Is
it hot enough for ya? Don’t you hate hearing that? Imagine a world in
which no one, except maybe the movie theater, had air conditioning. In
1998, playwright Arthur Miller wrote a nostalgic piece about the New
York City summers of his youth in the 1920s, during which people had to
use their creative juices to beat the heat.
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.
Reading the essay might make you feel cooler, or at least appreciate the modern convenience of air conditioning.
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