No feeling hurt here. Quite the opposite. Again, allow me express my "free exchange of information and ideas" and my somewhat amused feelings; You're a fucking moron!
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 delivered for two locations shortly after they fixed the pizza. In both locations, shift leads and managers came up with so many excuses for house pizza. More than any other chain I worked for. I didn’t connect the dots until later. The pizza must have been much worse before.
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.
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 unfortunately very 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 bisected
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
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.
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
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.
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
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).
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.
The difficulty was drainage. Isolated steam systems in steam era construction were designed to use gravity for condensate collection. It’s one of the reasons boilers are always in the basement of old buildings.
Steam system engineering was a well-compensated profession. A well-designed system would accurately predict the rate of condensate flow for every part of the building, prior to construction, and reflect these predictions in the slope/grade and diameter of the steam pipes. Inaccurate predictions resulted in problems like pipe knock (aka steam hammer) which you can often hear when you or a nearby neighbor partially close the shut-off valve of a radiator.
Since construction in the city had many elevations and could not be predicted in advance, there was no equivalent solution to facilitate condensate collection. The system had to be one way. And yes, it’s inefficient compared to modern systems, but was innovative in its day.
I can't speak for NY but that is the situation in Cleveland. I have a customer downtown on city steam. I watch hot water discharge to a drain at the rate of about 3 gallons a minute and there's 1440 minutes in a day. When it was built I'm sure they reclaimed most of it (80% return is considered good) but over time the pipe corrodes and you have leaks.
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.
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.
I made the same suggestion you did, all I changed was that the city pay for and implement the changes instead of handing out money to random people in the form of loans that may or may not get anything done.
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.
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.
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.
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. Technology Infrastructure is incredible!
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.
But cold water is also continuously flowing in. And as someone said, it perhaps cools down quickly. Is that all and all enough for such a dense vapor cloud to appear as in pic?
If it is colder above ground, than the ambient temperature of the ground, IIRC that's somewhere in the 50° F range, and less humid than the sewers, sure.
I think it's important, at this point, to differentiate between NYC CHUDs, and your common racist shitbag chud. NYC CHUDs are many things, but not racist dickbags.
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?
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
Ooh. I know this one. Parts of NYC still use a steam heating system that was first designed in the late 1800's:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system
You should tell this guy.
https://youtube.com/shorts/_MAXlkWLpfM
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.
I've never been called a boomer before, I'm far from it. Let me exchange a free idea and information; you're a fucking moron.
Sorry to have hurt your millennial feelings.
No feeling hurt here. Quite the opposite. Again, allow me express my "free exchange of information and ideas" and my somewhat amused feelings; You're a fucking moron!
Don't feed the troll, ignore and move on.
And you, sir, are an accomplished wordsmith! I mean, "fucking moron" twice? Brilliant! Thank you for you contributions!
Wtf? Bad form, Peter Pan.
Wow that's neat
No, that's heat.
Yeet the heat or beat the meat
Yeet the meat not the heat.
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.
I delivered for two locations shortly after they fixed the pizza. In both locations, shift leads and managers came up with so many excuses for house pizza. More than any other chain I worked for. I didn’t connect the dots until later. The pizza must have been much worse before.
I actually liked the crust after the change. It's not great, but it was better than most other chains.
Product placement in a movie doesn’t count
They seem to have the only people willing to deliver to a drainage hole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system
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
Ftfy
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.
A new rat pope was elected.
I love how plausible this is
Praise Cheesus
Thank you, much a-brie-ciated.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
Sources: https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/slowdown-in-outflow-but-no-robust-rebound-in-latest-ny-population-estimates/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/nyregion/nyc-population-decline.html
https://pix11.com/news/local-news/nyc-loses-thousands-of-residents-many-move-to-florida-and-other-states/
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.
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
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).
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.
Oh, I didn't know it was a one-way system in NY.
A weird decision, but I guess it lowered the initial cost a bit?
The difficulty was drainage. Isolated steam systems in steam era construction were designed to use gravity for condensate collection. It’s one of the reasons boilers are always in the basement of old buildings.
Steam system engineering was a well-compensated profession. A well-designed system would accurately predict the rate of condensate flow for every part of the building, prior to construction, and reflect these predictions in the slope/grade and diameter of the steam pipes. Inaccurate predictions resulted in problems like pipe knock (aka steam hammer) which you can often hear when you or a nearby neighbor partially close the shut-off valve of a radiator.
Since construction in the city had many elevations and could not be predicted in advance, there was no equivalent solution to facilitate condensate collection. The system had to be one way. And yes, it’s inefficient compared to modern systems, but was innovative in its day.
I can't speak for NY but that is the situation in Cleveland. I have a customer downtown on city steam. I watch hot water discharge to a drain at the rate of about 3 gallons a minute and there's 1440 minutes in a day. When it was built I'm sure they reclaimed most of it (80% return is considered good) but over time the pipe corrodes and you have leaks.
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.
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.
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.
I made the same suggestion you did, all I changed was that the city pay for and implement the changes instead of handing out money to random people in the form of loans that may or may not get anything done.
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"
That's the steam from the melting pot
There's a really good explanation here:
https://youtu.be/QRKzA8JlYBU
That isn't steam, it's smoke. Smoke from the smoked hams we're having. Mmmm, smoked hams.
I thought that was from the streets of Albany?
no, there it was the other way round, pay attention
Ah, so it was the streets of Utica.
Surely you mean smoked clams?
Teenage mutant ninja turtles barbeque
Dragons.
It's the only explanation that fits
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!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.
Could you name one thing that would cause heat under streets? It's kinda hard to believe tbh
Pipes transferring steam.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system#%3A%7E%3Atext=Con+Edison%27s+Steam+Operations+is%2Cbuildings+and+businesses+in+Manhattan.
When you take a hot shower where do you think that water is going?
Wouldn't it cool off in the sewer, though?
Yes but hot water continues to flow in.
And it doesn’t need to stay very hot. It just needs to be warmer than the outside air temperature in order for vapor to form.
The ground and continuous hot water input keeps everything insulated.
But cold water is also continuously flowing in. And as someone said, it perhaps cools down quickly. Is that all and all enough for such a dense vapor cloud to appear as in pic?
If it is colder above ground, than the ambient temperature of the ground, IIRC that's somewhere in the 50° F range, and less humid than the sewers, sure.
Yeah okay maybe. In the winter for sure
More hot water than cold water is flowing in. It’s a simple thermodynamics problem
How so, or do you just wanna sound smart
Subway brakes.
Ehhhhhhhh
Ask London.
https://hackaday.com/2024/12/04/the-london-underground-is-too-hot-but-its-not-an-easy-fix/
Hot. Moist. Air.
it's steam not air
No it is Moist. Air.
You can't see steam. It's not visible to the naked eye.
The CHUDs are having a BBQ. Guess the markets closed for the day.
I think it's important, at this point, to differentiate between NYC CHUDs, and your common racist shitbag chud. NYC CHUDs are many things, but not racist dickbags.
I'm just referencing the movie, but if you think that there are not racists in NYC, you haven't talk to enough New Yorkers.
the mutants who live beneath nyc are not the fuckwit racists.
Hundred plus year old infrastructure.
Wrong answers only:
From the Steamed Clams we're having. Mmmmmmm, Steamed Clams!
Illegal underground gay saunas
german techno beats intensify
Rat farts.
New York rat farts, which are genetically distinct from normal rat farts.
They smoking dope down there
Volcano under the city
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?
They use a lot of steam for heating still
That's not smoke. It's a space station.
That's no moon, it's... oh, wait... shit.
See it in Kansas City usually in the winter.
It's from the streamed clams they're having.
It's the ancient horrors beyond description, that are buried underneath the city, that are having indigestion.
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.
I loved these books!! Need to give them another read soon.
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"
The author is active on bluesky and she's actually quite nice and everything you would expect her to be.
There's C.H.U.D.s down there.... https://youtu.be/BJckCjZ8Tdw
Denzel movie used the steam pipes
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145681
The Bone Collector would be a good punchline to a "yo mama" joke
Sewer mutants cooking up some grub.
It's where they store the chemtrails before putting them in planes.
video is in reverse, they are actually sucking them out of the air.
They outlawed chem trails so they had to change tactics.
Damn nobody likes a joke?
yo mama's farts
I immediately thought of this tune for some reason.
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.
Something's happening in Zaun.
That’s where they cook the Nuts4Nuts
That's the breath of millions of poops.
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.
Volcanism
https://www.instagram.com/share/reel/BAfAUhVNLG
The dragon underneath is starting to stirr.
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.
With respect, I believe you may have confused New York with Cleveland.
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.
Based on media set in New York, I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
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.