You Heard Florence, Dog Days Are Over

Or: Dog Days’ Journey Into Night

There’s nothing like summer in the city. Everyone’s in a rush and no one looks pretty, or whatever the founding fathers said. This sweaty, soupy, six-month stretch is objectively unpleasant, as evidenced by the annual Memorial Day exodus of anyone who can afford to get the hell out. And yet, paradoxically, it’s got every seasonal ingredient Norman Rockwell American summer dreams are made of. Ice cream trucks and baseball games and fire escape fireworks shows, bikes (danger) and boogie boarding (don’t) and Shakespeare in the Park (arguably British).

Labor Day has come and gone, a holiday New Yorkers invented in the 1880s when 10,000 painters, tailors, and piano makers took to the streets to rally for the 8-hour work day. The Jewelers Union of Newark spearheaded said peaceful parade, and to respectfully terrify their robber baron opps, they hired a marching band to Trojan horse them, honking a Gilbert and Sullivan opera solo all the way from Jersey. Word got out and the real-life Monopoly man was like “call 911.” Forewarned of the flutes and feathered hats, the cops shit their pants and promptly started circling the area on horseback, wielding clubs. 

But perhaps the narc horses and crotchety newspapers that denounced the protest, citing “ulterior motives,” were onto something. These laborers’ short-term goal was, in fact, a freaking afternoon off, which they spent post-parade at a kegger (for real) in Wendel’s Elm Park (now the 92nd and Columbus Just Salad). Thoughtfully timed between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, that freaking afternoon off/kegger became a permanent American fixture, its origins—and the decade of strikes and riots that fought it into legitimacy—fading into the national periphery.

Before I just Googled it, I’d certainly never heard so much as a peep on the backstory, or why they named a holiday after the nemesis of all holidays, work. (“Union Day” was right there, or, might I suggest, “No Labor Day.”) All the Labor Day lore I’d previously surmised was that it’s my cue to go pumpkin mode, a day when we pronounce summer dead a month before the Earth does, and spend the subsequent weeks in a game of red-light-green-light with our sweater collections. “It’s fall,” we cry, blasting “This Is Halloween” as sweat pools in our knee-high boots, sunburnt in an aspiring apple orchard that is currently an organized forest. It’s what the Jewelers Union of Newark would have wanted.

Of course, No Labor Day signifies one thing besides summer’s murder: your last chance to wear white, lest you face the fashion police guillotine, and then the wrath of God. This arbitrary rule was also invented by New Yorkers, but rich people this time. Tuning out the strikes, the protest parades, and the tap-dancing pleas of the real-life newsies, those not guilded spent the 1890s gilded (sorry). Positively burdened with cash and huge-ass hats, they heeded the NYT’s rec and summered on the hip potato farms of the Hamptons. And surrounded by cows and beanstalks, towers and crabs, they stumbled upon a fairytale of their own: they could actually wear white outdoors for five seconds without getting covered in literal horse shit. Sweat stains be damned, this fantasy come true also boosted their albedo (I think) (#womeninstem), punting back a few rays of sun amidst the pre-AC, pre-electric-fan heat. The rich love an inside joke, so they tried using no-white-after-Labor-Day as a silent status symbol back in the city, until it was promptly Regina George nipple shirted by all of America.

For some, Labor Day is still a liberation. Summer in the city is brutal. The abysmal concrete:tree ratio can jack it up a whole nine degrees hotter than the suburbs. Heat waves of yesteryear have melted railroad tracks, boiled asphalt, and literally driven people insane. There’s no big Christmas tree, no reservoir-framing cherry blossoms, no Al Roker reporting live from a turkey balloon. Just eyeball sweat, full-body chafe, and if you’re lucky, an odorous odyssey on the Q to ride the Cyclone and get a concussion. Even some of the guilded flee the premises in search of less ritzy potato farms, because what’s a mosquito bite and a sprinkle of Lyme disease compared to the locust swarm of 19-year-old finance interns?

Still, we’ve commandeered September as summer’s sunset, a whole extra calendar month devoted to the leaves’ lingering farewell. (After all, who really remembers dancing in September? I remember almost zero of these allegedly 30 annual days—like, first day of school, maybe a wedding—which I assume is why Earth Wind & Fire felt the need to ask 500 times.) And so as I begin to feel passing pangs of snuggly fall cheer, I’m claiming this last chance to pay this past Labubu-laden summer its proper elegy.

Goodbye, summer. Goodbye post-5pm sunsets and crowded stoops. Goodbye street fairs and outdoor concerts and pickleball. Goodbye looking into people’s windows from the High Line and Sheep Meadow rosé buzz. Goodbye Smorgasburg and Governors Island and movies in Bryant Park. Goodbye mystical chime of children body-slamming the Little Island’s giant glockenspiel. Goodbye Central Park boats and your evil twin, Hudson River kayaks. Goodbye magical sunlit twinkle of lead paint on illicit rooftops. Goodbye baseball hat soft serve, the modern man’s Cracker Jack. Goodbye streets so empty you can chug an Aperol spritz in the middle of them. Goodbye Macy’s-sponsored barge launching explosives into the East River as a birthday gift to America—I guess I’m glad you missed the Jonas Brothers while they apparently performed on a roof mere inches below? 

Goodbye warm, bright whimsy and spontaneity, and hello warm, cozy nostalgia and introspection. The kegger is over, the white pants are in jail, and we have the painters, tailors, and piano makers to thank that there was a party at all.