N.Y. / REGION

As the City Bakes: ‘It’s Late July. This Is What It’s Supposed to Be Like.’

By BENJAMIN MUELLER and ANDY NEWMANJULY 29, 2015

The water was warm, the lifeguards were whistle-happy and the poolside pavement was packed. Beyond the usual irritants, a chunk of concrete had broken off the bottom of Douglas and DeGraw Pool in Brooklyn, which meant swimmers on Wednesday had to navigate a tangle of lane lines designed to protect them from the jagged patch.

Still, on a day when temperatures climbed into the mid-90s and a heat advisory was issued for New York, a fragmented pool was better than no pool at all.

Like other city pools, it was staying open an extra hour, until 8 p.m.

“It’s late July. This is what it’s supposed to be like,” said Rich, 32, a cabinet distributor who declined to give his last name, as he vented about the broken concrete and overeager lifeguards. “After the winters we’ve had, everyone was complaining they wanted summer. This is summer.”

On Wednesday, summer meant a slight uptick in emergency calls, hundreds of residents losing electricity and another round of pleas from city officials for people to stay inside.

The temperature touched 96 degrees in the afternoon, the start of what is expected to be several days of readings in the 90s. The National Weather Service issued a heat advisory until 8 p.m. on Thursday.

“I want to urge all New Yorkers to be cautious,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference, taking sips of water as an example of proper hydration. “This is very high heat.”

City officials’ foreheads glistened with sweat — the result, Mr. de Blasio said, of setting City Hall thermostats to 78 degrees in an effort to limit power usage. They asked New Yorkers to do the same.

A better option for some Brooklyn residents was Douglas and DeGraw Pool, in the Gowanus neighborhood, even if that meant enduring a bit more congestion than usual in the lines.

On a cooler day, the concrete crack might have shut the pool for repairs. But given the crowds, lane lines were instead strung across the pool to close off the hazardous area, with one line looped around the base of an oil-drum can filled with trash. The result was a pool divided into four unevenly shaped sections, puzzling swimmers and leaving the lifeguards to enforce the space restrictions with their whistles.

At times, the pool sounded like a busy intersection with no working traffic lights, as two lifeguards seemed to compete to see who could spot infractions first.

“The whistles here, it’s like Chinese water torture,” Rich said. “You hear them and you keep looking up to see what’s happening and if they’re whistling you.”

The pool coordinator, Robert Silver, said a crew was supposed to come on Wednesday, probably after closing, to dive underwater and make the necessary repairs.

Many New Yorkers, unimpressed by the heat wave, took to complaining about all the attention being paid to temperatures that bobbed in the high double-digits.

“It’s not bad,” said Alvin Francis, 52, pulling scavenged empties from his shopping cart and neatly stacking them in milk crates at a redemption center on Nevins Street near the pool.

Anyway, he said, “everything’s extreme in New York — extreme poverty, extreme wealth, extreme heat, extreme cold.”

At Raices Times Plaza Senior Center in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, one of the city’s more than 500 designated cooling centers, people came for the camaraderie as much as the cool. About 50 people gathered in a basement cafeteria that was cheery despite being windowless; the room was hung with balloons and festooned with crepe paper, decorations left over from a birthday party last week.

Jean Sutherland, 84, took the bus from her home five blocks away. She has had cancer for five years.

“I don’t deal with air-conditioners too much,” she said. “Once you have cancer, you can’t take the cold anymore.” Instead, she said, she comes because “it’s like family here.”

The evening was not expected to bring much relief, as the asphalt and rooftops, absorbing heat all day, radiated it back into the air.

“That’s why heat waves can be dangerous,” said Tim Morrin, a meteorologist for the Weather Service.

For all the hype, James Lewis, 76, said he had seen worse. Parked on a bench near City Hall on Wednesday morning, he recalled some scorching days that had broken triple digits in his time.

“I drink extra water,” he said. “That’s all you have to do is drink extra water in this so-called heat wave.”