New York City, in particular, is not a pleasant place to be in the rain.
If you now expect me to do the kind of bashing of urban life you’d hear on local newscasts or in the living room of your extended family, you can banish that notion right now — I will not denigrate this fine city. But one has to admit that the rain reveals some of the flaws of the Gotham way of life, flaws that are not entirely caused by the motion or structure or ethos of the city, but are unique to the city in a way that they are not unique to, say, Westchester.
See, when it rains in New York City — as it doing much of this week — the rain often accumulates in the same place that you find yourself. When you cross the street, you have to dodge a puddle as you step off the curb, and then again as you step back on at the other side. When you walk down that street, you are in the rain, of course, but also in the accumulated water dripping down the edges of the awnings. When you descend the stairs to the subway, the rain stops under the roof but the wet follows you, kicking up whatever happens to lie on the station floor and sloshing it around, doing the same on the subway car itself. Need I even mention what it is like to wait for a bus in the rain?
Do not think that I am so new to this Earth that I am confusing this week’s rainstorm, when I am currently unpleasant, with all rainstorms in the past, which are no longer so unpleasant to me, and blaming New York City for something it does not deserve. I have lived in places besides New York City and I do not remember the rain being so up close and personal.
Some of that might be due to getting older — when you are young, you simply get wet and then dry off. This ease carried with me at least into college, when I did not own an umbrella and merely walked through the rain on my way to class. At some point, I realized that I didn’t want myself (or my clothing) to get wet if I could avoid it and bought an umbrella. A cheap one.
But even in my umbrella-owning years, I have found New York particularly onerous during a storm. Before this, I lived in Washington, DC, and I am sure that it must have rained here and there but I don’t remember it all that much. I had a car then and maybe I drove in the rain instead of walking, but I did not always want to drive around the city and must have sloshed through the streets on my way to the Metro, where it must have been wet and dank and muddy and all manner of unpleasant things. But I don’t remember it.
I remember the rain in New York. I remember specific storms, like when Hurricane Henri hit in the summer of 2021 and I ran across the Upper West Side to reach the 1-2-3 line totally soaked, watched rain pouring down into the station from above the tracks, made it back to Brooklyn and watched clips of the city falling into wet disarray on Twitter. I remember Hurricane Ida soon after that, when I again watched videos on Twitter of the city falling apart, watched my landlords rush into the basement of my building and later read about the dozens of people who’d died that night, who drowned right here as I waited and looked out the window.
Not all rainstorms are so bad, not even here. I remember once last summer a brutal stretch of heat seemed to never want to die until a storm came in one day and cooled everyone down. Once, it rained hard and fast and long and I didn’t care, walking all the way from my apartment to Downtown Brooklyn, my umbrella essentially useless by the end of my trip. I was wet, but I was not unhappy.
This week’s rainstorm isn’t so bad, but it isn’t great either. For one, it’s relentless, it just keeps coming every day. By now, the ground is so saturated that puddles form instantly after the water starts falling and the streams washing along the curb are wide, wider than you can easily step over. You hop and skip and tap quickly to get across them but even such light-speed dance moves can’t stop the physics of your toes getting wet when you step in a puddle.
And that’s really why rain is so much more unpleasant here than anywhere else — because here you are truly here, in location, among the infrastructure of the city, more than in other places. When I used to drive from work in Virginia back to Washington in the rain, I would shuffle to my car and then close the door, drive along the highway, park at my house, shuffle to the front door and come inside. I was kept dry by the impenetrable force of fossil fuel-powered transportation.
New Yorkers mostly know that they are at risk of being in such proximity to the rain, and prepare accordingly. Soon after moving here I ditched my cheap umbrella (in a trash can, after the wind blew it inside out, like in a cartoon) and purchased a sturdy, serious umbrella. This one came with an automatic open-and-close mechanism and a wind vent to keep it right-side-in. When I misplaced it last year, I bought another of the same model. I see many of my neighbors holding such sturdy, or big, or even sturdy and big umbrellas.
But I also wonder what might be if we didn’t tacitly accept that being in such proximity to the workings of our infrastructure meant that we had to get wet. I remember seeing a post on social media once that argued that an umbrella was a capitalist, individualist solution to the rain. Think of it like health insurance — in a capitalist system, everyone chooses the plan they have to protect themselves, even if none of the plans are sufficient enough to truly keep you dry. What if, this post surmised, the sidewalks simply had roofs?
Such an idea is not the height of political theory, nor do I wish to debate the merits of putting roofs on our sidewalks. But there are decisions we make that change how the rain flows in this city. For one, we have a combined sewage system, meaning the water from our homes and the water from our storm drains flow into the same pipes. Since this system was built a long time ago, it often overloads in heavy rainstorms and the water (rainwater and sewage combined) flows into the harbor at specific outflow points around the city. This is why no one wants to swim in the East River.
Similarly, many neighborhoods in the city are more prone to flooding than others. The area around the Gowanus Canal here in Brooklyn, for example, is both low-lying and near the harbor, meaning it fills up with water in many heavy storms. Runoff in these places is intensified by the fact that we have so many impermeable surfaces like roads and sidewalks and not so many places like parks and trees and rain gardens where water could safely filter below the city.
If we wished, if we were willing to put in the time and effort and money, New York City could make our sewer system more robust by installing things like rain gardens and permeable sidewalks to round out these outlying problems. We could even, in some places at least, throw a roof over the sidewalk — not only would it keep the rain away, but it could also keep the hot sun off of our backs in the summer. We could update the drainage systems in the subway stations so they don’t fill up to our waists, and we could make sure every bus stop has a covered waiting bench so no one is standing outside for 20 minutes as they try to go home. One could argue, even, that we *must* do these things as climate change increases the risk of extreme storms like Henri and Ida.
But it will always rain at least a little bit and rain will always be wet and that wet will always get on our toes and wet toes will always be cold. And whenever you run into such immutable facts, all you can ever hope to do is embrace them.
When a thunderstorm is truly coming down, there’s nothing better than standing just inside the facade of a building, maybe even outside on a covered porch, and feeling the wetness in the air with the volume of the storm turned up all the way. When it’s raining just a little bit, it can be a perfect day to walk through the park, catching sparrows shaking off the water under a bush or squirrels scrubbing mud off their paws.
Sometimes, when your umbrella breaks or conveniently isn’t with you and the rain is pouring down and you’re miles away from home and you don’t want to pay for an expensive meal just to get inside and the buses aren’t coming and the subway is blocks away and your feet are already soaked and your hair is starting to drip and you don’t have anywhere to be or maybe you do but what the hell are you going to do about that now — then all you can do is get wet, in the rain, in this city, with everyone else.