Just How Hot Is the Herald Square Subway Station?

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — The city has been under a consistent "extreme heat" warning from the National Weather Service pretty much all this month. However, these government warnings only tell us the heat levels we should expect on the street. As most New Yorkers already know, the subway platforms deep underground are often, somewhat counterintuitively, even hotter.

How much hotter? Against our better judgement, we wanted to find out. So we took a thermometer into one of the most notoriously sweltering of all subway stations: 34th Street-Herald Square.

Sitting in the middle of the platform for the N, Q and R trains a little after 4 p.m. on Sunday, a simple thermometer measured the temperature to be around 102 degrees:

Just above ground, the same thermometer reported a temperature of around 96 degrees — a full 6 degrees less.

Completely unprompted, a subway rider complained to Patch about the heat on the platform. Asked if it seemed hotter than outdoors, she said, "Yes. I'm frying. Up there, at least, there's a little breeze."

Of course, when a train rolled into the station, there was, like on the street above, a little breeze. And the temperature on the downtown N train was 78 degrees — just as de Blasio would have demanded.

Photos by Cody Fenwick