A simple way New Yorkers kept apartments cool during summer days before air conditioning

How did New Yorkers get through sweltering summer days before the invention and widespread use of air conditioning? Well, a lot of it depended on your income bracket.

If you were wealthy, you likely waited out the summer at a seaside resort like Newport or on a country estate cooled by mountains or river breezes.

Middle-class residents could head to less pricey vacation sites like Brighton Beach, with its spacious ocean-fronting hotels, or Coney Island for day trips by railroad or ferry.

If escaping the sticky city wasn’t an option, you might have relied on canvas awnings to cover your windows—keeping the hot sun out and making room temperatures a little more bearable.

Cheap, easy, and requiring no energy to use, canvas awnings were one answer to keeping cool, whether you lived in a posh rowhouse or lowly brownstone (like these, the top image of a row of homes on West 89th Street in 1915 and the second image of a tenement in Bushwick).

They might not have been very attractive, but could canvas awnings be worse aesthetically than all the window AC units hanging off New York City buildings today?

[Top photo: NYPL Digital Collections; second photo: New-York Historical]