A late May heat wave has scorched New York and New Jersey, and few places have felt the heat quite like Newark.
Sitting on a stoop near Hennessy Street Park in the Ironbound neighborhood, Artur Cesar said he knows his community is hotter than other places. On weeks like this, he seeks refuge in the shade. Making sure his house is cool enough to sleep in at night takes some mechanical help.
“It's on, the air conditioning, all the time,” said Cesar, who has lived in the Ironbound for about 15 years.
New Jersey’s largest city has one of the country’s most intense urban heat island effects. It can make already hot days almost unbearable and threaten the health of residents, especially vulnerable people like children and the elderly. It’s a well-understood problem, and one that millions of dollars are being spent to deal with.
Urban heat islands are a phenomenon in which cities are hotter than surrounding suburban or rural areas, because the concrete and asphalt landscapes retain and reflect heat rather than dissipating it.
Greg Pope, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Montclair State University, has studied urban heat islands around New Jersey. He said all the heat absorbed in cities becomes a bigger problem when the sun goes down, and things should be chilling out.
“Overnight temperatures just don't cool off as it should,” Pope said. “If you're a more suburban or rural area, where the heat is free to radiate and cool off. It doesn't do that as fast in the city, so it just seems hotter longer.”
A study done by the Princeton-based nonprofit research group Climate Central in 2024 analyzed the urban heat island effects of 65 cities around the country. New York City and Newark were the two most intense, the only cities on the list where residents experience, on average, an extra 9 degrees of heat on top of the air temperature because of the landscape around them.
The group found that 97% of people in Newark live in areas with urban heat indexes of more than 8 degrees, compared with 83% of residents in New York City.
Earlier this year, the state Board of Public Utilities gave Newark a $500,000 grant to redevelop Hennessy Street Park in the Ironbound to add new cooling infrastructure and vegetation. It was part of a $5 million statewide effort to fund urban heat mitigation projects.
Meanwhile, Newark officials are focused on cooling down Brick City with a pair of programs: painting roofs white and planting more trees.
The Cool Roofs Newark program works to make roofs on buildings around the city lighter and more reflective, so that heat bounces off of them rather than being absorbed into them. The program offers training and part-time work for residents, and that work began this month.
But more work has been focused on restoring Newark’s tree canopy. Trees and plants are critical to combatting the urban heat island effect, Pope said, because they provide shade, absorb sunlight and emit moisture to the area around them.
“[A] study we did back in the 2000s was driving from Newark out to suburban New Jersey, up toward Verona and Caldwell,” Pope said, referring to more suburban communities just a few minutes northwest of Newark. “It just classically cooled off the more suburban you got away from the urban core.”
Roughly 15% of the city has tree canopy, according to a 2022 study from Rowan University and the Nature Conservancy. And those trees aren’t distributed equally. The Forest Hills neighborhood, which includes Branch Brook Park, has far more tree coverage than the Ironbound.
Getting more trees into the city is the focus of the Newark Tree Canopy Initiative, an effort led by the Nature Conservancy in partnership with local community organizations like the Ironbound Community Corporation. The work is funded by an $8 million grant from the U.S. Forest Service.
Johnny Quispe, the Nature Conservancy’s director of cities programs, said the initiative has already planted almost 400 trees and trained dozens of workers to plant and care for them. The goal is to plant 2,700 trees over the course of the grant.
Quispe hopes people are starting to see trees as critical infrastructure for the health of any city, not just Newark.
“ Our cities are at the front line of climate change,” Quispe said. “We know that extreme heat in these areas is a critical public health issue. And urban forestry, I believe, is one of the most effective scalable solutions we have for this.”
Ajéna Duckworth, the urban greening program coordinator for the Ironbound Community Corporation, said the spring planting season for new trees in the neighborhood just wrapped up.
Duckworth said locals aren’t always thrilled about getting new trees.
Some people are concerned about having to deal with leaves in the fall or potential damage to sidewalks. But there’s been even more positive feedback, she said, especially from homeowners who notice that new trees help keep their buildings cool and electric bills down, homeless people who are grateful for the shade and children who find a sense of wonder in their branches.
“ It really sparks their curiosity around nature and learning different trees and seeing all the different animals that are also interacting with the trees,” Duckworth said.
Another major tree planting program is underway in the city. Mayor Ras Baraka last year launched his Rooted in Newark initiative with a goal to plant 5,000 new trees in the city over the next decade.
