Phoenix Back Then

[Master Shake]

Originally Posted by DJipa

I heard that people would soak bed sheets and hang them in open windows. Much like an evaporative cooler.

Yup, I have heard that also. In addition to this, many people would just sleep outside instead of being inside where it was often hotter at night.

A few of the older buildings downtown (like the one across the street from the Chase building) also experimented with ice based systems, that somehow were able to circulate cool air throughout the building.

[synapse]

Originally Posted by Jnvlv247

I have been watching old movies on TV and some of them are in Arizona or Phoenix. I got to wondering HOW the heck people lived here without AC or anything like we have now.

What was Phoenix like before people started bringing all the trees and other foreign things from the east? and don't just say it was all desert :P

Well, don't forget, it's only ludicrously hot a few months out of the year. Most of the time it was quite tolerable. You can also make an evaporative cooler by hanging a wet sheet up and letting air blow through it - not perfect, but certainly in non-humid air a darn sight better than being in Florida.

Also, it cooled down more at night then. Now, the heat soaks into the pavement all day and radiates at night, so the heat goes up and up and up. Back then, the sun set, and the desert cooled down rapidly.

And also, you could escape - Flagstaff, Prescott, Payson...all of those much cooler than the Phoenix area, and not too far.

[roosevelt]

Most early hotels in downtown Phoenix had sleeping porches that covered the sidewalks. There were cots with straight folding legs and chairs. As far as I know there were no dividers between guests, just a long row of cots. On the front there were roll up canvas shades. Instead of windows, the front of the hotel had doors opening to the porch. Some hotels were several stories high in the case of the Ford and Adams hotels.

People at home, if they had no screened in porch would sleep outside on whatever furniture they could carry out. They would wet sheets and sleep on that plus mosquito netting.

[Arizona Mike]

They did have ice in the Old West - Tombstone even had an ice craem parlor that served something like a hundred flavors during Wyatt Earp's tenure.

They made ice by putting water in a metal container (about the size of a small beer keg) that had copper pipe wrapped all around it, with alcohol in the tubing and a hand pump attached. When you compress alcohol, it drops the temperature, so it dropped the temperature of the water inside and froze it. I always thought that was kind of neat.