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.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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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
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Steam from the steamed hams we're having
And you call them that even though they are obviously grilled?
excuse me for a minute
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.
It's from the streamed clams they're having.
Believe it or not. Very old infrastructure in the city. Still runs on steam power.
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.
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That's the steam from the melting pot
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
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.
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).
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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?
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!
That isn't steam, it's smoke. Smoke from the smoked hams we're having. Mmmm, smoked hams.
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Hundred plus year old infrastructure.
They use a lot of steam for heating still
Teenage mutant ninja turtles barbeque
Volcano under the city
yo mama's farts
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