Creative History

  During the unbearably hot summer of 1916--while the horrors of the First World War raged across the Atlantic in Europe--Americans, who as yet were still considered neutrals in the Great War to End All Wars, flocked to the beaches along the eastern seaboard in record numbers. Nowhere was this early twentieth century summer holiday craze more apparent than along the Jersey Shore and at the beaches that were in close proximity to New York City--most notably Coney Island.  By July of 1916 Brooklyn’s Coney Island had already begun to come into its own known worldwide as America’s most popular summertime playground for both children and adults.  Coney Island’s nearest competitor for the title of America’s Beach in 1916 was about one hundred miles south, with a boardwalk all its own and just as famous in its own right, New Jersey’s Atlantic City. During the monumental summer of 1916 in France soldiers from all over Europe were slaughtering one another by the thousands in t...

            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.  Me...