Air Conditioning

The advent early in the 20th century of mechanical airconditioning systems designed to simultaneously control indoor heat and humidity helped to reshape urban America. As its use spread, starting in the nation's largest, wealthiest, and most important cities, the rhythms of city life changed as buildings and work schedules responded to the promise and problems of a new kind of indoor control. After World War II, air conditioning would play a central role in the ascendancy of Sun Belt metropolitan areas.

Worries about summer heat and humidity predated the arrival of systems designed to fix them. As cities like New York, Chicago, and St. Louis grew in population, industrial might, and building density in the late 19th century, thermal comfort and temperature control became life-or-death concerns. While dozens, mainly children, died daily of heat stroke in congested slums, wealthy urbanites fled city summers for cooler mountain and shore locations. In major cities, theaters, department stores, and museums catering to the middle and upper classes would close for much of the summer.

The success of refrigerated cold storage facilities in several cities by the late 1880s provoked engineers and others to consider how to bring similar coolness to spaces inhabited by humans. One pioneer was heating and ventilating engineer Alfred R. Wolff, who in 1889 equipped New York's Carnegie Hall with air ducts that could hold ice for summer cooling and in 1902 designed a cooling system for the New York Stock Exchange's new trading room.

That same year, Willis Haviland Carrier, an engineer employed by Buffalo Forge, designed what is generally considered the world's first modern airconditioning system for Brooklyn's Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company. On humid summer days, inks would smudge the colorful covers of Judge, a national political humor magazine. Carrier's system of coldwater pipes, sprays, and circulators attempted to keep relative humidity at 55 percent and the summertime indoor temperature at 80 degrees.

Despite these projects, it would be some 15 years before cooling technology would become a significant presence in U.S. cities. At first, heat and humidity control systems were marketed not for human comfort but to enable consistent and efficient industrial processes. Only when air conditioning went to [Page 19]the movies did it begin to become a fixture of urban life. In 1917, Chicago entrepreneurs Barney Balaban and Sam Katz opened the Central Park Theater, the world's first movie house to use mechanical cooling rather than fans blowing over blocks of ice. By the 1920s, “picture palaces,” accommodating 2,000 or more moviegoers at a time, occupied prime urban real estate in the Northeast and Midwest. In 1925, Willis Carrier's company outfitted the Rivoli in Times Square with bypasses meant to gently infuse cool air instead of blasting icy breezes at foot level. During the Depression, smaller theaters, especially in the South and West, began installing more compact and efficient cooling units as moviegoing for both entertainment and heat relief purposes soared, marking the beginning of the summer “blockbuster” season.

Soon, other city institutions were feeling the heat. In 1925, the 21-story J. L. Hudson's on Detroit's Woodward Avenue became the nation's first airconditioned department store. For many years, only its Bargain Basement was cooled, attracting low-class and middle-class Detroiters unable to leave the city during hot summer months. Macy's in New York's Herald Square, Filene's and Jordan Marsh of Boston, and Chicago's Marshall Field soon followed J. L. Hudson's and installed air conditioning. The spread of cooling in the economically lagging South was slower. Rich's of Atlanta did not air condition any part of its “great white store” until 1937, 20 years after it opened.

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