With above-average temperatures predicted for this summer, New Yorkers are bracing for a scorcher.
The risks to health and safety are real. More New Yorkers die from extreme heat than from any other kind of weather event, with Black residents dying at twice the rate of those who are white, and with older individuals particularly vulnerable. Air conditioning, for those fortunate enough to have it, drives up electricity bills and carbon emissions, exacerbating climate change, which is what is fueling the extreme heat to begin with. For those of us who want to spend the summer outdoors, tree canopies are few and far between — and very much in demand.
Shade in New York City, it must be said, is a hot commodity.
For this reason, architects, urban planners, developers and environmentalists have been working on ways to temper heat and glare. Some are time-tested and some are new. Here are nine of them.
Updated awnings
Although window awnings took a hit with the advent of air conditioning in the 20th century, they are still prevalent in neighborhoods with one- and two-family homes. And they became even more so during the pandemic, when the city’s awning companies were kept busy with orders for coverings over terraces and decks for outdoor working and socializing.
With our love of fresh air restored and the need for natural cooling techniques an environmental priority, the trend continues this summer. The latest twist: retractable awnings tricked out with LED lights, Wi-Fi and sensors that let homeowners activate them remotely, said Jay LoIacono, a co-owner of Acme Awning in the Van Nest neighborhood of the Bronx.
Gazebos in schoolyards topped with greenery
Since 1996 the nonprofit Trust for Public Land has helped transform 225 asphalt schoolyards across the city into greener, shadier places.
Students help in the design process. Working with landscape architects, they learn to track the movement of the sun and plot out what parts of the yard need shade.
Blacktop, which absorbs and radiates heat, is replaced by spongier surfacing that sops up rainwater. Trees are planted. Gazebos with benches and specially designed roofs are installed. The roofs have built-in trays that are filled with lightweight soil and planted with sedum, greenery that helps dial down the temperature of the shaded space underneath.
At P.S. 107X, in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx, the principal, Katherine O. Hamm, said she envisions the new gazebo in the recently overhauled yard as a spot for reading sessions and art class. Before school ended, Luis Molina, 11, and his friends were already making use of it to hang out and talk. “It’s cooler in the shade,” he said.
Municipal park structures
Ever since Hurricane Sandy decimated the Rockaways, the Department of Parks and Recreation has been renovating the area’s parks and playgrounds. Part of these updates is the installation of shade structures to make up for the fact that it’s hard to grow trees at the beach.
Sturdy modernist structures — the department’s own design — are made of hot-dipped, rust-resistant galvanized steel. At the adventure course off Shore Front Parkway between Beach 101st and 102nd Streets, the canopies incorporate solar panels, providing power to USB ports where you can charge your phones.
Farther east at Beach 94th Street, a different, much larger shade structure serves as a gathering and event space as well as a gateway to the beach and boardwalk. Three overlapping curved forms made of structural steel tubes and mesh fabric arch over a stage and plaza. The design by Sage and Coombe Architects shades about 3,000 square feet and, seen from a distance, evokes the taut sails on a boat.
Courtside cabanas
At Central Park’s Wollman Rink, where pickleball courts have been installed, fabric-draped structures with a definite “Midnight at the Oasis” vibe are providing shaded comfort for players willing to pay for the privilege of sitting on sectional sofas in the shade and ordering sandwiches and craft beers with a QR code.
Despite the stratospheric cost of renting a court with a cabana ($325 for two hours, plus a $150 food-and-beverage minimum), they have proven popular for evening and weekend sessions — proof, perhaps, that if you shade it, they will come.
Shaded rooftops for the public
When the dreary old Mid-Manhattan Library was renovated recently, becoming the lighter, brighter Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, its strictly utilitarian rooftop was transformed into a lovely terrace that has become the place to be, particularly at lunchtime.
One reason for its popularity: A terrace addition housing a cafe has deep overhangs that provide ample shade for outdoor tables and chairs. Francine Houben, the founding partner and creative director of Mecanoo, the primary architecture firm behind the project, hid the building’s mechanical equipment in the addition’s angular roof, which she called “the wizard hat,” and had it painted green.
Private pergolas
Outdoor spaces are on the rise in new developments across New York City, and with those, pergolas. Training plants to grow up and on top of pergolas, as is being done on a second-floor terrace at 510 Gates, a rental building in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, doubles comfort: The leaves provide dappled shade and push out cooler air. “It’s like an air-conditioning system for the outdoors,” said Steven Yavanian, the landscape architect working on the project.
In hot-weather countries, slatted or perforated screens known as brise soleil (French for “sun break”) are built onto structures to block glare and heat, while allowing light and air to flow through. Now the designs are increasingly cropping up here, thanks to a revision to the city’s zoning known as Zone Green that allows for “sun control devices” on facades.
Such devices can take many forms. On the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center, designed by Morphosis, has an aluminum screen with cutout discs that covers the second, third and fourth floors.
Slats or fins on a facade can run horizontally, as they do on 425 Grand Concourse, a 26-story mixed-use building in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx designed by Dattner Architects. Or they can run vertically, as on a sanitation department facility in Manhattan, also designed by Dattner, along with the firm WXY. “I think you’re going to see more and more of this,” said Claire Weisz, a founding partner at WXY.
Sunshades
Curtains can be drawn to block the sun and blinds can be lowered, but adding so-called sunshades on the exterior of windows can buffer sun before it enters the building and starts heating up interiors. These devices are typically slender, inconspicuous lengths of flat metal that function as visors for the windows.
At Home Street Residences, an affordable housing project in the Foxhurst neighborhood of the Bronx designed by Body Lawson Associates, sunshades are on the top and western side of south-facing windows because most heat gain during the day comes from the southwest, said Victor Body-Lawson, the firm’s principal. They do not block light or views, he added, but they do help keep apartments comfortable.
Sunshades will also be added to a life science building designed by Perkins & Will, now under construction in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Architects said that the sunshades will minimize glare and reduce solar heat gain by nearly 40 percent.
Trees, trees, trees
The city’s 7 million trees do more than provide shade; they absorb storm water and carbon dioxide, provide habitats and, of course, add beauty. Studies have shown that exposure to plants can even reduce stress.
But the shade from tree canopies — their branches, leaves and stems — can also lower ambient temperatures by several degrees. “Trees are like little misters as well as sunshades, which is why they’re so powerful,” said Rohit T. Aggarwala, the city’s chief climate officer.
Tree canopy increased 1.7 percent between 2010 and 2017 in New York City, due in part to a campaign started under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that planted a million trees across the five boroughs. Today 22 percent of the city is covered.
Trees are not distributed equitably, however. Affluent areas have more trees, and thus more shade, than lower income neighborhoods.
Borough presidents have called on the Adams administration to plant a million more trees by 2030. And the City Council has joined a coalition of organizations known as Forest for NYC in putting forth a goal of 30 percent canopy cover by 2035.
The parks department is responsible for more than half of the trees in the city, in parks and on streets. So far this year, it has planted more than 13,100 of them and intends to plant 1,800 more by the end of June, with a focus on heat-vulnerable neighborhoods.
A new program to train tree pruners could ultimately help with their maintenance. A 15-month pilot project is scheduled to start with at least a dozen members of the parks department this summer.
“Our goal,” said Jennifer Greenfeld, the department’s deputy commissioner for environment and planning, “is to have healthy trees live a long time and provide as much shade as possible.”