In Defense Of Summer, New York City's Best Season

It finally stopped raining just in time for the summer solstice, which means that the giant ball of fire in the sky, you know, the only reason why any of us are alive right now, is basking us with more light than we will get all year. This means midday ice cream consumption; cicadas; ponderous nights filled with promise; rhythmic waves of cool salt water; the tingling heat on your grimey, bare skin against cool, clean sheets after a day spent basking in the embrace of that giant, life-giving flame dancer. Yes, Summer! But recently the best and only true season has been under attack, not from the Christmas lobby or the Easter Guild, but this very website.

Defending the awesome power of Summer feels stupid and futile, like trying to sprint to shelter during a violent, August thunderstorm. But those sprints are also pretty fun (you almost always laugh at yourself, maybe through gritted teeth, shoes squishy, fogging up the ATM vestibule), and we are compelled to try.

Summer’s detractors have a handful of gripes that all seem to boil down to: summer is hot. And in New York City, it is especially hot. Rats sipping mosquito larvae-filled trash juice out of tiny martini glasses hot. Fresh asphalt singeing nose hair hot. Fire escape cockroach double-takes hot. Hot enough to think about ordering a Moscow Mule.

(The heat is always described as "oppressive," but giving up our steamy subway platforms for a life of scurrying to the car to work to the car to our home again, trading one chilled morgue for the other, seems more unbearable.)

Summer would be better, they say, if it weren't so summery (in other words, Fall).

One member of the #NYCSummerSucks coalition suggests that our fondness for the season (though technically another is more popular, and May is America's Favorite Month) is "partially a holdover from when you're younger, when symbolically summer means school's out and you get a long break."

There is truth to this. When your days are chopped up into 50-minute blocks and you drink milk out of a plastic bag, there’s nothing “symbolic” about shattering that sameness with total freedom and 9 p.m. sunsets. But it's deeper than that.

A friend recently described Summer’s effect on New York City as heightening everything about it. Garbage is smellier, tempers are shorter, drinks are colder, people are out on the street, screaming for seemingly no reason.

New York heat makes us shed: layers, manners, liquid. We leave our boxes and seek relief because we have no choice. We are all in the cauldron together.

So yes, the heat “sucks.” And that’s exactly the point.

Starting tomorrow, every day will get imperceptibly shorter, one after the other, until it's cold and dark again. But today the day is as long as it will get all year, and instead of shoving you into your apartment against a rasping radiator, the night will beckon you outside, to where the breeze and the laughter is. Summer's calling. Join us.