When the City Really Sizzled

By TERRY GOLWAY

There's a good reason why Frank Sinatra crooned about "Autumn in New York." Autumn is the season New Yorkers ache for during the summer, especially after a blistering one, as 2010's has been so far. But thanks to modern marvels like air-conditioning, scorching days do not, except in unusual instances, bring death by heat stroke and exposure. Hot days don't often lead to crisis—except of course in the Con Edison utility's control rooms.

More than a century ago, though, New York was staggered by a heat wave during which temperatures reached the mid-90s—several degrees cooler than the 100-degree days already seen in the city this year. The 10-day heat wave, which began on Aug. 4, 1896, was a catastrophe. In "Hot Time in the Old Town," an engrossing account of this forgotten episode, Edward P. Kohn estimates that 1,300 people died in Manhattan and Brooklyn (the latter was technically not part of New York City at the time) as a result of high temperatures, high humidity and the unforgiving sun.

Summer's arrival in New York City in the late 19th century was no cause for celebration for laborers, children or the elderly. Mr. Kohn, an assistant professor of American history at Bilkent University in Turkey, provides a vibrant re-creation of life in the airless tenements of the Lower East Side and other crowded New York neighborhoods, where temperatures inside the sun-baked brick boxes could reach 120 degrees. With the tenements also "crowded, noisy, and filled with the stench of garbage, cooking, and stopped up drains," Mr. Kohn writes, "most residents sought refuge on their fire escapes, front steps, or the roof." Down below, "during the heat wave, almost every street had a horse carcass rotting in the heat, and the city was unable to cart away the massive number of dead horses."

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Not surprisingly, many of the human casualties came from the tenements, but in Mr. Kohn's calculations not all of the victims succumbed to high temperature. In a nice piece of research, he goes beyond death certificates to include other fatalities related to heat. "On August 8," he notes, "the drunken John Hughes fell from his roof, while baby Lewis Citron fell from the fire escape where he and his father were sleeping. Both died." Mr. Kohn adds these two to his heat-related body count.

Mr. Kohn's depiction of life in tenement New York is not a groundbreaking addition to this well-covered subject, but his research into the lives and deaths of individual New Yorkers is a poignant reminder of how precarious life was in the city's poorer wards. The book's stated mission, though, goes beyond a chronicle of forgotten tragedies. Mr. Kohn wishes to place the heat wave in the context of a particular moment in American political history, one that saw the rise of two young politicians: future president Theodore Roosevelt and 1896 presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

The book's subtitle makes the provocative claim that the heat wave contributed to the "making" of Roosevelt, who was president of the Board of Police Commissioners at the time. Mr. Kohn argues that Roosevelt's response to the crisis somehow helped raise his profile—although he had already run unsuccessfully for mayor a decade earlier—and sent him on the road to the White House.

"Roosevelt," Mr. Kohn argues, "was one of the few city officials even to suggest taking direct measures for relief of the poor" during the killer weather. Roosevelt emerges as an energetic, problem-solving progressive who prodded a lethargic City Hall to buy tons of ice, which his police department handed out to the poor free of charge. Roosevelt was "right in the thick of things" during the latter stages of the ice giveaway, we're told. He toured precinct stationhouses to check on distribution, and he directed his officers to make sure the ice went only to the most desperate citizens on their beats. This picture of TR in the arena, taking center stage in a time of crisis, is in keeping with our image of the man. Mr. Kohn insists that TR's actions made him a hero of New York.

The book's argument, however, is undermined in a single sentence: "Although Police Commissioner Roosevelt remained at home on Long Island during the height of the heat wave, his police continued to be in the vanguard of city employees responding to the crisis." Readers may be excused if they have to read that sentence twice. How was the crisis the "making" of TR if he wasn't even on the scene during the worst moments?

If there was a hero during the heat wave, it was the commissioner of the Public Works Department, Lloyd Collis, who had the Fire Department flush the streets with water to lower temperatures, shortened city employees' hours and ordered free public baths to stay open around the clock. While TR was cooling off in Sagamore Hill, it was Collis, in Mr. Kohn's words, who "continued to take the lead among city officials" in providing relief for overheated city residents.

Mr. Kohn might fall short in showing how TR's performance during the heat wave bolstered his reputation, but the author makes a better case for how the hot weather cooked William Jennings Bryan's presidential hopes. Bryan, a populist hero who scorned Wall Street and urban elites, indulged in a bit of political theater by choosing to travel to New York City—the "enemy's country," he called it—to accept formally the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1896. As bad luck would have it, he arrived during the heat wave.

The great orator was a flop when he spoke to a crowded, steamy audience in Madison Square Garden. Even rabid Democrats were in no mood for a long address, and the speech received bad notices. Bryan went on to lose the general election to Republican William McKinley. Mr. Kohn argues persuasively that Bryan never really recovered from the setback in hot New York.

Mr. Kohn does a wonderful job of explaining how a heat wave could produce a calamity for a city and a personal disaster for a presidential candidate. The author's insistence on also highlighting Teddy Roosevelt's role in the story detracts from the drama but does not ruin what is, in the end, a hell of a story.

Mr. Golway, the author of "The Irish in America," teaches U.S. history at Kean University in Union, N.J.