Jeffrey Liu works in a hot warehouse on a hot dead-end street in one of the hottest neighborhoods in New York City. As he walked a half-mile to work on Monday morning, he knew it would be the hottest day of the year so far.
He reached Ibra Foods Importer & Distributor near Newtown Creek, in Maspeth, Queens, a few minutes before 10 a.m. He pulled down the brim of his baseball cap, which read “Thuglife Outlaw,” and drank the last drops from a little bottle of water. Then he shrugged and headed inside.
“There’s nothing I can do, man,” said Mr. Liu, 26, who lives in Fresh Meadows, Queens. “Look at me, I’m already sweating. And I’m just going to sweat all day.”
After a long spring that was unusually cool and notably wet, summer finally arrived in force. In Central Park the high reached 96 degrees, and the heat index, which combines temperature and humidity, hit 106, according to the National Weather Service.
At least the people in Central Park had some shade nearby.
The hottest places on hot days in New York City are the acres of asphalt at LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy Airports, according to a heat map published by the City Council. Smaller hot spots abound, usually where there are few trees, including a section of Jamaica, Queens, and around the giant food warehouses in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx.
The largest single zone of superhot average temperatures in New York City isn’t a neighborhood at all. It is the valley surrounding Newtown Creek, an industrial waterway of fetid smells and toxic sludge that divides Queens from Brooklyn. It is an area of factories, trash-transfer stations, food warehouses, nightclubs and auto body shops, with a smattering of residential streets hugging the edges. The valley contains sections of Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside and Maspeth in Queens, as well as Greenpoint, Bushwick and East Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
Perhaps because all those neighborhoods turn their backs to the valley, Newtown Creek can seem overlooked. In a report published in 2022 called “Overheated, Underserved,” Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, warned that many neighborhoods including East Flatbush, Elmhurst and Corona lacked the number of cooling centers required to keep residents safe during a heat wave.
Along the three and a half miles of Newtown Creek, the surrounding neighborhoods have just one cooling station, in East Williamsburg. (It happens to be in the aptly named St. Nicks Alliance, a senior center on, naturally, Frost Avenue.)
Those who live and work along Newtown Creek must contend with sewage smells and garbage, with noisy trucks and the overhead roar of jets flying into LaGuardia. Those who ventured out on Monday said they found these annoyances more concerning than the heat. So they made a few small adaptations to try to keep cool and then soldiered on.
“This is just what I do,” said Hilliard Greene, 67, who carried a full-size upright bass on the subway from the Bronx, and then across 10 treeless blocks in Brooklyn, to reach a group of fellow musicians in a loft space in Bushwick. “I go to rehearsals, and I go to shows,” he said, the black bandanna around his head soaked with sweat. “I’m a little winded, but the heat isn’t going to stop me.”
Others who spend time near Newtown Creek felt lucky to claim what space they could. Alexandra Velasquez lives with her two dogs and two cats in a 30-year-old cream-colored motor home. She usually pulls up alongside public parks to let the dogs, Milo and Cypress, out to run. But on Thursday she learned that a heat wave was headed for New York. So she drove around, looking for a parking space with shade.
She found it on Rust Avenue, a few blocks from Newtown Creek. It’s a good neighborhood for a motor home because it isn’t much of a neighborhood at all, she said. From her bus she could see no homes and few businesses, leaving few neighbors to complain about the homeless encampment on that street, which fluctuates in population every week. She parked as close to the sidewalk as she could, nestling the roof of her motor home under the branches of trees and weeds that border a seldom-used freight railroad.
There are days when she feels stuck in her predicament. She spent $10 on Monday morning to buy gasoline. It was enough to power the generator and keep the R.V. cold for 22 hours, but that and other bills make it difficult to save money for an apartment.
But when she looked around, she said she felt fortunate.
“I’m really happy I found this place,” she said. “It’s amazing how much work those little trees do to make everything cooler.”
She was right. Half a block away, Bolivar Ortiz sat shirtless inside his own R.V., also parked on Rust Avenue. The generator was broken, he said, which meant no fans and no air-conditioning. His trailer had no shade, and by 10:45 a.m. it was already baking in the sun.
“This is not safe,” said Mr. Ortiz, 40, who would soon leave for his job doing maintenance for a building in Manhattan. He plans to move into an apartment as soon as he can persuade someone to pay him $2,000 for the R.V.
“I work a lot,” he said. “I try to spend as little time here as possible.”
Near the southern terminus of Newtown Creek, in Bushwick, Sonny Cedeño kept a close eye on his son Gabriel, 6. As New York’s first hot afternoon of summer wore on, Mr. Cedeno noticed Gabriel was getting overheated. He was moving more slowly and had become grouchy.
Then a friend opened a fire hydrant, releasing a powerful burst of water across Scott Avenue. Gabriel became ecstatic. He ran into the spray, screamed, ran out, and back again.
Tuesday was expected to be even hotter.
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
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