No Cooling Hum in This Urban Oasis
William Gross is sweltering through the steamy, sticky days of summer wishing he could walk into the nearest appliance store and buy the biggest air-conditioner in stock.
He can afford thousands of B.T.U.’s, enough to chill his two-bedroom apartment to the see-your-breath coldness of a polar bear’s den. But because he lives in Stuyvesant Town, he wilts.
For in Stuyvesant Town, where 18,000 people live in a parched six-block-long area, air-conditioners are strictly against the rules.
‘A Lot More Arguments’
‘’People look at me and say how can you live without one?’’ said Mr. Gross, an insurance agent. ‘’You eat out a lot. You go to the movies. You change the sheets a lot. You get into a lot more arguments with your wife.’’
On the oval-shaped sidewalks in Stuyvesant Town, an 89-building middle-income complex on the East Side of Manhattan, and in Parkchester, a condominium complex in the Bronx where air-conditioning is also forbidden, this is the time of year when people plot strategies about fans. They decide where to place them, how to aim them, even how to find the prized, discontinued Hunter fan units that families hand down from generation to generation the way children of football fans dream of inheriting season tickets to Giant games.
Some residents wonder about propping room air-conditioners against the window, out of sight of security guards and nosy neighbors who could notify the management. Others avoid cooking. And one topless toddler was dashing across a Stuyvesant Town playground the other day saying, ‘’The ice cream store, the ice cream store, the ice cream store’’ - like a mantra.
On a day of merciless heat, with the sun blazing through a mostly cloudless sky, New Yorkers had other hot-weather headaches yesterday, a day with the temperature peaking at 89 degrees at 3 P.M.
Although there are no air-conditioners in Stuyvesant Town or Parkchester, thousands of others were humming yesterday, helping to set a state record for electricity used in a single day. The New York Power Pool, which ties together the state’s seven major utilities, said demand reached 25,274 megawatts in midafternoon. A megawatt is one million watts.
Yesterday also marked the first time this summer that the Long Island Lighting Company asked its customers to limit power use. Lilco estimated that the request cut use by 50 to 100 megawatts.
For centuries people have dreamed up ingenious ways to cool themselves - an eighth-century caliph of Baghdad imported snow and packed it between the walls of his palace, and Leonardo da Vinci designed water-driven fans. But so far no one has figured out how to air-condition Stuyvesant Town. Metropolitan Life, the insurance company that owns the complex, says the 40-year-old wiring could not support thousands of air-conditioners safely.
A Metropolitan vice president, Fred Wortman, said rewiring Stuyvesant Town would cost at least $50 million. It hopes to have a plan ready by the end of the year, he said, but the rewiring will take years to complete.
With a lengthy waiting list for its rent-stabilized apartments, the landscaped Stuyvesant Town complex has been described as a green oasis.
In Parkchester, residents have hired consultants to advise them on keeping cool. Amit Sikdar, who manages Parkchester South in the complex, said one option was piping chilled water through each building and installing fans to throw the cold air into the rooms.
‘An Art to This’
In the meantime, tenants make do with umbrellas, bandannas, broad-billed caps and long visits to friends’ air-conditioned apartments. ‘’I go to the D’Agostino’s on 20th Street just to walk down the aisles,’’ one tenant, Joan Bennett, said.
At home, there are fans, fans, fans. Chris Bush has eight. Ed Petty has four, including a huge Hunter fan. ‘’There is an art to this,’’ he said. ‘’I sit in the living room with the shades drawn and the kitchen fan roaring.’’
But some like it hot, or at least warm. Stuyvesant Town’s senior citizen center, an oasis of four air-conditioners, began warming up the other morning. The director, Isabelle Ackerman, checked and found someone had nudged the temperature knob toward - can you believe it? - warm.
To make their apartments a bit more bearable, some residents have bought an $845 windowless air-conditioner, an Italian device that keeps William Koniuk’s handy digital thermometer at a steady 54 degrees.
‘’I tell ‘em don’t buy it,’’ said Mr. Koniuk, the owner of Frenchmen TV, an appliance store on First Avenue across from Stuyvesant Town, pointing to a sign saying the unit violates Stuyvesant Town rules. ‘’They say, ‘If you don’t want to sell it, we’ll go somewhere else.’ ‘’ This has made Mr. Koniuk the largest seller of the units this side of the Tiber.
For some Stuyvesant Town tenants, the hottest prospect for staying cool is moving. In 1978, Mr. Gross applied for an apartment in Peter Cooper Village, a Metropolitan Life complex across from Stuyvesant Town, where air-conditioners are allowed. He was told not to expect to get to the top of the waiting list until 1993.
‘’Only five more hot summers,’’ he said. ‘’But you know what? I hear the wiring in Peter Cooper isn’t so good.’’
Published: August 4, 1988