HYLAND
Slang-crazy New York had only recently come up with a
new catchphrase, a remake of an old scientific term, to
describe this situation: a "heat wave." Whatever it might
be called, it was guaranteed to make that hundredth
performance miserable.
During those years, America was realizing that a heat
wave was much more unpleasant in cities than in rural
areas: the larger the city, the more brick and stone and
human bodies, the more hellishly hot it felt. And New
York might be the nation's largest, richest and most
cosmopolitan northern city, but in reality its latitude was
more nearly equivalent to that of Madrid. As often as
not, its summer heat could be ferocious. Natives knew
this fact. Tourists were frequently surprised.
Visitors flocked to see Manhattan's "skyscrapers"
(another new catchphrase), and were dismayed to
find those looming buildings so badly designed and
so closely packed together that breezes were rare and
upper floors were like ovens. They trotted up and down
Fifth Avenue, gawking at the sumptuous mansions of the
wealthy; had they been permitted to enter, they would
have found the air inside those homes as hot, heavy and
oppressive as the atmosphere inside any slum tenement.
They had heard about the exciting crowds to be found
in the cobblestone streets … but the stones themselves
absorbed the burning temperatures of the daylight hours,
remaining hot well after midnight, bathing pedestrians in
