As it was, so it is.

‘Heat Hits Workers the Hardest’ by Stewart Carhart from The Daily Worker. Vol. 10 No. 139. June 10, 1933.

Five Die, Many Prostrated in Sweltering City Heat

NEW YORK. Five died and a number were prostrated as thousands of unemployed workers yesterday crowded every inch of space in the parks in an effort to escape the terrific heat wave that swept over the city. Nearly 100 deaths have occurred throughout the United States as a result of the seven-day heat wave.

In New York, while the wealthy sought relief in penthouses and in the country clubs on Long Island, groups of unemployed workers clustered over subway and basement gratings to take advantage of the cooler air blowing up from them. Even in the financial district, unemployed were so numerous over gratings in front of the buildings that police and attendants gave up attempts to “move them on.”

On the East Side whole families sat on the entrance steps and in the shade of the tenements to get what little benefit they could from the few breezes that stirred. The night before bedding was moved on the roofs and fire-escapes and hundreds in the lower East Side slept there until they were driven in by a shower early this morning.

In the parks in lower Manhattan the grass, as well as the benches, was covered with adults and children.

In the stores, workers at starvation wages, slaved in the dead heat, compelled by their jobs to wear a set smile and be “cheerful” to customers.

Truck drivers, helpers and other manual workers, worked as usual.

Workers’ children, their parents too poor to afford bathing suits, plunged around in the fountain basins in the same clothes they wear seven days a week.

Cool apartment houses with efficient ventilating systems were vacant, their unrented floors in sharp contrast to the crowded, sweltering conditions of workers’ living quarters families are crowded into dark, hot in many of which several rooms. This condition is especially true in Harlem and the lower East Side, where, as conditions grow worse, workers are packed into even more miserable and unhealthy living quarters.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1933/v010-n139-NY-jun-10-1933-DW-LOC.pdf