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Paper short abstract:

This project examines how summer heat burdens shaped New Yorkers’ lives at the turn of the twentieth century. New York City absorbed and stored solar radiation—the climatological effect of the urban heat island—by the mid-1800s. Climatological vulnerabilities compounded other forms of precarity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how summer heat burdens shaped working-class New Yorkers’ lives at the turn of the twentieth century. The city’s working class and poor had limited access to climate-control technologies before the 1940s and thus lived attuned, and exposed, to summer heat and humidity. Making visible climate-based inequalities, this paper documents how the densely-built city of brick and concrete absorbed and stored solar radiation—the climatological effect known today as the urban heat island—by the mid-1800s. It illustrates how environmental vulnerabilities build upon other forms of precarity of urban life. Bodies experience and process heat similarly regardless of how the census identifies race, but not all built environments process heat the same way. The “moneyed class” of New York, both whites and, by the 1920s, Harlem’s growing class of Black elites, purchased comfort via additional ice, escaping to newly air-conditioned theaters in the 1920s, or leaving the city. This paper focuses on people unable to escape overcrowded tenement living. As the city’s worst (and cheapest) housing, tenements were the traditional starting point for new arrivals. By 1900, over 82,000 tenements housed 2.3 million New Yorkers. The tenement combined with summer weather to create a collective experience of heat. I argue that the roots of the city’s climate equity gaps and traditions of residents and reformers who sought to mitigate summertime environmental challenges originated in the nineteenth century.