The Hottest Day in Chicago, Then and Now It's 2 PM and 102
degrees at Chicago Midway, and we seem to be closing in on the
all-time record of 105 degrees (temperatures usually peak
between 3 and 4 PM; never mind, it just dropped 19 degrees). The
prior record was set on July 24, 1934—an ill time for such a
record, in the middle of the Great Depression and the ongoing
extreme drought of the Dust Bowl. It was only anomalous in being
just slightly hotter than the rest of that summer. July 1934 was
intensely hot across virtually the entire country, with above-
normal mean temperatures covering the entire country that July:
The mid-1930s were a particularly calamitous time for weather,
with a frequency of heatwaves much greater than that of the past
few years, and it would only get worse (source: EPA). (The heat
wave index reflects a "four-day period with an average
temperature that would only be expected to occur once every 10
years, based on the historical record.") 1936 was the worst of
it—in some ways, the most e