Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York
Why is there steam coming out of the streets in New York
172 comments
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It's from the streamed clams they're having.
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Ooh. I know this one. Parts of NYC still use a steam heating system that was first designed in the late 1800's:
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You should tell this guy.
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Imagine having two keyboards just to put your hands in each of them and, like play 4 keys from each... without moving your arms at all...
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It’s not steam. It’s smoke from wood fired pizza ovens for the turtle men that live there. There was a cartoon documentary about them on tv a few years back.
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I never thought of them eating artisan pizzas. I always figured they’d get some shitty dominos.
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Steam from the steamed hams we're having
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And you call them that even though they are obviously grilled?
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excuse me for a minute
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Old steam heating system. They vent it when they’re working on a section.
Side-note: surprised by all the fellow New Yorkers i’m seeing in this thread. I thought yous were still at the other place.
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Yep. Detroit has this, too.
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Yeah it’s common enough I figured most knew, but a few years ago I went ice skating at the bryant park rink with someone who refused to walk anywhere near the steam. They thought it was toxic and didn’t accept my explanation, so we had to walk an extra few blocks to get around the steam work. Shrug
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I wonder if they could make it more efficient by running at a lower temperature and installing water source heat pumps in buildings. https://youtu.be/abGiNL9IT54
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That’s a good idea! My understanding is that the old steam network is slated for decommission and replacement by this program, basically a large distributed geothermal heat pump network that also harvests from major heat producers like data centers and provides both heating and cooling.
It will end the era of the steamy-street Sin City aesthetic but should be many, many times more efficient than the old steam system. Phase-change thermal transfer in HVAC systems is nearing 400% efficiency, so 4 times more efficient than the theoretical limit of direct heating, because it only uses the energy necessary to move heat from one place to another rather than produce it, and it works for both heating and cooling.
Right now I believe they’re piloting the system in NYCHA buildings (public housing) of neighborhoods outside the old steam network, like Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, but supposedly the plan is to expand to the rest of Manhattan.
Edit: corrected coefficient of performance
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That's just from the ruins of Old New York that New York is built on top of. The mutants down there are a steampunk society.
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A new rat pope was elected.
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Praise Cheesus
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Thank you, much a-brie-ciated.
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I love how plausible this is
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Believe it or not. Very old infrastructure in the city. Still runs on steam power.
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The New York City steam system includes Con Edison's Steam Operations, a piped steam system which provides steam to large parts of Manhattan. Other smaller systems provide steam to New York University and Columbia University, and many individual buildings in New York City also have their own steam systems. The steam is used to heat and cool buildings and for cleaning and disinfecting. It is the largest such system in the world and has been in operation since 1882.
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We have these in Lansing MI too! Part of the Satanic Panic back in the 80s involved kids playing D&D down in parts of the steam tunnels under MSU, which, I'm told, is much harder to do now unfortunately
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We have these in Lansing MI too! Part of the Satanic Panic back in the 80s involved kids playing D&D down in parts of the steam tunnels under MSU, which, I'm told, is much harder to do now
unfortunatelyvery fortunately since children don't know how to look out for a superheated steam leak and it was only a matter of time before a child got fucking bisectedFtfy
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Wow this makes me realise why so many movies set in New York I watched in the 80's and 90's often had steam coming up from the ground.
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That's the steam from the melting pot
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There's a really good explanation here:
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New sewer pope
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Some big cities originally heated their buildings by producing steam in one one centralized building and delivering it to large buildings thru pipes underground. The steam you see is from leaking pipes in this antiquated infrastructure. It's a very inefficient method if you ask me. Cities should offer these buildings low interest loans so they can update and be independent but they never take my advice
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District level heating is actually pretty efficient, some universities do the same thing on purpose to save on bills. Our relatively young city does it with the downtown skyscrapers for the same reason.
The other nice thing is that when you upgrade the heating system to be less carbon intensive, you can instantly have a ton of buildings all jump instantly to fewer emissions too.
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Afaik it's not inefficient if the heating is done via fossil fuels as big furnaces (especially in the past, especially turbo-fan super-fine grind coal ones) are much more efficient than smol ones for individual buildings (even if the buildings are giant).
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It's terribly inefficient. The efficiency is lost when the steam that condenses back into hot water is lost and none of it is returned to the boiler to be reheated. Rather than reheating this returning water which normally is at 120-160 degrees Fahrenheit, fresh water is used which in the winter here is around 56 degrees. Aside from this the cold water taken in contains impurities such as dissolved gasses which cause corrosion and dissolved minerals which can cause scaling that acts as an insulator raising the amount of energy needed to heat the water.
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Why not just have the city mandate the upgrades and then implement them? It's probably not that big of a problem for everyone involved.
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If it were that simple everyone would have done it by now. This method of heating your building is very expensive. Long story short, I'm in the HVAC business and two of my customers have made themselves independent. One was a private property management company that gutted an empty building and was successful, the other is a federal building that hired a private company to convert over and got screwed.
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Ah yes, the classic New York fog machine. Turns out it’s not for dramatic effect—just the city’s 19th-century steam system still doing its thing. Who needs modern infrastructure when you’ve got built-in Gotham vibes?
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Hot. Moist. Air.
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it's steam not air
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You can't see steam. It's not visible to the naked eye.
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No it is Moist. Air.
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The tubes are there to raise minor steam leaks above street level so they don't hinder visibility.
Another interesting underground quirk we have is our pneumatic tube mail system.
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Wait those pneumatic tube things are real?? I always thought it was like 1960s sci-fi. Like what they thought the future would be like
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It was the fastest way to get original physical documents from one side/floor of the building to another.
When I was a kid that was the standard way that banking drive throughs worked, too. You'd drive up to the multi-lane drive through, each station would have a pneumatic tube for handing off cash or checks or receipts between the car and the teller in the window. It pretty much ended when ATMs could start handling cash and checks.
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Those things used to be on every single bank drive-up teller booth in the 80's and 90's.
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Haha Roosevelt Island trash system go pshew
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I like the term "clogged mail"
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You know how when rockets take off in Florida there's lots of smoke?
Yeah there's a tunnel that goes from Florida to New York that the smoke goes through to help heat up the New York streets. So anytime you see smoke in New York it's cause a rocket was recently shot up in Florida.
TechnologyInfrastructure is incredible!
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They use a lot of steam for heating still
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Hundred plus year old infrastructure.
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Dragons.
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It's the only explanation that fits
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Volcano under the city
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Teenage mutant ninja turtles barbeque
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The CHUDs are having a BBQ. Guess the markets closed for the day.
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There’s a lot of things under the streets of New York, many of them cause heat. In order to cool them off the heat is vented outside and the warm moist air meets with the cool dry air and condensates into droplets that we see as steam. Same affect as breathing out on a cold day, you’re not creating steam but it looks that way because the warm moist air from your breath is condensing in the cool dry air.
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yo mama's farts
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That's not smoke. It's a space station.
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That's no moon, it's... oh, wait... shit.
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Wrong answers only:
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From the Steamed Clams we're having. Mmmmmmm, Steamed Clams!
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Illegal underground gay saunas
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german techno beats intensify
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Rat farts.
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New York rat farts, which are genetically distinct from normal rat farts.
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They smoking dope down there
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See it in Kansas City usually in the winter.
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That’s where they cook the Nuts4Nuts
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That's the breath of millions of poops.
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It's the ancient horrors beyond description, that are buried underneath the city, that are having indigestion.
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They might be smoke testing the system, looking for leaks! Smoke is pumped into water pipe infrastructure and leaks out of potential cracks or undisclosed/illegal sources (such as a company dumping into the sewer system without disclosing it to the city). They do this so they can locate and fix these sources so the water remains uncontaminated by groundwater seepage.
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Denzel movie used the steam pipes
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The Bone Collector would be a good punchline to a "yo mama" joke
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It's where they store the chemtrails before putting them in planes.
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video is in reverse, they are actually sucking them out of the air.
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Regardless of the truth, I prefer Diane Duane's explanation in the "So, You Want to Be a Wizard" novel, In that all of the steam in the subways are generated by a breed of fire worms. These worms, if left long enough, can grow to the size of a respectable and quite terrifying dragon.
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I loved these books!! Need to give them another read soon.
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This is the first time I've seen someone reference this book. I had a fun time remembering the title of this book when the only thing I could remember was "a book about wizards that had a talking car"
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The author is active on bluesky and she's actually quite nice and everything you would expect her to be.
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There's C.H.U.D.s down there.... https://youtu.be/BJckCjZ8Tdw
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Sewer mutants cooking up some grub.
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I immediately thought of this tune for some reason.
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This is the tune I thought of (apologies for linking a YT short, but it was the only version I could find)
There's also a longer YT Music version here, but I'm not sure if it's a premium thing or not.
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Something's happening in Zaun.
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They outlawed chem trails so they had to change tactics.
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Damn nobody likes a joke?
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Volcanism
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Umbrella Underground Laboratory
🤫 Shut up or they'll send Nemesis after you
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The dragon underneath is starting to stirr.
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What the other comments aren't mentioning is that, as you've probably learned, poops steam. Put a lot of poops under the ground (i.e. sewers) and that steam has to go somewhere, due to various complex thermodynamic principles that are probably beyond the scope of this question.
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With respect, I believe you may have confused New York with Cleveland.
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Despite the fact that poo steams if it is really cold outside, I have a strong suspicion they did not build a smoke stack to release a cloud of shit-smelling steam in the city.
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Based on media set in New York, I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
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It’s not poop. It’s people running hot water. That hot water needs to go somewhere and that somewhere are the sewers.
Hot water flowing through the sewers is warmer than the air temps. The air being vented from the sewers is also hot because of the water.
As the hot air comes into contact with cold air outside of the sewers you see vapor form as the cold air squeezes condensation from the hot air.
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172 comments