By Gus Saltonstall
Stay cool Upper West Siders.
The National Weather Service has issued an extreme heat warning for New York City, the highest possible heat alert, through 8 p.m. on Tuesday. Temperatures have a chance of reaching 100 degrees as Central Park is forecast to hit a high of 99 degrees on Tuesday.
If a temperature of 100 degrees does register in Central Park, it would be the first time since 2012.
Temperatures are also expected to reach 97 degrees on Wednesday, before rain breaks the heat and conditions come back down into the 70s on Thursday, according to forecasts.
The heat has already started to have an effect, as thousands of people lost power in southeast Queens on Monday.
To complicate matters –Tuesday is Election Day — and tens of thousands of New Yorkers will be waiting on line to vote, including Upper West Siders. For those who are out and about and suddenly find the need to pop into a chillier environment, there are cooling centers.
- Read More: Upper West Side Election Guide 2025: Early Voting, Polling Sites, Local Races, Candidates
A cooling center is a community center-type building that allows members of the public to come in and cool off. Senior centers and libraries make up a large chunk of them, and some centers are only open to older adults.
Outdoor public pools open on Friday.
Here are all of the cooling centers open Tuesday in Morningiside Heights and on the Upper West Side.
Morningside Heights Library: 2900 Broadway
- Open: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
ABSW OAC-Older Adult Center: 221 West 107th Street
- Open: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Older adults only
Center at the Red Oak OAC: 135 West 106th Street
- Open: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Older adults only
Frederick Douglass Social Club: 868 Amsterdam Avenue
- Open: 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Older adults only
Bloomingdale Library: 150 West 100th Street
- Open: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Goddard Riverside OAC: 593 Columbus Avenue
- Open: 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Redeemer West Side: 150 West 83rd Street
- Open: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
St. Agnes Library: 444 Amsterdam Avenue
- Open: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
JASA Club 76: 120 West 76th Street
- Older adults only
- Open: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Find Aid Hamilton: 141 West 73rd Street
- Older adults only
- Open: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Riverside Library: 127 Amsterdam Avenue
- Open: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Goddard Riverside LSNC: 250 West 65th Street
- Older adults only
- Open: 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Library for the Performing Arts: 40 Lincoln Center Plaza
- Open: 10:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
The Harmony Atrium: 61 West 62nd Street
- Open: 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Find AID Clinton OAC: 530 West 55th Street
- Open: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
You can check out the complete map of cooling centers from the city — HERE.
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Cool! Thanks!
Our building circulated guidance for conserving energy due to stress on the power grid.
But have not seen any City information or media on this?
There were texts and emails from ConEd and the Notify NYC app sent out last weekend (preceding the heat wave). The NYC app is good to have because everything is timely.
If you have deliverymen bringing you things in this weather, please tip them extremely generously.
Because recent months have been wet, many building jobs involving pointing and brickwork are behind schedule. I was shocked to see and hear workers fully exposed to sun working on high floor rigs outside our building Tuesday morning. Thankfully I think they did not go out angain after lunchtime. Whew.
Cooling centers are woke (good thing)!
Now is not the time to tough it out, folks. Take care of yourself!
Hey Rag, and other member of the public – please don’t glorify the wasting of water from fire hydrants. Please contact 311 about running hydrants and report them, they city will actually turn them off and they want the public to report these more often. I reporting a running hydrant out in Crown Heights recently and the city shut off the hydrant ASAP. This water is paid for by taxpayers and is clean potable drinking water costing thousands to waste like this.
Also remember that road salt is leaching into the reservoirs that hold New York City’s tap water and could make some of it unhealthy to drink by the turn of the century as reported by the Times in March of this year: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/nyregion/nyc-drinking-water-salt.html
And then there is summer drought. And the massive amount of water needed to cool all the data centers being built for AI. Need I go on about the need for caution for overuse of this resource? Don’t glorify waste — if you see it, say something.
Thank you!
You’re right to report open hydrants and to conserve water but the water barely costs anything. It falls from the sky. It gets treated with chlorine, orthophosphates and flouride and then it goes through either a ultraviolet plant or a filtration plant. Your water/sewer bill represents the cost of running and maintaining a water and sewer system plus NYC’s 14 sewage treatment plants, but the water itself is a tiny part of that.
The sprinkler pictured is a water conservation measure – provides cooling, and can be turned on and off. Not the same as a running hydrant. But of course your concerns are accurate – wasting potable water is something we can all be aware of and do less.
That’s a city-approved spray cap. It cuts down the water usage from an open hydrant from 1000 gallons per minute to about 25. And the device on top is a magnetic lock to keep people from opening the hydrant. Unless you have the magnetic wrench that goes with it it’s very hard to operate. Yes I know too much about water.
As they say in Phoenix, “But it’s a DRY heat!” (They say so even when it isn’t — it’s good for business.)