Ooh. I know this one. Parts of NYC still use a steam heating system that was first designed in the late 1800’s:
You should tell this guy.
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…
Thank you. There’s so many people responding with unhelpful answers.
Wow that’s neat
No, that’s heat.
Yeet the heat or beat the meat
Yeet the meat not the heat.
It’s from the streamed clams they’re having.
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.
I never thought of them eating artisan pizzas. I always figured they’d get some shitty dominos.
Ew, gross. They live in a sewer, but they’re not animals.
They’re teenagers, taste doesn’t factor in much after cost and availability.
Have you never seen the movie? The only pizza they ate was from Domino’s.
And in every other piece of media, it isn’t?
They wouldn’t do dominos they’d probably get a variation of Rays famous near them
90s dominos also isn’t today’s dominos.
90s Dominos was trash. Even Dominos recognized old Dominos was trash.
Truth. Whatever they did 10-15 years ago made it tolerable. Not great, but tolerable.
Product placement in a movie doesn’t count
They seem to have the only people willing to deliver to a drainage hole.
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.
Wow, that was quite a read, thanks. Amazing technology
Amazing for the 1800s
Whole parts of Eastern Europe still transport Steam for heating.
What you think of is district heating, it (usually) just uses warm/hot water instead of steam.
You are likely correct.
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
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
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.
That’s the steam from the melting pot
A new rat pope was elected.
Praise Cheesus
Thank you, much a-brie-ciated.
I love how plausible this is
Steam from the steamed hams we’re having
And you call them that even though they are obviously grilled?
excuse me for a minute
New sewer pope
Believe it or not. Very old infrastructure in the city. Still runs on steam power.
I swear I thought this answer was about as accurate as the one that said “dragons”.
How steampunk for probably the largest city in the world to use steam in this day and age? I love it…
I’m going to have to interject, NYC is the 11th [or 35th] largest city.
11th, OR 35th? Could you explain?
It depends on how you define the city, here’s my source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
I don’t know why they include the surrounding areas as part of the city population. The 5 boroughs is roughly 8 million people. If you live in jersey city, you shouldn’t be counted as part of nyc population
I don’t know why they care about population https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_by_area clearly land is more important because land votes not people.
That list is from 2018
NYC didn’t grow any more populous since.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/nyregion/nyc-population-decline.html
Doesn’t mean other cities haven’t grown. Especially Chinese tech haven and trade hub cities are blowing up. If New York didn’t grow, it probably dropped several spots.
Or 3rd or 76th.
There’s a really good explanation here:
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?
Hot. Moist. Air.
it’s steam not air
You can’t see steam. It’s not visible to the naked eye.
No it is Moist. Air.
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.
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
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
Yep. Detroit has this, too.
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
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!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.
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
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.
Are these not the norm for bank drive thrus now?
I haven’t seen a new bank branch open with a drive through in a long, long time. Most banks just have multiple ATMs in the drive through, as there’s very little you’d need a teller to do compared to what the ATMs can do now.
Ah I’ve never seen that. Big city? ATM vendors sucks… Can’t imagine banks here surviving without tellers. I’ve only seen multiple teller drive throughs and an ATM eating one of the drive through spots.
It’s true that most banks haven’t had new branches in a while. In Florida, a lot of old banks are being converted into Cannabis dispensaries because of their vaults. I hear they even repurposed the tubes as a delivery system.
Now? Banks have been rocking those since forever. If anything they’re much less common now
Oh shit you’re right. I think I vaguely remember banks having those when I was really young. I mostly remember the suckers they’d give us tho. Fuck those things are cool tho. We should bring them back
They’re still a thing. You can still find them at banks with drive thru tellers. My local department of motor vehicles has a drive thru for vehicle registration so you can do your inspection and registration without leaving your car. You send the registration documents back/forth via pneumatic tubes.
They left? All the banks still use them in the middle of the US. So do drive through pharmacies that have an extra lane.
The drive thru pharmacy I go to just has like a shelf thingy they can lift and push down. Not one of those cool tubes :(
Those things used to be on every single bank drive-up teller booth in the 80’s and 90’s.
As a European, the idea of a bank having a drive-through is just absolutely wild.
Haha Roosevelt Island trash system go pshew
I like the term “clogged mail”
