That '70s Summer

(Originally published 7/19/20)

It’s extremely hot today. The temperature is expected to near one hundred degrees Fahrenheit—a New York City scorcher in the midst of a bona fide heat wave. Once upon a time in the Bronx, I was undeterred come hell or high water. What now constitutes a long time ago, neighborhood kids went about the business of summer regardless of what the thermometer read or where the relative humidity stood. We played stickball on steamy asphalt without a cooler of bottled water on hand. In fact, there was no such thing as individual plastic bottles of water back then.

The contemporary Big Apple is being compared unfavorably to its 1970s forebear. In the mid-1970s the city was in the throes of a fiscal crisis—with bankruptcy a very real possibility—and rampant crime on top of that. I was a boy in those days and fondly remember that colorful snapshot in time, even if it was on the dirty and unsafe side. It still resembled old New York—the city my paternal grandparents settled in—with its mom-and-pop shops, Garment District, and the last of the automats.

Summer nights brought out stoop sitters en masse, who shared the increasing darkness with copious lightning bugs. I’ve spotted a smattering of those incandescent insects around this year, but nothing like the numbers in their heyday. Even the fortunate folks with air conditioners emerged on the warmest nights to spit the breeze. We youth played a game called “flashlight,” a.k.a. “flashlight tag,” immediately after sunset. No part of our days were wasted. I grew up in an outdoor world absent any uber-technological devices to endlessly stare into. So much was left to our imaginations.

When the heat was on, our local utility—Con Edison—often scaled back the power during the nighttime hours. Lights would flicker and ice cubes would partially melt and then refreeze. A cold drink was sometimes hard to come by and the poor excuses for ice cubes tasted foul. No air conditioning and sub-par ice cubes, though, were par for the course during the dog days. I called home an upstairs apartment. Seven of us lived in it with a solitary bathroom. I’m not complaining because The Brady Bunch had it even worse with nine people sharing one. They never appeared bothered by the heat, so I assume the Brady clan had some form of air conditioning.

As a kid, the heat of the summer was to be expected, endured, and celebrated as a welcome respite from the interminable school years. There were no air conditioners in my classrooms from kindergarten through college. I recall some days—particularly in the month of September—baking like a couch potato while learning my ABCs. But at least that was taught back in the day. There were few things more horrifying than hazy, hot, and humid weather in the fledgling days of a new school year.

My father always said that feeling the heat was in our heads. He wasn’t bothered by the melted, peculiar-tasting ice cubes, which he found no use for in his preferred brew. The old-school Italians grinned and bore it. Dinnertime in the dead of summer was not all that different than dinnertime in the dead of winter. In the hottest of hot weather, some adjustments were made vis-à-vis turning on the oven, but the frying pan continued to fry with the post office motto the wind beneath its wings.

That was then and this is now. I like having an air conditioner on days like today. And I’d rather not cook baked chicken and French fries this evening. Still, I miss the great outdoors in the heat of the night and heat of the day, too. Forty and fifty years ago, there were no safe spaces for us to hide in during the summer months and the recurring brownouts didn’t trigger any meltdowns either. So, please, let’s not compare the 1970s to 2020.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)