Sugared Ice and Underwear Balconies: Arthur Miller on City Life Before Air Conditioning

A beautiful piece from a June 1998 issue of the New Yorker:

Every window in New York was open, and on the streets venders manning little carts chopped ice and sprinkled colored sugar over mounds of it for a couple of pennies. We kids would jump onto the back steps of the slow-moving, horse-drawn ice wagons and steal a chip or two; the ice smelled vaguely of manure but cooled palm and tongue.

People on West 110th Street, where I lived, were a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes, but around the corner on 111th and farther uptown mattresses were put out as night fell, and whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear.

Even through the nights, the pall of heat never broke. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake. I can recall only white people spread out on the grass; Harlem began above 116th Street then.

The essay moves from the ’20s through the ’60s, with the advent of air conditioners that required pitches of water to be poured into them, and ends with a reminder that nothing is quite new under the scorching July sun: “The city in summer floated in a daze that moved otherwise sensible people to repeat endlessly the brainless greeting ‘Hot enough for ya? Ha-ha!’,” Miller writes. “It was like the final joke before the meltdown of the world in a pool of sweat.”