City’s Newest Playground at Pier 42 Is Missing Shade

For months, Jennifer Aquilino’s three children have been asking her when the park they could see from their apartment terrace would open. They were excited, she said, because the Lower East Side, where they live, doesn’t have many playgrounds she feels safe taking them to, especially not those where she’s seen needles on the ground. “When they started building this park, I was like, ‘Great, at least we’ll have somewhere to go,’” Aquilino said.

It’s been a long wait. The Lower East Side park first began in a community-visioning workshop 12 years ago. In July, city officials finally opened Pier 42, a $33.6 million eight-acre waterfront park where a parking lot and a warehouse used to be. It offers sports fields for soccer, tennis, and basketball, and most important for Aquilino’s kids, there’s a sprawling playground with monkey bars, swings, slides, and sprinklers.

But when Aquilino took her children, she realized it was missing something critical: shade. During one visit, she saw a couple of adults with an infant huddled beneath a playground bridge, one of the only places to shelter from the sun. Jessica Lin, another mother in the neighborhood, took her two children there on a sunny day. But when she put her hand on the metal slide, it was too hot, and she told her kids not to use it. “I hadn’t realized how hot it was going to be until that day,” the 39-year-old said. After ten minutes, her 5-year-old was exhausted, and they headed home. Lin is in a Facebook group for moms, and she said the parents in the group have come to a consensus: Avoid the park until the fall.

Another part of the playground, this one for older children, has two small canopies on the structure but no shade otherwise and none for caretakers or parents.
Photo: Sukjong Hong

It’s not as if the city didn’t make any provisions for the sun. There’s a red steel canopy over the recreation deck, which contains an adult-exercise area and picnic tables, but it’s far from the playground. The Parks Department also planted nearly 100 saplings in the area. But young trees can take up to a decade to grow tall and full enough to block out the sun, said Daniel Vecellio, a geography professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who researches extreme heat and playspace designs. That’s if they even survive the hostile urban environment where they’re growing. Until the trees mature, visitors to Pier 42’s playground have nowhere to seek relief from the sun.

Aquilino is disappointed. Even the couple of times in the late afternoon when she’s gone to the park, it’s been uncomfortably hot. “The city should really take our children’s health in consideration,” she said. “Shade is something we need.”

The slides are burning hot to the touch even on a 70-degree day, and parents caution their kids not to use them.
Photo: Sukjong Hong

There’s no question that New York is getting hotter. As I was writing this, the city was undergoing its fourth heat wave; the National Weather Service had issued a severe heat advisory for another 24 hours, and the heat-index value was right on the edge of what the National Weather Service classified as “danger,” with a high chance of heat-related illnesses. With weather conditions like this, public spaces and parks without enough shade are essentially unusable for several months of the year, especially summer, when families with young children and the elderly might need to get out of the house the most.

In theory, parks should be cooler than the surrounding cityscape. But besides the lack of shade structures, Pier 42’s playground has a few other features that make it hotter. The “grassy” area is covered in synthetic turf, which heats up faster than real grass. The playground’s white surface also reflects heat immediately, due to the albedo effect, which makes the area feel hotter during the day. (This is why the snow-covered Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the globe from climate change.) In response to my questions about heat exposure in the park, the Parks Department said that it is looking into adding more shade

If a public space is going unused due to poor design, that’s not just a waste of taxpayer money, said Vecellio, the heat researcher. It’s also a loss for public health because for kids, playtime is exercise. “If those times are being cut because it’s just too hot to do anything, what are the long-term health implications that’s going to have?” he said.

Elsewhere, New York City has tested a few measures designed to block the sun and heat. The Parks Department has installed shade structures on the boardwalk in the Rockaways, and nonprofits have funded design changes that cool down asphalt schoolyards, including the installation of green-roof-covered gazebos. In Los Angeles, the city is adding trees, shade sails, and umbrellas to keep bus stops cool. If we look even further, in Abu Dhabi, one of the hottest cities in the world year-round, Kishore Varanasi, a senior principal and director of urban design at the architectural firm CBT, led the development of pilot projects to make public areas more comfortable in the heat. In his work, he said, designers consider the materials they’re using, the movement of wind, the availability of trees, and shade to maximize comfort.

A gazebo with a green roof being installed at a public-school playground nearby.
Photo: Sukjong Hong

“The success of any comfort from heat really is about a combination of these measures, not any one or two,” Varanasi said. “When you create a series of layers of these different elements, you get the kind of comfort that you need.”

A playground doesn’t need to be entirely covered by a canopy, for instance. If city planners can create just a few opportunities for shade — be it through trees or through sunlight-blocking structures — that’s enough for kids and their parents to catch their breath and cool off before running back into action. And these don’t need to be more expensive, Varanasi said.

Given all this, the scorching playground at Pier 42 feels like a missed opportunity in more ways than one. Along the water at Pier 42, tree coverage isn’t dense enough to keep residents cool and healthy, and the communities there are experiencing higher temperatures than others nearby. For residents of public housing at the Vladeck and La Guardia Houses bordering the park, a cooler green space and playground would have offered one of the few options around. While the neighborhood has a greenway along the waterfront, it isn’t that easy to access, especially with the ongoing resiliency-project construction, which also cut down many mature trees in the process.

When I visited one late morning, the playground was empty. After 15 minutes, one family visiting from Mexico arrived. They weren’t all that concerned about the heat; they seemed to have a higher tolerance for it. Only one other father showed up, but he left with his infant after about 15 minutes. The baby wouldn’t stop crying — was he hot too? I left after an hour of waiting, drenched in sweat.

It’s an experience parents in the neighborhood want to avoid. Aquilino said her kids are heartbroken that they have to wait until the fall to return to Pier 42. They want to go back, she said, but Aquilino won’t risk their health.

“During these months, the heat is brutal,” she said. “It doesn’t matter where you come from — your race, your religion, your creed. All kids will suffer from this.”