Good writing

American Summer: Before Air-Conditioning : The New Yorker

This article by Arthur Miller, apparently from 1998, paints an evocative picture of hot New York summers of the depression era in particular.   He also reflects on hard work in those days:

Given the heat, people smelled, of course, but some smelled a lot worse
than others. One cutter in my father’s shop was a horse in this respect,
and my father, who normally had no sense of smell—no one understood
why—claimed that he could smell this man and would address him only from
a distance. In order to make as much money as possible, this fellow
would start work at half past five in the morning and continue until
midnight. He owned Bronx apartment houses and land in Florida and
Jersey, and seemed half mad with greed. He had a powerful physique, a
very straight spine, a tangle of hair, and a black shadow on his cheeks.
He snorted like a horse as he pushed the cutting machine, following his
patterns through some eighteen layers of winter-coat material. One late
afternoon, he blinked his eyes hard against the burning sweat as he
held down the material with his left hand and pressed the vertical,
razor-sharp reciprocating blade with his right. The blade sliced through
his index finger at the second joint. Angrily refusing to go to the
hospital, he ran tap water over the stump, wrapped his hand in a towel,
and went right on cutting, snorting, and stinking. When the blood began
to show through the towel’s bunched layers, my father pulled the plug on
the machine and ordered him to the hospital. But he was back at work
the next morning, and worked right through the day and into the evening,
as usual, piling up his apartment houses.

 Wow.