

Today we survive summer heat waves with air conditioning and gelato runs.

But the “can’t-get-aways” of the 19th century city had to rely on other ways to keep cool, reports this cheeky New York Times Illustrated Magazine article from July 23, 1899.

One tactic was to loiter near electric fans: in offices, barber shops, and restaurants.

“When [fan loiterers] find a fan that suits them they plant themselves, so to speak, and remain as long as possible in placid enjoyment of the breezes furnished by other people’s money,” wrote the Times.

“Every proprietor of an electric fan becomes acquainted during the heated term with these electric fan fiends.”

Some people engaged in “violent exercise.” These are the “misguided people who, given a temperature of a hundred in the shade, will choose a century run on a bicycle as the most enjoyable way of passing the time.”

Golf, baseball, and tennis “also have their enthusiastic hot-weather devotees, as a visit to Central Park any afternoon will testify.”

Socializing on a roof garden was an option, or heading to the mall at Central Park to hear free music, or splashing around “gleefully as dolphins” in the fountain at City Hall Park—though the latter was reserved for newsboys.

You could always catch a cool breeze by riding streetcars, transferring from car to car to the farthest and coolest parts of the city.

“The happiest man of the season is one who has just discovered that he can ride from the Battery up to Hastings-on-Hudson for 8 cents,” states the Times.

Then there was the “soda water habit,” which caused afflicted people to guzzle all kinds of creamy, bubbly concoctions and risk “dyspepsia.”

Finally, the article took New Yorkers to task for dressing inappropriately.

“Young professional men get an idea that dignity is a matter of dress, and go about on hot days wearing high silk hats and frock coats that give one a high fever only to look at them.

“It is true that lanky young men with very lean calves affect knickerbockers in Summer, and stout elderly women appear in light, airy muslins that would be suitable for slender girls of sixteen, but beyond this, and the general appearance of straw hats and shirt waists, there are few indications in the dress of New Yorkers that Summer is with us.”

[Photos: soda water ad, NYPL; splashing in the fountain at Madison Square Park, LOC; the roof garden at the Ritz-Carlton, NYPL; a street car with open windows, NYPL; a free summer concert on the mall, NYC Parks Department]

The lonely vending carts under the elevated

Daniel Hauben’s “Mango Sunset” depicts a desolate summer evening under an elevated train and tropical fruit carts lacking customers.

Is it Upper Manhattan? The Bronx? If anyone recognizes the train tracks and the evening sun streaming through them to the street below, I’d love to know where it is.

Three ways New York used to cool off in summer

The city is no stranger to scorching temperatures; there’s the heat wave of 1911, the heat wave of 1899, and the heat wave of 1938, among others.

Imagine how oppressive it must have been a century ago, with no AC, no cool drinks from the fridge, and no skimpy summer attire.

But New Yorkers found ways to deal. One strategy: licking huge blocks of ice on a street corner with your pals, as these boys are doing in a July 1912 photo from the Bain News Service.

You could also find a shady spot in a park and just lie there in your jacket and shirtsleeves. This Bain News Service photo depicts men doing just that in Battery Park (no date).

And if you don’t have access to a swimming pool, why not jump in a fountain? Some boys attracted a crowd in Madison Square Park with that move in another Bain News Service shot (circa 1910-1915).

A twilight shadow dance on Park Avenue

Women stroll down Park Avenue at 34th Street—the evening sun illuminating their sheer dresses—in Martin Lewis’ 1930 drypoint print “Shadow Dance.”

It’s a scene played out on city streets every warm summer night.

And hey, if you have $50,000, this lovely example of Lewis’ work can hang in your home.

A summer scene at Battery Park in 1917

The straw hats the men are wearing give the season away. They’re strolling through Battery Park beside what was once Castle Garden Fort, now the home of the New York Aquarium, according to the back of the postcard.

The card continues: “Here can be seen in large glass tanks the most valuable and complete collection of fish, seals, turtles, and other deep sea inhabitants in existence.

“At the entrance of the harbor is the Statue of Liberty and a little further up is Ellis Island, through which all immigrants landing in New York City must pass.”

The aquarium relocated to Coney Island in 1957.

New York’s earliest ice cream man

Well, he could be, perhaps—with a wooden cart rather than a truck and a bucket of ice instead of a freezer.

He’s not quite Mister Softee or the Good Humor guy, but then, his cart probably doesn’t play the same jingle over and over again.

This sketch is dated August 11, 1885 and is titled “A Summer Scene in the Streets of New York—the Ice Cream Man.” It’s from the NYPL.

“Summer Electric Storm”

Painter and Greenwich Village resident Cecil Bell captures a moody lightning storm on a New York summer night in 1938.

It may have been painted from his own apartment at 19 East Ninth Street. Bell, who studied under John Sloan at the Art Students League, liked to work from his rooftop, according to biographical information provided by the Museum of the City of New York, which owns the painting.

The tall apartment building on the left dwarfing the Village’s tenements and churches is One Fifth Avenue, erected in 1929 at the foot of Washington Square Park.