SWELTERING IN NEW YORK

Evening Star, Issue 19407, 16 November 1926, Page 8

SWELTERING IN NEW YORK

HORRORS OF A HEAT WAVE New York, in a heat wave, is more of a scandal than a city. Lisbon, Constantinople, and Peking, all about the same latitude, have in the course _ of centuries developed a type of building which offers some defence to humanity. America, with the widest open spaces in the world, built New 'fork for the benefit of “ realtors,” and its apartment buildings are a horror (says Wilson Midglcy, in the Daily News’). New Yorkers have been driven to adopt a hot-weather technique. The foundation of it is the window cushion. Everybody seems to have cushions specially to avoid the elbow friction that long hours of hanging over window sills would produce. Perhaps this is a symbol of American luxury. But as you rattle by second and thirdstory windows on the “ helleyated ” railway and see hundreds of heads—black, white, and yellow—lolling out of windows to catch a breath of the air that isn’t there, you feel that New York has brought humanity to the level of maggots. It is a tragic commentary on the failure of human institutions and mass production to produce the elements of human comfort. _ New York is a city of jaded people. Grey and haggard, they stumble through their tasks like inhabitants of a city on which some terrible catastrophe has alighted. As the heat goes on, clay .after day, one never meets with a smile or any unnecessary courtesy. People who bump against you are too tired to apologise. The crowds of men and women in the underground trains sway against one another like a mass of frogs’ eggs. There are alleviations. Constant driving in motors produces a change of i ahr* but frequent traffic jams in do,ud§

of petrol vapor, with the sun beating down through the_ covers adopted as protection against it, leave little joy in motoring. , ■ ' There are the beaches, about a score of them of various social standings. They are highly commercialised, and when you sec that some outraged municipality is talking nonsense about the Pilgrim Fathers because some girl has gone to the beach in a car with a frock over her bathing costume, and gone straight in, you may hazard a guess, ns i have just discovered, that they have erected a municipal bathing house, “minimum charge Idol,” and are not without a commercial interest in “ morality.” All the same, thousands of people turn these beaches into a kind of wet Hampstead Heath. The litter is incredible. People wait for an hour for a dressing room, but, having got it, they live for the rest of the day in bathing costumes, eat, sleep, chide the baby, dip and dry from time to time, and then sleep in ranks till it is time to dress and catch a train for work.

The only real coolness is in the modern cinemas. Vast places that hold thousands of visitors, they are cooled by refrigerating plants and have a recording thermometer on view,, sealed and guaranteed to show the temperature inside. Usually it ranges about 75deg, but as you enter a wave of coolness embraces you like a welcome —well, like a welcome wave of coolness.

Boat excursions sail away from the Battery—trips to Coney Island, to Sandy Hook, or Atlantic Highlands, moonlight trips up ,the Hudson—but the breath that languidly comes in over the hows of the boat is merely the same stale air we - are trying to avoid. Yet .they dance, these wonderful young people. The sweating jazz players thrum and throb at them, and they

cannot withstand the lure. With the minimum of movement they sidle alono —men with flushed faces; the httu typists, pallid and damp. They are like moths obeying some law of Nature, even if it kills them. _ . But to-morrow an air blowing, as u from the eternal snows of the Rockies or the icefields above Canada, will blow beneath a sparkling sky, and New Yorkers, vivacious, energetic, highly-strung, will think again they have the best climate in the world —until the next heat wave.