New York City is full of peculiar phenomena—rickety fire escapes; 100-year-old subway tunnels; air conditioners propped perilously into window frames—that can strike fear into the heart of even the toughest city denizen. But should they? Every month, we’ll be exploring—and debunking—these New York-specific fears, letting you know what you should actually worry about, and what anxieties you can simply let slip away.
One of the most common concerns of the New York City pedestrian is the mysterious water that sometimes drips onto your head. Is it rain? Air conditioner drippings? A rich person spitting on you from their penthouse apartment? Who can say for sure?
Still, as summer wanes and air conditioners are put away for the season, those random droppings happen less frequently. But there is another watery menace that New Yorkers are concerned with year-round: the mini-moats that mysteriously appears below your feet right when you’re stepping off a curb. This water is known, colloquially, as “puddles”; once you’ve lived in New York for a few years and stepped in about 10,000 of them, it’s impossible not to wonder what exactly lurks below their oily surfaces.
In New York, at least, puddles tend to be the size of a modest studio apartment, and are typically filled not just with water, but also garbage. They’re a persistent nuisance for city residents: According to a 2018 study from Localize.city, “the number of street flooding complaints is skyrocketing across the five boroughs.” This is due, in part, to climate change, which leads to increased rainfall and rising sea levels. (Flooding is, of course, the worst in areas that are close to bodies of water.)
It’s also due, in part, to overstressed infrastructure (i.e. clogged sewers), as well as reckless overdevelopment; more development means fewer permeable surfaces, among other problems.
The end result is that, these days, after a large storm, enormous puddles can sit in the streets for days before they finally evaporate, leak into the sewers, or run off into some already-ruined body of water such as the Gowanus Canal (in many ways, the biggest, grossest puddle of them all).
All of this information led to our first, and most disturbing question about the specific content of street puddles: If the sewers are sometimes too full to handle additional water, could they also become too full to handle the water they already have? Or, to put it more bluntly, is some of that puddle water coming up from the sewer?
The city’s Department of Environmental Protection was quick to dispel this fear. “Combined Sewer Overflows do not end up on the street/sidewalk,” the agency says. According to its website, when “combined sewers receive higher than normal flows […] a mix of excess stormwater and untreated wastewater discharges directly into the city’s waterways at certain outfalls to prevent upstream flooding.” The sewer water may not be going exactly where we would ideally like it to go, but it’s not ending up in our puddles just yet.
That is not to say, of course, that street ponds are necessarily safe to wade into. We spoke to Manhattan-based podiatrist Dr. Stuart Bernstein, to learn more. “If someone is wearing flip flops and they manage to get into a puddle, they could certainly get some sort of bacterial or fungal infection on their foot,” Bernstein says. But, he added, “That’s a longshot. I’d think they’d just go around the puddle.”
Still, puddle-related foot problems are not unheard of. Dr. Bernstein estimated that in his 40 years of podiatry, he has seen them, on average, “once or twice a year, in the summertime.” Most common, he said, is “a fungal infection between your toes or on your foot. I wouldn’t say that there’s some flesh eating bacteria lingering in puddles.”
You never really know what, precisely, is lingering in a puddle, though. Many of the sewers that you might see developing huge puddles around them are simply clogged with garbage, which mixes with water—garbage, of course being a somewhat nebulous term. The water also mixes with whatever happens to be sitting in the streets: rat droppings, pigeon droppings, car tire residue, cigarette butts, and general dirt and grime. In short, you wouldn’t want to step it in, but it’s unlikely to kill you if you do.
If you do step in puddle, Bernstein recommends that “you wash your foot really well, and you might want to run a little peroxide between your toes, just to kill any bacteria that might be lurking.” However, he also pointed out that he sees as many sprained ankles from people trying to avoid puddles as he sees infections from people stepping in them.
So, in the end, puddles might not even be worth avoiding at all.
Got a weird New York anxiety that you want explored? E-mail tips@curbed.com, and we may include it in a future column.
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