How air conditioning remade America

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A friend of mine, visiting Brooklyn, drove down to Coney Island on a recent summer weekend. He remarked with some surprise that kids in Kings County still played in the spray of fire hydrants, “like they do in the old photos.” It’s true: Crossing the borough on the muggiest days of summer vacation, it’s not unusual to see a popped valve spurt cool water across the asphalt, transforming a street into a jury-rigged Splish Splash for neighborhood kids.

Yet such impromptu playgrounds seem to belong firmly to another era. Mid-century Greenwich Village, immortalized by Jane Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” teemed with children every afternoon. “This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys,” she wrote in 1961. “They slop in puddles, write with chalk, jump rope, roller skate, shoot marbles, trot out their possessions, converse, trade cards, play stoop ball, walk stilts, decorate soap-box scooters, dismember old baby carriages, climb on railings, run up and down.”

As Alex Marshall, a fellow at the Regional Plan Association in New York, noted in a recent Daily News piece, that description far surpasses anything you can find on Hudson Street today, or most other places in America. Our culture has changed. Childhood is now zealously supervised; in July, a South Carolina woman was arrested for letting her 9-year-old play in a park while she was at work.

The environment has changed too: Summer in the city isn’t as hot as it used to be, thanks to air conditioning. When Jane Jacobs described the “sidewalk ballet,” fewer than 14 percent of households in urban America had air conditioning. Today, it’s over 87 percent.

It’s almost impossible to imagine, dashing from the house A/C to the car A/C to the office A/C to the restaurant A/C, how hot and different the American summer once was.

One evocative recollection of the un-air-conditioned American city is Arthur Miller’s vignette “Before Air-Conditioning,” which describes New York in the summer of 1927. The street in those days was repurposed nightly as an outdoor dormitory; mattress-laden fire escapes lined the block like iron bunk beds.

Lacking that option, there was always Central Park, where Miller would “walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake.”

That was the year Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs; then came air conditioning and the reinvention of American life.

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