Today’s Heat-Related Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
John Hughes could not sleep. Like thousands of other tenement dwellers during the New York City heat wave of 1896, he had taken refuge on the roof of his building at 202 East Ninety-Eighth Street. Hughes made frequent trips over the course of the night to the local saloon, where he purchased buckets of beer called “growlers,” returning to the roof to drink. During one of these trips he met the building’s janitor, William Froome. “This makes thirteen growlers of beer tonight, and I expect to make it eighteen before I get through,” Hughes told Froome as he carried a fresh can in front of the street.
After drinking the beer, Hughes stretched himself out on the roof’s low parapet. A woman whose window looked out on the roof called to Hughes that he would roll over and be killed. Hughes drunkenly replied that his death “wouldn’t cost the neighborhood much.” Not long after, Hughes fell asleep on the parapet and rolled off the roof. He fell five stories into the concrete-paved courtyard of his building, where a police officer later found his crushed body covered with blood and the clothing from a wash line broken by his fall.
During the heat wave it seemed all of the Lower East Side could be found sleeping on rooftops or fire escapes. Inevitably people fell to their deaths. Certainly these strange and tragic accidents must be counted among the city’s heat-related fatalities of that killer August.
John Hughes was not the only victim who fell from a great height that night. Two-year-old John Herman climbed to the windowsill of his home on the fourth floor to get a breath of fresh air and fell. Luckily he did not fall all the way to the ground but was caught only two floors below by the fire escape. At Harlem Hospital he was treated for two broken legs. Mary Lessie, tired from the day’s work, fell asleep in her window on the third floor and fell to the yard below. She received severe injuries to her back and was taken to Bellevue Hospital. John Moxham, overcome by the heat while walking along the embankment at 199th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, fell down the twelve-foot embankment and lay there unconscious until a passing patrolman discovered him. Although an ambulance was summoned, the man’s injuries were so severe that he died before arriving at the hospital. An eleven-month-old infant named Lewis Citron was sleeping with his father on their building’s fire escape when the child fell two stories to the ground. He died shortly after arriving at Bellevue.
One did not even have to fall from a height to fall victim to the heat. An unknown man fell asleep on the pier at West Thirty-Seventh Street, rolled into the water, and drowned. His body was not recovered.
Beating the Heat
Culled from: Hot Time in the Old Town
Post-Mortem Photo Du Jour!
Mother Cradles Child with Large Head
Daguerreotype 1/6 Plate, Circa 1843
Culled from: Sleeping Beauty III: Memorial Photography: The Children