Kara Murphy Schlichting

City summers can be joyful. But summer heat has long been a complex problem of infrastructure, economy, policy, and community. This project examines how extreme heat has shaped New Yorkers’ lives for more than 150 years. By the mid-1800s, New York’s builders knew that they were exacerbating how the city absorbed and stored solar radiation—its urban heat island effect—and that low-income and non-white communities faced unequal exposure to heat each summer. To address thermal inequalities, health experts, reformers and city leaders considered tree canopy, ventilated tenements, and pools, while business leaders embraced climate control technology. Yet many New Yorkers could neither afford air conditioning nor easily access cool pools and green spaces. In exploring the collision of rising global temperatures with the existing urban heat island, “Hot Town” tells a story of lived experience and science that explains the historical origins and contemporary stakes of the accelerating climate crisis.