There are few memorials for Chicagoans who died from heat in 1995. But there are remnants.

Chicago Tribune

4 days ago

Emilio Aguirredied July 17, 1995.
He died because he was too hot.
He received a headstone in the back of Homewood Memorial Gardens cemetery just last month. We know very little about Emilio Aguirre. We know that he was 80 when he died. We know that he had a wife who died long before he did and we know they had a child, but we don't know anything beyond that fact. We know that he had siblings, but the last of them died in 1969. We know Aguirre spent decades alone, in an apartment on the North Side. We know that he was poor when he died, so poor the city of Chicago buried him in Homewood Memorial because that's where Cook County keeps a longstanding agreement to bury unclaimed, forgotten or unknown residents of the city.
Aguirre was buried in a long plot that holds 41 other Chicagoans who died the same week that he died, and for the same reason: It was way too hot in July 1995. The site is what some people would call a potter's field, and others would refer to as a mass grave.
There's no nice way to put it.
The headstone is small, the lettering gold, and gives additional, not minor details: Aguirre served in the military during World War II, he was a prisoner of war, he received a bronze star. Charles Henderson, a Chicago veterans activist who served in Afghanistan, is the reason Aguirre received a headstone 30 years later. He saw a flash of Aguirre's veteran's papers in 'Cooked,' a 2019 documentary about the Chicago heat wave of 1995. It took years of paperwork and research, but Henderson eventually learned that Aguirre, a native of Mexico City, crossed into the United States at 13, and despite his immigration status, served in the U.S. Army becoming a U.S. citizen.
At the bottom of his headstone, it says: 'NEVER FORGOTTEN.'
But that's more polite than true: Like many of the 739 Chicagoans who died of heat that summer, many elderly, many people of color, he was forgotten for years. His grave is one of two places in the Chicago area where you are even reminded of what happened.
Thirty years ago, on July 13, 1995, the temperature in Chicago was 106 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat index — what it actually feels like outside — reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Melrose Beach was packed long after dark with families lingering on blankets. Supermarkets humored customers who came to buy milk and eggs and stayed for hours, lulled by cheap air conditioning. O'Hare International Airport — six years before our current TSA checkpoints — welcomed those without travel plans, who loitered away days, curled up in books, paying for airport food.
That's one image of the 1995 heatwave.
Here's another.
Rows of refrigerated trucks, commandeered from the Taste of Chicago, to store the dead. Police wagons lined up outside the city morgue, dropping off one more heat victim, only to leave and retrieve many more. A mayor, through press conferences, decades before cries of 'fake news,' openly disrupted the unflattering mortality numbers coming from his own medical examiner.
It was possible to be surrounded by disaster that summer without understanding what was happening. Karl Koball, now a funeral director in South Dakota, was one of a handful of students at Worsham College of Mortuary Science in Wheeling recruited by the medical examiner's office to handle the overflow of bodies: 'I lived on Clark Street in Rogers Park, and I remember sitting in a tub of cold water when I got called in at midnight on a Saturday. When I got to the morgue, it was like another world. And I didn't get home until Monday.'
Even now, depending on who's measuring, the disaster lasted four or five or eight days, and was either the hottest period of time in Chicago history or merely one of the hottest. The exact duration of the heat wave — which, by most accounts, lasted July 13 to July 20 — is still somewhat difficult to settle on, partly because of all the dead Chicagoans still being found in homes and hotels after the heat declined to the low 90s. Even the final number of dead, 739, was only settled on months later.
That's not far from the 844 who died in the SS Eastland disaster on the Chicago River in 1915, but larger than the number of dead in the Iroquois Theatre fire of 1903 (602) and more than twice the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 (300). So why did the Great Heat Wave of 1995 become an afterthought?
Why, 30 years later, are we pressed to find plaques, statues, remembrances or simply everyday memories of such a relatively recent disaster? Why did local culture move on?
'I think some of the vagueness about this is residual from the mayor's office, which took the attitude of 'Let's not make such a big deal, OK?'' said Robert T. Starks, who founded the African American Studies Department at Northeastern Illinois University and became an outspoken critic of then-mayor Richard M. Daley's handling of the crisis. He never forgave Daley, and never failed to call out Black aldermen who remained silent. 'But 30 years on, I am surprised no one's stepped up to memorialize these people. I'd hope Brandon Johnson heads up something before leaving office.'
Eric Klinenberg, the Chicago native and sociologist who has done more than anyone in government or beyond to keep the memory of the heat wave alive, puts it this way: 'If four airplanes crashed into each other over O'Hare during a heat wave — roughly the number of people who died in the heat wave — we'd talked about it constantly. It'd be local lore. But for a lot of reasons, the 1995 heatwave got a strange status in Chicago.'
Those reasons, complicated and damning, are all too obvious.
The closest thing we have to a true memorial is not even in Chicago. It's the headstone of the mass grave in Homewood, a short walk from Emilio Aguirre's new marker. It's about 5 feet tall and sits at the back of a plot that abuts a parking lot for trucks and trailers. It's thoughtful, but unless you know it's there, you'd never know it's there. And while it means well, it avoids anything like context. The inscription reads: 'They died poor and alone,' then takes a contradictory turn: 'But were cared for and remembered by the compassionate citizens' of Chicago, in the form of a collective headstone. That marker, installed less than a year after the heat, 'gives honorable closure' to the crisis.
Klinenberg says that 'you can almost see a lack of an honest remembrance in how the city and local media framed the heat wave 30 years ago.' He laughs even now thinking of 'how much work it took' to make what happened seem as though no one was to blame. When the mayor's office published a report months later, he notes how it said many of those in need of help didn't trust the government, and that churches, community groups and 'ethnic associations' should have reached out in a time of crisis. It also twists itself into linguistic contortions to describe a heat wave as 'a unique meteorological event.' Even the title seems opaque: 'Mayor's Commission on Extreme Weather Conditions.'
Klinenberg, you can probably tell, has refused to let the heat wave fade from memory.
You could argue his account of that summer, the 2002 best-seller 'Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago,' is the only real memorial to its dead. Consider that Henderson learned about Emilio Aguirre from 'Cooked,' a Kartemquin Films documentary by a New York filmmaker, Judith Helfand, who was partly adapting Klinenberg's work. Both Henderson and Helfand didn't know much at all about the heat wave until reading Klinenberg, who, for two decades, has largely framed the way we have discussed that summer.
He grew up in Old Town and taught sociology at Northwestern University before leaving to become the director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He started 'Heat Wave' in the late 1990s, when he was not yet 30, and found the city had already moved on. 'I would go block by block asking people if they knew anyone who died during the heat wave and there were so many solitary deaths where the people who died were isolated and frail, you could live next door to them and unless they noticed a city vehicle take them away, they might not have know anything happened there. There was literally no conversation at all about what happened not long before.'
The theme of the book, in many ways, became: Why did we forget this happened?
The answer, he says, can be boiled down to: 'The people affected were largely poor and depleted and didn't get a lot of attention or sympathy from the city on a regular basis because they died — mostly on the South and West Sides — where Chicago expects bad stuff to happen.' But the book's power is in how Klinenberg walks through the systemic failures of both the mayor's office and the local media to recognize their own historical blindspots — there's an entire chapter on how the Tribune reported and, he writes, downplayed the severity of the disaster, rarely challenging Daley's handling of the crisis. (One Mike Royko column was headlined 'Killer Heat Wave or Media Event?')
He never heard from the mayor's office about the book but, through back channels in city hall and beyond, he heard he wasn't wrong, and that the Daley administration was not happy. When he spoke at book events, readers told him to expect his property taxes to spike, expect parking tickets. 'The very first event for the book, huge, thick guys came and sat in the front row with their arms folded and just stared,' he said.
When the New England Journal of Medicine reviewed 'Heat Wave,' it assigned, bizarrely, John Wilhelm, the deputy commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, the chairman of Daley's heat wave commission. He found the book 'fascinating,' but didn't appreciate how it portrayed the mayor's response or fixated on the race of the victims.
Ten years after the heat wave, to recognize those victims, Nicole Garneau, an artist from Chicago who had just read Klinenberg's book, decided she wanted to mark the 10th anniversary of the disaster. She decided to perform and document herself marking 739 deaths, every day of 2005, in ways profound and minor. She named the project 'Heat:05,' and the point, in a sense, was merely to acknowledge what happened here.
'In winter, I made a pile of 739 ice cubes on a beach,' she said. 'In spring, I lined up 739 blades of grass. It got very conceptual! I weighed 739 stones, dissolved 739 grams of sugar. On the 739th day of the strike outside the Congress Plaza Hotel on Michigan Avenue, I walked 739 steps with strikers. When it came time for the actual week of the disaster in mid-July, I decided, from July 14 to July 20, I would set up 739 cups of water on Daley Plaza. I had volunteers and as we did that first day, security came, of course. They ordered me to break it down or they would call the cops, and they called the cops, and the whole thing became so unnecessarily dramatic, and we just ended up doing it in Millennium Park instead. But I knew Daley, who was still in office on that anniversary, wouldn't want to draw a lot of attention to it, and sure enough, 10 years later, a lot of people didn't know that much about what happened. The city had failed to understand.'
It's the same reason why, five years after 'Heat:05,' Wiley Edmundson, a now-retired Chicago associate judge, decided to write a one-act play titled 'The Meltdown,' to tell the story of July 1995 from the perspectives of three sets of Chicagoans who saw the worst: a rookie cop making an unusual number of wellness checks; paramedics struggling to keep up with emergency calls; and a sanitation crew in Englewood that notices the elderly woman who regularly makes them brownies hasn't shown her face lately.
He wrote it as a one-night performance for Elgin Area Leadership Academy. He's written similar one-acts for the school about the Rwandan genocide, the Our Lady of the Angels fire in 1958 and Hurricane Katrina. 'I end up telling the same story again and again,' he said. 'Because they come out of feeling frustration at a lack of preparation and then the predictable outcome. Chicago made all kinds of changes for heat waves since then, but it's always easier to do the right thing after the fact, right? I admired Richie Daley but his downplaying of the disaster always bothered me, and sure enough, 15 years later, when I had conversations with people about the heat wave, nobody seemed to remember.'
The city does have one formal marker of the disaster, a plaque in the entranceway to a senior center on Ogden Avenue, on the West Side. It was dedicated in 1996 by then-alderman Ed Burke. When I went to see it recently, it seemed no one had ever noticed or read it, including those at the front desk. Such rote memorials are easily ignored. What's interesting about it is the dedication, which calls what happened a , though qualifies what happened, defensively, as .
'America is most comfortable memorializing war and violent attacks and the people involved with them and it tends not to grapple with natural disasters in anything like the same way,' said Alex Jania, who teaches history at the University of Chicago. Specifically, he teaches disaster studies and the environment, and is an expert on Japanese disaster memorials: '(The Japanese) bind the national character together so that everyone acknowledges the same risks, with the point of alerting people to some future disaster.'
A year ago, during the spring semester, Jania, who grew up in the Far South Side neighborhood of Hegewisch, had his students design and build a temporary memorial to the victims of the heat wave, taking them through issues of environmental injustice and climate change and the ethics of constructing a thoughtful remembrance. They made a temporary geodesic dome — a nod to the 'heat dome' that sat atop Chicago that summer — lined the inside with a brief history of the disaster and erected it on campus.
The difficulty with creating a lasting public memorial in Chicago, Jania said, is the heat wave did not 'inscribe itself on the physical landscape of the city,' the way a demolished building might. 'And more importantly, that summer was an indictment on how we deal with loneliness and poverty, and any effective memorial would have to call all of that out.'
Such a memorial would require the city of Chicago to acknowledge failure. It would mean recognizing the deaths of those Chicagoans who remain unrecognized in life.
'People don't want to be reminded every day of large tragedies,' said Ivan Rayner, a funeral director at A.A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. He recalls 'chaos, mass casualties,' yet 'stretched over a long period, and so personal' any kind of big encompassing memorial could be difficult. Helfand, the documentary filmmaker, remembers interviewing passersby on the streets of Chicago nearly 20 years later, 'and what they remembered was totally based on class and race.'
So maybe a cooling center can be a memorial.
Maybe a single day teaching the history of the heat wave is a memorial.
After I left that plaque at the senior center on the West Side, I passed a brownstone in North Lawndale, one of the corners of Chicago with the largest loss of life caused by the heat wave. Sitting outside was Richard Gross, 67, a semiretired Loop office worker. He was visiting a much older, more frail friend. Until he moved, they were neighbors here. The temperature was 96. Gross stopped by, just to see how she was doing that day.
That's a memorial, too.
Here's one last memorial of sorts, though most Chicagoans will never see it.
Inside an auction house on Western Avenue in Rogers Park are cardboard boxes. Each holds personal items, mostly papers and letters, left by 125 or so residents who died from the heat that summer and had no one to handle their burials or what remained of their estates. Their bodies were sent to Homewood Memorial Gardens and their papers to the little-known Office of the Public Administrator of Cook County; its whole job is to manage the belongings of residents of Cook County who die without any known relations.
Some of what is in those boxes was never connected to living relatives because, well, decades ago, the department wasn't nearly as good as it is now about tracking down relatives. What is in those boxes are many mountains of clues as to who the victims were.
Dolores Adams of Sheridan Road left her Medicaid card.
Lillian Boyer of W. 63rd Street left an insurance policy.
Jimmie Floyd of Rockwell Street left 80 cents in change.
James Grady and Edward Hoffman lived blocks apart in Mayfair and though there's no indication in their possessions that they knew each other, they are bonded in loneliness: Hoffman left behind a returned letter in which he asked a friend to 'please' visit soon, explaining that he lost his left leg and several fingers to frostbite; Grady left a letter from his mother written 25 years earlier, who explains: 'There is not much more I can say,' other than she is now too old to help him, but she will always love him deeply.
Geraldine Buttersworth of W. 69th Street left a birthday card from a sibling, who boasted, from her home in Iowa, that she had central air, and even signed the card: 'Hot enough for you?'
Luis Mendez left a black-and-white portrait of a woman with a bouffant and a large stack of Christmas cards from friends and relatives, many received at least 30 years earlier.
James Ordile left his Blockbuster card.
Others left wallets, some left savings books showing amounts too small to pay for groceries, never mind a funeral. There are passports and back-rent notices that would never be paid. Some folders contain Polaroids shot by investigators, showing small apartments and a fan in a corner. Jerry Van Houten of Aldine Avenue left a Post-It note apparently stuck to his front door: 'Cynthia from Michigan has been trying to reach you.'
Some left lives amounting to thick folders, some to folders so thin it's surprising there's anything inside at all. Emilio Aguirre, the Bronze Star POW who just got his headstone, had a thicker folder, containing his wristwatch, military papers and naturalization papers.
Charles Henderson was able to get Aguirre a headstone 30 years later because Aguirre had left the paperwork. But the fact it took so long for Aguirre to receive his headstone infuriates the veterans' rights activist. 'Someone back then could have easily seen what's in (his folder) and called an American Legion or a VFW hall and said 'Hey, we got this guy here…' Cook County wouldn't have even had to pay for a burial! Every veteran is owed that. Instead, someone just saw the possessions of a poor old Mexican guy.
'I truly believe that. Emilio didn't have to go to World War II, he could have returned to Mexico. And he didn't, then he died alone. But at the end of the day, it's poor people who suffer. No one wants to talk about that. Certainly, no one wants to remember that.'