This presentation examines how summer weather shaped New Yorkers’ lives before the advent of climate control technologies. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, urbanization came to exacerbate summer temperatures in New York through the urban heat island effect. Successive reforms and individual coping strategies but partially addressed heat emergencies. New York’s current climate equity gaps grew from socio-economic divisions knowingly built into the urban core in the 1800s.

Kara Murphy Schlichting is an Associate Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (University of Chicago Press, 2019).