An interview by ‘The Gotham Center for New York City History’
Melting Metropolis: An Interview with Daniel Cumming and Kara Murphy Schlichting
24th September 2025. Interviewed by Rachel Pitkin.
In honor of Climate Week — an annual event that aligns with the United Nations General Assembly and is run in coordination with the United Nations and the City of New York — Rachel Pitkin talks to Daniel Cumming and Kara Murphy Schlichting, researchers on “Melting Metropolis: Everyday Histories of Health and Heat in London, New York, and Paris since 1945.” Based at the University of Liverpool, UK, and Queens College, CUNY, Melting Metropolis is a Wellcome-funded project exploring how Londoners, New Yorkers and Parisians have thought and felt about heat and its impact on their health. In partnership with the technology nonprofit Urban Archive and Queens Memory Project, Melting Metropolis ran an open call for old photographs and personal histories that illustrate how New Yorkers have experienced the everyday heat of summer. You can catch the Melting Metropolis team at the American Museum of Natural History “Climate Resilience in Action” event Thursday, September 25, 2025, starting at 6:30 PM, as part of NYC Climate Week 2025.
Susan C. Ryan, Rockaway Beach, Queens, July 4, 2012.
RP: What is your collaborative project Melting Metropolis all about?
KS: Melting Metropolis brings together a team of nine scholars from history, ethnography, and geography, a community engagement manager, and a research artist to investigate how, in the past (as in the present), summer weather and long-term climate-based challenges were unevenly distributed across London, New York and Paris. With a focus on sensory, community, and cultural experiences in these three cities since the postwar era, we investigate how city dwellers have both enjoyed summer heat and sought to mitigate its negative impacts, particularly as it relates to human bodies and environmental health.
We helm Melting Metropolis's New York City case study. New York’s climate delivers summers that are hot and humid, and heat waves magnify the season’s environmental challenges. And New Yorkers have, since the 1790s at least, known that their city had an additional environmental challenge in summer: the urban heat island (UHI) effect (the phenomenon of warmer temperatures in urban developed areas). The effect is particularly pronounced in densely built areas with limited green space and high concentrations of heat-absorbing surfaces.
DC: While all bodies process heat in the same way, not all New Yorkers faced the same summertime heat exposure. It varied by building, by block, and by neighborhood. New York's built environment created the UHI, while class and racial segregation magnified residents' vulnerability to heat. The city's geography of thermal inequality became particularly extreme in some districts through government disinvestment, impoverishment, and housing deterioration, which together, heightened poor New Yorkers' exposure to the UHI. As a result, low-income communities of color bear a disproportionate heat burden in neighborhoods long undermined by environmental injustice. And heat exposure is a growing public health problem today: heat-related illness kills over 500 New Yorkers each summer, and Black New Yorkers are more than twice as likely to die from heat than white New Yorkers. [1] In fact, heat kills more people every year across the US than all other natural disasters combined. We have gotten somewhat used to 17-20 days of extreme heat each summer (defined as temperatures over 90 degrees), but a recent report from the New York City Panel on Climate Change projects that in the next 25 years the city is likely to experience between 32 and 69 days of extreme heat each year. Without mitigative policy intervention, in the worst-case scenario, we could see as many as 108 days by 2080. [2]
Yet heat-related health risks are only one aspect of urbanites’ relationship with heat in their cities. Hot summer days also herald opportunities such as summer festivals or swimming outdoors. The social history of summer shows that New Yorkers have long practiced local traditions of heat mitigation. These traditions reveal that beating the heat was often a source of pleasure and community even when heat itself was also a source of discomfort, even danger.
This submission to Melting Metropolis + Urban Archive’s Summer 2025 call was published by the New York Daily Mirror in 1953. Submitted by Stephen Flaherty (pictured!).