The Heat Was On. So Were We: How Upper West Siders Made It Through the Meltdown

by Yvonne Vávra

Summer in New York is when we all get to shine. It’s our chance to show what we’re made of — that we’re tougher than the elements. The air turns thick, the smells get… complicated, we sweat, we sizzle, but we keep going.

Last week’s heat gave us the ultimate test of grit. And while we may have looked a little melty, we made it through. Because if there’s one thing hotter than a New York summer, it’s us.

On Tuesday, temperatures reached record highs. Just before 1:30 p.m., the mercury hit 99 degrees on the city’s official thermometer at Belvedere Castle in Central Park — the hottest reading in over a decade. Anyone remember June 18, 2012? Probably not. It was too hot for proper brain function. But that was the last time the Central Park weather station recorded a temperature that high.

Ninety-nine degrees in Central Park is nothing to scare a poet — if anything ever could. Charlie Levine, who just celebrated his three-year anniversary as a full-time poet, shows up to work at Strawberry Fields on 72nd Street almost every day, and Tuesday was no exception. Why would it be? The people of the Upper West Side need their beautiful words. And wouldn’t you agree that “almost decent poetry” (Charlie’s words, not mine) is worth melting for? So there he sat with his typewriter, in his office of one, in the furnace formerly known as Central Park, working hard while the airflow had given up hours ago.

His hot tip for staying cool? “Talk to the people you love and to your community. Don’t forget how much magic there is in the living. And bring a fan.” Trust a poet to answer a weather question with a philosophy. But there’s something to it: connection, gratitude, and a shift in perspective might not lower your body temperature, but they can make difficult conditions a little easier to carry. Another way to stay cool-headed — even while the heat’s melting your brain — is to hold onto something you’re chasing. For Charlie, it’s his dream of being adopted by a small business in the neighborhood as their resident poet. “If you or your store or your brand wouldn’t be opposed to trying out their own patron poet, please reach out.”

Not just poets, but the whole neighborhood was out there. Buskers, fruit vendors, park rangers, construction and sanitation workers, mail carriers, and delivery people hauling everything we didn’t want to leave the house for ourselves. Mr. Softee du jour was also there, and even the hot dog vendors were braving it out in sausage steam.

And then there was Ruthi, who preferred to keep her last name private. “I’m Ruthi from 87th Street, and I’m almost as old,” she laughed. I asked how she was handling the heat because, honestly, she looked like she was thriving with a lime-green wet towel around her neck and a giant folding fan with Flamenco dancers on it. On her way to Key Food, she was taking a break on a Broadway median bench. “You should’ve seen us as kids, before everyone had air conditioning,” she said. “We’d go to the movies on 88th and Broadway all day just to cool down. They’re selling shades there now.”

Had Ruthi been born a little earlier, she could’ve taken a dip in one of the city’s so-called floating baths — enclosed pools sunk into the Hudson and East Rivers, with the first ones installed in 1870. At 95 feet long and 60 feet wide, they were designed as a safer alternative to swimming in the rivers, whose strong currents claimed many lives every summer. But of course, the water could still get you — with its cocktail of industrial and human waste. Unsurprisingly, the floating baths fell out of favor in the 1920s, and most were shut down.

But in 1938, the city gave the concept a fresh start: three refurbished floating baths, now filled with filtered water, were attached to barges in the Hudson at 96th Street — giving one Upper West Side teenager their moment in New York history: “Claire Hyman, 9 years old, of 2 Stratford Place, was the first girl, and Pierre Grimes, 13, of 132 West Ninety-sixth Street, the first boy to enter the Park Department’s new floating swimming pools in the Hudson River at Ninety-sixth Street”, the New York Times reported on August 6, 1938. Roughly 200 people splashed in the pools during the first hour alone, but the revival didn’t last. Within a few years, the floating baths were abandoned again.

Fortunately, the weather has cooled down a bit, but the next heat wave will surely hit us soon. Who knows, it might even try to beat Central Park’s all-time record of 106 degrees, set on July 9, 1936. However hot it gets, we’ll make our way through it. We’ll schlepp a typewriter through the neighborhood, stand in sausage steam, and wrap our heads in wet towels. The main thing is, we know how to survive the sizzle and fan each other through it. Happy summering!

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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