By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2026-08-10 18:06:06 | Updated at 2026-08-10 18:20:15
16 minutes ago
It’s just what the city needs — more hot air in government buildings.
Excess heat from infamously sweltering Lower Manhattan subway platforms soon could be pumped out to both cool the platform for straphangers and warm nearby city buildings, officials revealed Monday.
A joint study by the city and the MTA will explore installing a thermal energy network — or, TEN — at the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and Chambers Street subway stations, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and transit honcho Janno Lieber jointly announced.
TENs are geothermal networks that capture, store and redirect heat, thereby cooling broiling-hot spaces such as the Chambers Street J/Z stop — Mamdani said as he visibly sweat during a news conference in the decrepit station.
“Anyone who has stood on a subway platform in August knows that our stations do not just get hot — they turn into underground saunas,” the perpetually besuited mayor said.
“If you, like me, do not know what a summer suit is and choose instead to commute in a wool one, let me tell you, it is far from a therapeutic experience,” he quipped.
The “thermal energy network feasibility study” will explore harnessing the heat that builds up at the subway station over the summer to heat government buildings — including City Hall, the David Dinkins municipal building, Tweed Courthouse and Surrogate’s Court — come the winter, Mamdani said.
A contract to conduct a feasibility study first needs to be awarded by the fall, with an eye toward design work in early 2027, according to officials.
The project would be the first TEN in a US transit system, officials said.
The Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and Chambers Street stations are the among the “sweatiest” in the subway system, Lieber said.
“The average temperatures last summer peaked at 96 degrees, and every year it’s actually getting hotter because of climate change,” the MTA honcho said.
“This technology has never been tested before in a transit system here in this country, but it is being used elsewhere in the city, like in St. Patrick’s (Cathedral), because it could be a real win-win.”
The project would include radiant cooling technology to absorb heat from the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall platforms — and potentially those on Chambers Street as well — and transfer it through pipes to geothermal boreholes, officials said.
Those boreholes will be drilled beneath an abandoned Chambers Street platform, an ideal location for testing the technology because it would disrupt passengers, the officials said.
“We would capture heat in boreholes that will run 500 to 600 feet underground, and install a system of circulating pumps and pipes that will use the heat from below our city surface to warm the offices where our municipal workers are hard at work powering this incredible city,” Mamdani said.
The work at Chambers Street would dovetail with a project announced last week by Gov. Kathy Hochul to modernize the dilapidated, 113-year-old subway station.
The restoration project — which will be funded by congestion pricing tolls — will replace damaged ceramic tiles and mosaics, replace or modify stairs and doors, plug leaks, install new lighting and give the station a fresh coat of paint, among other fixes, officials said.
Hochul’s office put out a release touting the geothermal project.
But neither the governor, nor anyone from her office, sweated it out with Mamdani and Lieber for their underground news conference.
