Ice Delivery in the City

[Ice Delivery from the American Ice Company to Emmanuel House], circa 1910, v1981.284.12; Emmanuel House lantern slide collection, ARC.136; Brooklyn Historical Society.

We recently had our first taste of pleasantly warm spring weather. It was lovely, but it also means that in about a month we will be heading into the moist, syrupy heat of summer in the city. I love summers in Brooklyn…but I have a refrigerator, and a constant supply of iced tea, iced coffee, and ice cream. Can you imagine facing the Brooklyn summer armed with only an icebox, and ice delivered to you once a day by horses?

The image above of an American Ice Company delivery wagon in Brooklyn circa 1900 hints at what life was like. Around 1900, people in the city were using 4 million tons of ice each year. People depended on ice not for iced coffee, but for equally essential things like stopping food from rotting.  An enlightening article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from July of 1872 details the uses of ice in the city for everything from cooling down “mint juleps, brandy smashes and claret punches” at the saloon, to preserving meat in the butcher shops and preserving bodies at the morgues. Ice wasn’t cheap, and you couldn’t have ice whenever you wanted it. Most of the ice bought in the city was natural ice from the Hudson and rivers in Maine, and prices soared when it was especially warm and there was a shortage — or, when companies like American Ice decided to try to profit from the desperation of sweaty Brooklynites by charging more. This is exactly what happened in the spring of 1900.

The American Ice Company was formed in 1899, bringing most of the smaller ice companies in the area into one “trust,” creating a monopoly on ice in the city. In April of 1900, the American Ice Company suddenly decided to double its rates, and also limited home delivery of ice from every day to three times per week. The company said that the changes were because of an ice shortage, but ice was a necessary part of daily life for people in 1900, and there was an immediate public reaction. There was an inquiry, and a series of scathing articles, and it became apparent that there was no ice shortage and that the company was simply trying to use its position of monopoly to increase profits while reducing labor costs. There was such a loud, negative response to the changes that within two months, normal rates and deliveries were resumed (from David Hemenway, Prices and Choices: Microeconomic Vignettes, 3d ed. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, Chapter 19, 189-203). While the resumption of normal ice sales was considered a public victory, waiting for the ice man, and depending on ice delivery wagons still sounds less than appealing. After seeing the image above, and learning about the history of ice delivery in the city, I will certainly appreciate my homemade ice cubes more this summer...

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