It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
Thunderclouds gathered in the late afternoon as I climbed the subway stairs and bumped into Polly, a former Jackie Gleason dancer now living in a shelter I helped run on the Upper West Side. Belting “Unforgettable” with abandon, her raspy, world-weary voice revealed undercurrents of tenderness and longing. Pigeons jerkily pecked the ground at her feet, and steam billowed like something feral and alive behind her, slicing the dark gray sky into rays of light. It felt like Polly had enough goodwill to energize the whole city that night. I stopped to listen. This was the early nineties, before I had a husband or kids. Before I’d had much opportunity to contemplate loss and loneliness.
Singing strangers home seems to me one of the loveliest things you could do.
New York’s infrastructure helps shape and define the rhythm of the city. While bridges, subway stations, and revolving doors are visible features, there is also a labyrinth of unnoticed systems—water, sewer, electric, and steam. Sturdy workhorses, their apparatuses lie in the periphery or underneath the skin of the city, like organs of a body, sustaining life on the island.
The most visible and poetic of these mostly underground networks is steam. With its operatic, rebellious temperament, steam evokes the very hue of the city, the same way its softer, more demure cousin, fog, might define a sea town. Fog and steam clouds are scene stealers. It has to do with the way mindless mist catches slivers of light, swirls, and changes shape. In New York, the steam ascends from manholes as if the underground muses are working around a large, bubbling cauldron, linking us in a collective dream that ties us together across time and death. In the dream we reassure one another that our homes will always be safe and warm.
If not for the steam system, each building in Manhattan would have its own chimney, and the iconic skyline would look very different. District steam, an underground 100-plus-mile grid of pipeline, is the least sexy direct-heating source in NYC. The roughly twenty-three square miles that make up Manhattan have been built on steam since 1881, when the first piping was laid beneath the streets to
