Read Online Close to Shore by Michael Capuzzo, Mike Capuzzo - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Michael Capuzzo, Mike Capuzzo
Tags: History
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waves from a sea of rooftops across the city. Crowded tenement rowhouses were steeped in odors of sweat and boiled cabbage, laundry motionless over dank alleys where children and dogs made retreat. The wealthy drowsed on a sticky Saturday morning, while the gentlemen of the press, dark stains under serge vests, reported “complete stagnation of the normal action of the human race” with outbreaks of “intense suffering” among the poor and destitute.
A baby died in the arms of her mother waiting in the office of the overseer of the poor to charge her husband with desertion. Another infant perished from sunstroke at the moment of victory in the Sixtieth Street Business Men's Association baby parade. A dockworker collapsed and died receiving a ship at port. A man had a heart attack reaching for the front door of his house. A young police officer suffering “acute mania from heat” climbed to the top of a five-story building and jumped off. July would transform Philadelphia into a tomb sized for a thousand new corpses, most of them destined for the local potter's field.
The warming air disturbed the order of nature at all levels. The Cruelty Society sent out a water brigade as thirty thousand horses faltered at their wagons. A crazed bulldog jumped back and forth between two porches, trapping the families inside until it collapsed and died. Three men braved the deadly currents of the Delaware River to cool off—and drowned, one with his head stuck in the bottom on a dive. A mystery arose on the river: A severed human foot, size seven and a half, surfaced near shore—a murder victim, police said, or a swimmer eaten by a large fish. What fish was capable of such a feat, police hadn't
a guess.
By midmorning on July 1, the migration to the sea began. Across downtown Philadelphia, thousands of Italian, Irish, Jewish, and Polish immigrants and working-class men, women, and children, laden with rope-tied rugs and straw hampers stuffed with towels, bread, and sausage, bottled water and beer, made their way to the trams. Crowds thronged to Broad Street Station, where the Pennsylvania Railroad crossed the Delaware River to Atlantic City, Cape May, Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Beach Haven. Newsboys on street corners shouted, hawking copies of the
Bulletin:
“Record Thousands Rush to Shore,” the headlines declared. They were day-trippers who would return before nightfall, blistered and sunburned but proud to have participated in the new fashion of beachgoing. The luckless, unfamiliar with the Jersey shore's legendary undertow, might not return at all. But the exclusive hold of the affluent on the ocean had fallen. It was the largest migration to the shore in the city's history. The railroads of the Industrial Age had opened the seashore to the masses.
Twenty blocks west of downtown, the Vansants' servants hoisted great steamer trunks into two automobiles parked behind Number 4038, near the rear entrance reserved for domestics. The trunks were laden with hand-fashioned silk and cotton clothing, damask linens, new wooden tennis racquets, swimming costumes, photographs and paintings, the portable Victrola. Both vehicles were filled to the rails (there were no roofs on cars in 1916) with luggage—and with the doctor and Louisa, their four children and friends, maids, cooks, servants, and nannies in tow. The Vansants traveled in the grand style of the last century, a time when old-moneyed Philadelphians packed carriages and boats to simple, elegant resorts to spend the entire summer. They were not especially comfortable with the invasion of the multitudes. In the words of Old Philadelphia social icon Sidney Fisher, “The masses in this as in everything else have destroyed all decency.” Suddenly, one rode a railroad car “crowded to excess with all sorts of people,” Fisher said. “This I have never seen before.”
The masses made travel an ordeal. Motorcars and carriages, electric trolleys and wagons, jammed the narrow
A baby died in the arms of her mother waiting in the office of the overseer of the poor to charge her husband with desertion. Another infant perished from sunstroke at the moment of victory in the Sixtieth Street Business Men's Association baby parade. A dockworker collapsed and died receiving a ship at port. A man had a heart attack reaching for the front door of his house. A young police officer suffering “acute mania from heat” climbed to the top of a five-story building and jumped off. July would transform Philadelphia into a tomb sized for a thousand new corpses, most of them destined for the local potter's field.
The warming air disturbed the order of nature at all levels. The Cruelty Society sent out a water brigade as thirty thousand horses faltered at their wagons. A crazed bulldog jumped back and forth between two porches, trapping the families inside until it collapsed and died. Three men braved the deadly currents of the Delaware River to cool off—and drowned, one with his head stuck in the bottom on a dive. A mystery arose on the river: A severed human foot, size seven and a half, surfaced near shore—a murder victim, police said, or a swimmer eaten by a large fish. What fish was capable of such a feat, police hadn't
a guess.
By midmorning on July 1, the migration to the sea began. Across downtown Philadelphia, thousands of Italian, Irish, Jewish, and Polish immigrants and working-class men, women, and children, laden with rope-tied rugs and straw hampers stuffed with towels, bread, and sausage, bottled water and beer, made their way to the trams. Crowds thronged to Broad Street Station, where the Pennsylvania Railroad crossed the Delaware River to Atlantic City, Cape May, Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Beach Haven. Newsboys on street corners shouted, hawking copies of the
Bulletin:
“Record Thousands Rush to Shore,” the headlines declared. They were day-trippers who would return before nightfall, blistered and sunburned but proud to have participated in the new fashion of beachgoing. The luckless, unfamiliar with the Jersey shore's legendary undertow, might not return at all. But the exclusive hold of the affluent on the ocean had fallen. It was the largest migration to the shore in the city's history. The railroads of the Industrial Age had opened the seashore to the masses.
Twenty blocks west of downtown, the Vansants' servants hoisted great steamer trunks into two automobiles parked behind Number 4038, near the rear entrance reserved for domestics. The trunks were laden with hand-fashioned silk and cotton clothing, damask linens, new wooden tennis racquets, swimming costumes, photographs and paintings, the portable Victrola. Both vehicles were filled to the rails (there were no roofs on cars in 1916) with luggage—and with the doctor and Louisa, their four children and friends, maids, cooks, servants, and nannies in tow. The Vansants traveled in the grand style of the last century, a time when old-moneyed Philadelphians packed carriages and boats to simple, elegant resorts to spend the entire summer. They were not especially comfortable with the invasion of the multitudes. In the words of Old Philadelphia social icon Sidney Fisher, “The masses in this as in everything else have destroyed all decency.” Suddenly, one rode a railroad car “crowded to excess with all sorts of people,” Fisher said. “This I have never seen before.”
The masses made travel an ordeal. Motorcars and carriages, electric trolleys and wagons, jammed the narrow
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