Longtime Newark resident Lenny Thomas, who resides in the Ironbound section, said that sometimes he doesn’t realize how hot his neighborhood is until he gets out of it and laterreturns.
“When you leave Newark and you go someplace else where they have maybe more trees or more green space or things like that, your body feels a little cooler,” Thomas said. “But when you come back to Newark, you say, ‘Wow, it got warmer again, what happened?’”
The city of 280,000 people was cited last year as being the second-worst heat island among 159 U.S. cities by Climate Central, a Princeton-based nonprofit research organization.
It was 93 degrees in Newark, New Jersey's second largest city, on July 1. In the city's Ironbound section, it was sevendegrees hotter.
Newark is known by climate researchers as an urban heat island. That is a city or town that has higher temperatures than the area surrounding it due to the presence of blacktop roads, parking lots, and buildings that capture heat in the daytime and release that heat back in the evening, and less vegetation to provide cooling.
A heat island’s effects are most pronounced in the summertime. Climate change amplifies the extreme heat, posing a health danger to the public.
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The report by Climate Central found that Newark was an average 7.7 degrees hotter than its surroundings, ranking second behind New Orleans which was an average 8.9 degrees hotter. New York City ranked third with an average 7.6 degrees hotter.
Last year, Newark had over 40 days of 90-degree heat as reported by the National Weather Service. This year, as of July 15, there had already been 20 days of 90-degree heat in the city as tallied by Accuweather.
The report named as key factors in Newark’s second-worst heat island ranking: population density, impermeable surfaces and building height.
Those factors can be found in abundance in the Ironbound section, a four square-mile area with about 50,000 residents.
Several major developments approved for the Ironbound won’t help cool things down: a six-story, 280-unit complex to be built at the site of the historic Ballantine Beer factory starting this summer; a 13-story mixed-use structure with 225 units and retail space; a five-story, 28-unit building that would replace an automotive garage; an 11-story, 133-unit building to be located near Newark’s Penn Station, and a five-story multi-family building with 80 units.
They are projects that fit into the population density/impermeable surfaces/building height trifecta that could generate more dangerous heat in the Ironbound, while adding yet more people to the mix as well.
Even within the Ironbound there are places that are worse than others.
An urban heat island assessment report done in 2018 for the city of Newark by the organization Sustainable Jersey and the Sustainability Institute at The College of New Jersey located “hot spots” where surface temperatures regularly go over 100 degrees.
Those spots in the north and south part of the Ironbound include a tile store, an auto body shop, two Astroturf fields, and three industrial facilities.
All play a role in increasing the heat in this section of town in various ways, according to the report.
Think of each place as a burner on an electric stovetop. When you turn the burner off, the burner will continue to release the heat it’s absorbed for a long time. In the same way, these hot spots absorb energy and take a long time to release it, deep into the night when other surfaces are already cool.
The synthetic turf fields absorb enormous amounts of solar energy due to their “plastic composition and can become extremely hot in the summer,” reaching surface temperatures of 160 degrees. The buildings in question have dark colored roofs, which absorb a great deal of solar radiation that “increase the indoor temperature of a building as well as ambient temperatures in the surrounding area.”
And then there’s a lack of vegetation and trees in certain parts of the Ironbound that makes it one of the city’s worst areas when it comes to heat. Increased vegetation, including trees, along with green roofs are cited as cooling strategies for cities to combat overheating.
Three sections of the Ironbound have 3% or less canopy coverage, according to an interactive map by American Forests, way below the conservation organization's goal of 20% tree cover. In the 2018 assessment report, the South Ironbound area is cited as lacking vegetation and there’s a need to “convert to green or ‘cool roof’ and add vegetation and green infrastructure; plant more street trees.”
Cool roofs are made from highly reflective and emissive materials that help roofs absorb less heat and stay up to 60 degrees cooler than those created from conventional materials during peak summer weather, according to the EPA.
This is in an area with three county parks and two city parks, all with trees. Putting plants near your stove won’t make those burners cool down any faster, though.
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The Ironbound got its name from the metalworking factories and railroad tracks in the area. For over a hundred years, this eastern section of Newark was home to all kinds of industrial activity.
While many of those industries are long gone, other industries and businesses have taken their place. A waste-to-energy incinerator, a sewage treatment plant, a metal plating shop, and numerous warehouses, to name a few. Unfortunately, the area has been subject to some of the worst pollution in the state.
Amid this, the Ironbound is also a residential community with two- and three-family houses alongside public housing complexes. In recent years, luxury apartments and condos have sprung up to accommodate upwardly mobile newcomers.
There are several schools and churches. And numerous restaurants including those serving Portuguese cuisine, a testament to the Portuguese immigrants who settled in the area over 100 years ago.
The diverse community faces many challenges, according to the Ironbound Community Corporation’s website: 25% of residents live in poverty, 20% of families have single heads of households, and more than 80% of residents do not speak English as a first language.
Tanisha Garner, a Newark native who has resided in the Ironbound for the past four years, points to the growing number of buildings being put up in her neighborhood contributing to the heated conditions there. She sees these projects taking out greenery and open space and filling them with buildings that help amplify the heat in her neighborhood.
“What creates that heat island? Is it the structure of the building, is it a lack of trees, is it the lack of balance between nature and construction?” Garner said. “When you look at the Ironbound, you can see there is an imbalance.”
During a tour of her neighborhood in July, Garner pointed out some of the areas designated for development.
One of those areas encompasses Freeman and Ferry streets, the future site of a six-story, 280-unit complex to be built at the site of the historic Ballantine Beer factory, starting this summer. The current area has no trees lining the sidewalk. A rendering of the proposed project shows trees surrounding the building. Will it be enough to offset the potential heat effect of such a huge structure?
A temperature check of that block at 11:20 a.m. the day of the tour registered 95.7 degrees, six degrees more than the city’s temperature of 89 degrees at that time, according to the website Weather Underground.
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“Foliage is very important, especially when dealing with a heat island,” Garner observed. “So, when you think about a heat island, you just think about the concrete and how it absorbs the heat, and the impact it has on quality of life.”
Lenny Thomas felt the effects of the heat in the Ironbound whenever he came back from visits out of town where he would feel much cooler and rejuvenated and started walking out of Penn Station on his way home.
“When I started to walk home, I would start to feel tired again and had some problems breathing, and noticing it a lot more,” Thomas recalled. “At first, I would say, ‘No, I had a long day,’ and you would find a lot of excuses. But since I was doing this on a regular basis a few times a week, it was not just time of day, it was the place.”
Thomas also saw how green places in the Ironbound offered a respite for residents from when the temperature was too much to bear.
“I used to volunteer a lot at the parks, and so I’ve seen how people took advantage of green spaces. It used to amaze that people would go to our parks and would just go under a tree,” Thomas said. “It would be over 100 degrees out, but they get under a tree and lie down. One guy used to do it every other day and take a nap. That was sort of striking.
“But as you get to the same place, you realize it was 10 to 15 degrees cooler. The temperature was close to 100 degrees in the sun, but in the shade, it would be close to 85 or maybe 90,” Thomas said.
Maria Lopez-Nuñez, deputy director of the Ironbound Community Corporation, has lived in the Ironbound area for a decade. She pointed out that her neck of the woods does get hotter than the city and signs of that can be seen in the operating of the corporation’s community garden, Down Bottom Farm.
“I tell you it is difficult because we’re the only patch of green or brown in an area surrounded by warehouses,” Lopez-Nuñez said. “It’s just really hard to grow our vegetables, we have to water more often, we have to really stick to the edges of the day by working in the morning and evening.”
She said that the heat is also a detriment when you’re living near a garbage incinerator, which for Ironbound residents is the state’s largest on Raymond Blvd. operated by the Covanta Holding Corporation.
“The one thing they don’t tell you about the urban heat island effect is that when you live next to a facility dealing with trash like a garbage incinerator, the heat makes that smell that much worse,” Lopez-Nuñez said. “There are nights when you could really taste the air. You wake up with the smell of dead carcasses in your mouth.”
Lopez-Nuñez said she worries about residents who live in public housing in the area who told her they are not allowed to have air conditioning units because it obstructs the windows. And she said that while the city opens cooling centers to help residents combat the heat, it is not enough.
Nathaly Agosto Filión, the chief sustainability officer for the city of Newark said in an interview with the USA TODAY Network that the city has been working to mitigate the intense heat across the entire city.
Strategies include installation of permeable surfaces on buildings, cool roofs on community centers and expansion of the tree canopy in not just the Ironbound but across the city. Filión did not provide details of specific implementation during the brief interview.
Newark has worked with the New Jersey Tree Foundation since 2006, leading to the planting of over 3,750 trees in the city. Also, a survey done by the association Green Roofs for Healthy Cities found that by 2017, Newark had the second most square footage of green roofs with nearly 600,000 square feet, ranking behind Washington D.C. and ahead of New York City.
Filión said that the city is encouraging residents to cool their homes and utilize the cooling centers, which open when the city's official temperature reaches 90 degrees. The Ironbound's cooling center on Rome Street is a walk of over 2 miles for some residents, or waiting at bus stops where a 90 degree day can have a "feels like" heat index of over 100 degrees.
This story is part of an extensive USA TODAY Network reporting project called "Perilous Course," a collaborative examination of how people up and down the East Coast are grappling with the climate crisis. Journalists from more than 30 newsrooms from New Hampshire to Florida are speaking with regular people about real-life impacts, digging into the science and investigating government response, or lack of it.
Ricardo Kaulessar is a culture reporter for the USA TODAY Network's Atlantic Region How We Live team. For unlimited access to the most important news, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.