Conditioning
1 year agoOne of my coworkers, who is eighty-one years old, grew up in Morningside Heights. I decided to interview her about the history of air conditioning after I spent a traumatic week in an 81-degree office on the 22nd floor of my Midtown office building. I couldn’t imagine how people held full-time jobs during the sweltering Manhattan summers of yesteryear without air conditioning.
Her answer: “We had fans. Everyone had a fan in their office, and another small one on their desk. But you had to be careful not to sit too close to it because you could catch pneumonia. I got pneumonia twice from sitting too close to my fan in the summer. But also, you would take lawn chairs out to Central Park and Morningside Park in the evenings, and you would just sleep out there with a light blanket or a sheet. Nobody would bother you. You would even see people in their lawn chairs sleeping on the medians outside their apartment buildings. The doormen and the policemen knew everyone. It was very safe. There were only six million people in Manhattan back then.”
Indeed, people actually slept in lawn chairs outside in Manhattan all night.
She also recalled how aggressive air conditioning manufacturers were when air conditioning first went mainstream. Their threatening advertisements asked “Do you want to sleep this summer?” Of course, nobody bought them that summer because they had gotten on well enough for so long without air conditioning. “But,” she said, “That summer nobody slept. And then the next year we all bought air conditioners.”
