So Hot Out it Could Kill You: The 1911 Heat Wave in the Northeast United States that Claimed 5000+ Victims

 

        The heat sets in on July 4, 1911 and it stays for ten deadly days.

An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people will die from Pennsylvania to Maine as a result of the 1911 Heat Wave.  Many, in an age before air conditioning, widespread electric fans or refrigeration,  will succumb to heat exhaustion.  

Others, living in cramped urban tenements and driven to madness by the unrelenting heat and humidity, will take their own lives to escape the stifling temperatures.

An elderly man in Boston named Jacob Seeger takes a revolver and blows out his brains inside his rented room just to find relief from the heat.

In Hartford, Connecticut twenty-eight year old Italian immigrant John Merlo, climbs to the roof of his boarding house in the middle of the night to try and find relief from the heat on the roof as he sleeps.  In the morning pedestrians find his body bloody and with its neck broken on the concrete sidewalk below.  Merlo, like many others, has fallen off the roof of his home and plummeted to his death while he slept.

In Manhattan, a young man who has spent the past forty-eight hours attempting to sleep outside, somewhere, anywhere in the shade, eventually jumps off a pier into New York Harbor shouting, “I can’t stand it any longer!”  He can’t swim and quickly drowns in the current.

In Harlem, a railyard worker driven insane from working outside all day attempts to throw himself in front of an oncoming train.  He has to be stopped by police and wrestled into a straitjacket.

It is so hot that mail delivery in every major city in the northeast United States is suspended for ten days.

Factories and offices are closed.

For over a week and a  half 5000 people sleep outside each night on Boston Common.  In New York City tens of thousands escape the heat by living outside in Central Park.

New Yorkers Sleeping in Central Park July 1911

The New York Tribune reported two days into the heatwave that, “A drunken man, partly crazed by the heat, ran out into the street and attacked a police officer with a meat cleaver.”

During the first days of the heat wave temperatures rise quickly once the sun comes up.  On the 4th and 5th of July 1911 it is reported that crowds gathered each morning in the street simply to watch the mercury on outdoor thermometers rise so rapidly.

The New York Times reported that, “the heat catches its victims in an exhausted state and kills most of them between 7 and 10 a.m.”

Temperatures in Nashua, New Hampshire reached 106 degrees Fahrenheit.  Boston saw several days over 100 degrees and even Toronto recorded a record high temperature of 103 degrees during the heatwave.  Farmers upstate in Woodbury, New York, reported that temperatures were so high that candles would literally melt if left outside or placed near windows.

The New York City Health Department, from July 5 to 13, 1911 issued the nation’s first ever heat advisory, which oddly enough, urged New York City residents to avoid direct sunlight and stay out of doors as much as possible.  1911 was still a time when many New Yorkers lived in crowded urban tenements with as many as ten to a family packed into a single room.  It was also still a time when men and women both always wore multiple layers of formal clothing and were resistant to shed even a single layer of excess garments in public for reasons of propriety.

Sleeping under a Tree 1911 Heat Wave NYC

Soon every shaded or grassy area in every city park was covered with writhing human beings attempting to catch even a moment’s respite from the unprecedented and oppressive heat and humidity.

In Hartford, Connecticut, temperatures rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit on July 4th and stayed there for almost an entire week!  Temperatures, even in the middle of the night, never once dropped below 85 degrees until July 13th nearly ten days later!

The Hartford Courant for July 8, 1911 when talking about the surface of paved roads, only recently covered with asphalt in the last several years due to the burgeoning popularity of the newly invented automobile reported that, “The tar surface is boiling like syrup in the sun making things difficult for vehicles as well as pedestrians.”

To this very day the Heat Wave of 1911 remains the single most deadly weather event in New England’s history surpassing both the 1938 Hurricane and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, combined, in terms of overall death toll.

Thousands died of heat exhaustion.  Hundreds died by suicide having been driven insane from the temperatures and hundreds more died, perhaps upwards of 200, by drowning as people recklessly leapt fully clothed into rivers, lakes, ponds and even the ocean to cool off.

Most people in 1911 had no idea how to swim because neither swimming pools, nor recreational swimming for either exercise or leisure, were common at the time.  And the vast majority of urban poor and working class at the turn of the twentieth century never had either the time, inclination or the opportunity to learn how to swim in the first place

Realizing that if something wasn’t done quickly to alleviate the suffering of New York City’s then nearly 2 million citizens, Mayor William Gaynor gave emergency authorization for ice deliveries to be made to the City from all across the United States and opened up the city’s coffers to pay for it.

Ice in 1911 was still an expensive luxury and usually only available to the well-to-do, but thanks to the initiative of Mayor Gaynor, throughout the first half of July 1911, large blocks of ice were regularly deposited on street corners in Manhattan and made freely available to the city’s children who, along with the elderly, were most vulnerable to the heat.

Mayor William Gaynor

To keep paved surfaces from literally melting in the sun, major cities all across the northeast United States including New York, Boston and Hartford freely opened up fire hydrants and gave residents free ferry and streetcar rides so that people could at least feel some sort of breeze while travelling either in open cars or on the water.

Between July 4 and 13, 1911 Department of Health authorities in New York City reported that over 600 horses died of heat exhaustion.  The bodies of these horses were left to rot in the street where they fell and the stench of rotting flesh became almost unendurable in tightly packed city neighborhoods.

After five sweltering days, on July 9, 1911, a line of fierce thunderstorms passed through the New York City area and finally brought some much needed relief to residents of the Big Apple and New England.   

The high temperature in Central Park on the following day, the tenth, is recorded as a rather seasonable eighty-six degrees, but immediately following this brief respite, the deadly heat and humidity returned with vengeance.

On July 11 the high temperature reached ninety-five degrees, but most New Yorkers at the time swear that it feels hotter.  As the humidity rises more and more residents take to the streets and live their entire lives outdoors.

Though the temperature, this time only hovers around 100 degrees for the next few days, the humidity begins to play more and more on the sleep deprived psyches of Americans all the way from New Jersey to Maine.

In dramatic fashion the New York Tribune explained the change in weather that occurred halfway through the great Heat Wave of 1911 thus: “The monstrous devil that had pressed New York under his burning thumb for five days could not go without one last curse, and when the temperature dropped, called humidity to its aid.”

Residents Living Outside in Hartford Connecticut

Finally, on the evening of July 13, 1911 another strong line of thunderstorms brought temperatures and the relative humidity back down to normal levels for July all across the northeast United States.

However, in one last cruel twist of irony, five people were killed by lightning strikes in and around New York City as the massive thunderstorms brought much needed relief.

Today, through a combination of heat stroke, suicide and drowning the estimated death toll from the Heat Wave of 1911 across the northeast United States is believed to have been as high as 5000 with 2000 people dying as a direct result of the heat in New York City alone.

The Heat Wave of 1911 is still the deadliest weather related event to ever strike the northeast United States.  From July 4 to July 13, 1911 in Philadelphia, New York, Hartford and Boston, it truly was so hot outside that it could kill you.