Today’s Rotting Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Horses suffered greatly during the New York City heat wave of 1896. New Yorkers were utterly dependent on the tens of thousands of horses that plied the streets of Manhattan, drawing carriages, transporting goods, and pulling the passenger cars of the several aboveground railways. While the final human death toll from the heat would number around 1,300, the heat wave also took the lives of thousands of horses. One paper described the treatment of sunstroke in horses: “A pail of water dashed over the head, a couple of kicks to see how much life was really left in them – this was about the best the sunstruck horse got. And then a bullet put him out of his misery.”
On a normal day perhaps two hundred horses might die. Their carcasses were routinely left on the street until removed by the city. 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.
Children playing beside a dead horse, New York City.
Culled from: Hot Time in the Old Town
Crime Scene Du Jour!
Luc Sante’s Evidence is a compelling collection of crime scene photographs taken by the New York City Police Department between 1914 and 1918. The images are always intriguing, often mysterious, sometimes artistic, occasionally shocking, and reliably graphic. The appendix contains a detailed explanation of all known facts regarding each image (include applicable newspaper clippings) and much reasonable speculation on those images where the facts are lost to history. Here’s an example:
No caption. A calendar dates the scene as June 1917. There is no sign of struggle in this meticulously ordered room, and the only possible indication of violence is the dull stain to the right of the body, which may or may not be blood. The undressing is undoubtedly the work of police or doctors, but if the victim had been white the responsible parties would unquestionably have tucked his penis back into his pants. There is a definite distension of the stomach that looks distinctly different from mere fat. Maybe poison was the cause.