This essay examines visual records to reveal summer heat’s effect on the body, on living spaces, and on Manhattan’s cityscape due to the urban heat island, the phenomenon of significantly warmer temperatures in metropolitan areas due to concentrated development and human activities. Although the bodily experience of heat and humidity is intimate and subjective, summer temperatures, especially when amplified by a heat wave, fostered collective seasonal suffering in the pre-“climate-controlled” city. This essay analyzes a political cartoon, news photography, and the work of two artists associated with American realism and the Ashcan School of art. While urban historians have long recognized the environment in cities, their studies have focused on physical places such as parks rather than on more elusive categories of nature such as weather and climate. A history of urbanites’ sensory experience of heat-as-environment therefore waits to be told. The interaction of weather with New York’s pavement, brick, and stone created a summer heatscape; visual archives of this phenomenon foreground the materiality of both the body and the urban environment. They make visible the seasonal feeling of, and environmental challenges inherent to, Manhattan’s dense tenement districts.
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