Turns out New York radiators are absurdly powerful on purpose.
You know the scene: January, windows wide open while the heating roars. It looks like waste. It’s a design spec.
After the 1918 flu pandemic, health codes pushed “fresh air heating”: radiators sized to keep an apartment warm WITH the windows open, so the disease gets ventilated away.
A century later the pandemic is gone, the oversized radiators are still there, and the whole city heats the street every winter.
Infrastructure is frozen policy.
Another one for the It has always been done this way collection, right next to The origin of the trouser crease.