My father spoke about sleeping on the roof of the apartment building. Spent many Saturdays in movie theaters which were apparently cooler at least and swam in the polluted waters of the East River. Other than that, poor NYC dwellers did a lot of sweating.
My Grandfather from southern Italy just didn’t seem to mind the heat much.
My parents and grandparents went from steamy St. Louis to cooler northern Wisconsin for the summer. Not hard to do, since everyone in the family was either a student or a teacher, and when the students grew up, they became teachers.
Before my family got air conditioning (in St. Louis), we lived a lot in the basement in the summer. Since the house was built into a hillside, it was cool, and one side opened to a back yard, so you weren’t stuck in a dingy hole. We even had a simple, 2-burner gas cooktop built in to the basement wall so we didn’t have to go upstairs to cook.
We had one neighbor who built his new house on the same concept, but his basement was a finished living room, dining room, and kitchen. Bedrooms were upstairs. When you came in the front door, you went down to the living area.
Neighbors had screened porches, and these were often used for sleeping as well as daily activities.
I’ve seen houses built in the 19th century that were designed with passive air conditioning. All the ones I’ve seen have been 2 story houses which may add to the efficiency of the design. The attics had vents in them and there was a central vent in the upstairs ceiling as well as the ground level floor. The attic acts as a heat pump when the sun hits it. hot air in the attic rises out the vents pulling air in from the ceiling vent. That pulls air in from the ground level floor vent which is cooler cellar air. The cellar is vented to the outdoors so air can be drawn in. You can increase the efficiency of this by running intake pipes underground so that air is pulled through them and cooled to the temperature of the ground. In my area that would be about 56 degrees. The hotter the attic gets the more air is drawn through the house.
If it’s a hot cloudy day you could augment the process with a furnace to move air up and out but I haven’t seen a house designed this way. This is how tunnels were ventilated for fresh air centuries ago. You would put a heat source in the front of the tunnel fed by a conduit running to the back of the tunnel which forced outside air to be drawn the length of it.
Houses in the desert would use a water system on the outside walls for evaporative cooling but you would need a good source of water and a pumping system.
During the Depression, when summers in the 30’s were so hot, my grandparents told me folks took blankets to the park and slept outside.
Grandma didn’t believe in “the good old days” She LOVED her air conditioner whern they were available for homes. She and Grandpa kept that house cold!
Ancestors? I don’t have air conditioning now!
I lived in a cold part of New Zealand. We had maybe a month of decent summer weather each year, and mostly it didn’t go over 25°C (77°F) if that. It might mean a warm night, in which case we’d sleep on top of the covers. Otherwise we would just sit in the shadier parts of the house.
I assume my ancestors, who for hundreds of years lived in generally the same region I am from, did the same, even though they lived in flax-woven huts.
Ancestors?
We didn’t get mains electricity until 1963 so this is a current life issue.
We didn’t get an air conditioner until the late 80s.
The house are orientated N-S so as to get no direct sun on the windows.
Big verandahs around the homestead, homes with central corridors, external and internal blinds over the windows. 14-20’ or more ceilings. Planting big trees like peppercorns on the north and west sides of the house.
On stinking hot nights the members of the family would move around the house to find cooler corners to sleep. One night I recall when it was still over 40C at 2am the whole family was asleep on the front lawn. (The homestead is several miles from the front gate)
The biggest issue was keeping meat, butter, milk etc fresh.
In days before refrigeration we had Coolgardie safes to keep perishables. Some homes had half cellars.
My grandmother had an ice box. She got electricity when the ice man’s horse died and he stopped coming around in the early 1960s. (Tiny remote mountain village in NE PA.)
The house I grew up in was built in 1865. We pulled down the roller shades and closed the heavy drapes on the sunny side of the house during the day in hot weather, then opened the windows (from the top & bottom) at night. When it was just plain too hot to sleep we all wandered out to the screened-in sleeping porch.
I always wanted a house that had a sleeping porch.
I grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee without AC, but it didn’t hit 90 that often. Ms. P and I lived in a tiny studio in Manhattan with no AC or cross ventilation. I’m usually fine without AC until the team inside the house hits the eighties; with all the trees we have it has to be pretty hot for that to happen (and it actually just happened, so I turned it on).
Sleeping porches, shade trees planted near the house, awnings over the windows.
I survived my summer living in a garret apartment in Tuscany by sitting in a bathtub full of cool water, reading books.
Yep. Works quite well unless the heat gets over 100 degrees for many days.
Grew up in Las Vegas, in the 50’s.
We had a swamp cooler. I don’t think that qualifies as A/C. By the time you were eight years old, the brothers all knew how to service it. It was a necessity for survival.
My grandparents’ house in Central California (where the summer heat is routinely over 110 degrees) had no air conditioning. They had two coolers that ran on water. One attached to an outside hose and one that had to be refilled with water from the tap. Other than that, there were open windows and fans.
Today is a good example of what my family did in summers past. Right now, it is 92F in Chicago, 93F in St. Louis, but my porch thermometer reads 72F, a big jump from this morning when it maxed out at 68F.
And if that is too hot for you, just skip down to the Michigan shore and dip your toe in the lake, which is probably about 50F right now. You’ll cool off real fast, y’bet. The fishermen on the lake are wearing jackets while Chicago sizzles.
My family is from Galveston. Most of the older homes there have transom windows throughout the house to allow the Gulf breeze to blow away the hot air at the ceiling.
My ancestors moved to the western shore of Lake Michigan where it’s ‘cooler near the lake’.
Today it is in the 90’s about a mile inland. Here, within 60 feet of the blue cool waters of the lake, it’s 73 degrees.
Now some days it is in the 90’s or even 100’s right down out over the water, but more often than not, it’s tolerable where I live.
And on the bad days, we brought out the fans and lemonade and iced tea and jumped in and out of Lake Michigan (surface water temperature today is 55 degrees), and slept in the basement.
And now of course I can turn on the AC. But we need that only maybe 10 days of the summer. Sometimes much less.
I used to swim in Lake Michigan near the UP all the time as a kid, as well as the coast of Maine. I can acclimate quickly to cold water, but I can’t stand hot weather, especially hot and humid weather. It makes me utterly miserable. I have too many genes from the Alpine and Baltic regions and, the Greek and Sardinian isn’t enough to make up for it; the long hot summers suck all the energy right out of me and force me into air-conditioned interiors. Part of the problem is that when it’s cold, you can bundle up and add layers until you can barely feel the cold air at all, but when it’s hot, there isn’t shit you can do except take off your clothes and there’s a limit to how much you can do that and still go around in public. And even then it wouldn’t help. The only reason I’m not living in Nova Scotia year round is because my SO can’t hack it through the long winters, but I don’t really give a damn about that. I’d rather be huddled around a fire indoors for several months than sweltering in the heat for the same amount of time.
My Auntie Panty and Uncle “Elephant Ear” Ernie never had a problem living in Florida before air conditioning.
Do you also have a cousin named Kevin?
Ancestors? I have never lived in a house with AC. The house I grew up in did eventually have AC but it was installed after I left. Before that, we had an attic fan and various oscillating fans. In my opinion we didn’t need AC. In my mother’s opinion, we did. (She used to go to the store and hang out near the frozen foods to cool off.)
I have lived in southern California, Texas, Oklahoma, and now Colorado. The places I lived where I felt AC would have been a good idea were Okla. and Texas, but I lived in cheap places and didn’t have it, and lots of people didn’t have it. Fans, cold drinks, dips in the pool, little spray bottles.
Growing up, I had relatives in Tucson and Phoenix. They had houses that stayed pretty cool, and pools, fans, etc. I know the Phoenix relatives had a large tree that shaded the back yard, but even so they wouldn’t let us play back there when it was hotter than 110F. They got AC and then complained about the electric bill quadrupling.