One Summer: America, 1927

worked or read or tried fitfully to sleep. Today we go indoors to escape the commotion of the city. In the 1920s, much of it came inside with you.
    Because the Fourth of July fell on a Monday, many workers enjoyed a three-day weekend, a marvellous novelty at a time when most people were still getting used to the idea of having any kind of weekend. The average working week in America had fallen fromsixty hours at the start of the decade to forty-eight hours now, so there was much more leisure time to be had, but the prospect of a three-day break was still rare enough to be thrilling. Nearly everyone seemed determined to try to make the most of it. By Friday all trains were packed and Pullman reservations were sold out for days ahead. Two million people were forecast to enter or leave New York during the 4 July break, the Times reported. The Pennsylvania Railroad laid on an extra 235 trains to help move the throngs, and the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad promised to make similar efforts for those heading north to Cape Cod and Maine.
    Closer to home, Coney Island reported a million visitors on 3 July, the highest number ever recorded there, and the beaches of the Rockaways and Staten Island absorbed perhaps half a million more – though oddly, officials reported, Staten Island’s own residents were mostly boarding ferries for New Jersey, where Asbury Park, Long Beach and Atlantic City all said they had larger crowds than they had ever seen before. At Atlantic City, the Boardwalk was solid with people from early morning to late at night on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
    Those who couldn’t get out of the city did what they could to stay cool. Many went to picture houses that were pleasantly air-conditioned – though ‘air-conditioned’ as a word didn’t quite exist yet. It would make its first recorded appearance, in the Reno, Nevada, Evening Gazette , the following month. For the moment, buildings that were artificially freshened were air-cooled, not air-conditioned.
    For the more thrifty, open-sided trolleys ran on Broadway, and for a nickel people could ride them for as long as they liked. Hundreds did. At night, many people lugged mattresses on to fire escapes or rooftops and slept there. Large numbers went to Central Park with blankets and pillows and camped beneath the stars. The playwright Arthur Miller, then an eleven-year-old boy growing up on 110th Street, years later recalled the surreal experience of walkingthrough an open-air dormitory: ‘With a couple of other kids, I would go across to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, beside 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 by the lake.’
    Those who couldn’t sleep often went for long walks, or for drives if they had a car. On the night of 3 July, ten people from a boarding house in South Orange, New Jersey – six adults and four children – packed into a car and went out for a drive ‘just to cool off’, in the words of the car’s owner, James De Cicco. One of the passengers, Mrs Catherine Damiano, was just learning to drive and asked if she could take the wheel to practise. De Cicco readily yielded it to her. Unfortunately Mrs Damiano stalled the car on railway tracks just as a train from the Pennsylvania Railroad – one of those being hurried to the city to help shift all the extra travellers – barrelled through. The train struck the car at 40 miles an hour. Mrs Damiano and all four of her children were killed instantly. Two other adults also perished. Two more were seriously injured. Only Mr De Cicco managed to jump clear. The seven deaths were thought to be the most ever in a one-car accident. Mrs Damiano’s unfortunate husband, who had a night job and didn’t know that his wife and children had gone out, learned the next morning that he had lost his entire family.
    All this, it is worth noting, was with the night-time temperature in the seventies. Before the month was out, both temperature and humidity would climb to far more punishing heights over much of the country, and many more would die.
     
    The warm weather and holiday spirits brought huge crowds to Yankee Stadium on Monday for a Fourth of July doubleheader between the Yankees and the Washington Senators. Seventy-four