Smoke obscured the New York City skyline on Wednesday, turning the outlines of buildings into ghostly silhouettes as the effect of wildfires in Canada continued to be felt. A campfire smell hung heavy over the streets, turning the sky a strange shade of taupe.
New Yorkers tried to cope as the miasma of 150 wildfires burning 500 miles away in Quebec blanketed the city for a second day. In Brooklyn, some commuters appeared to repurpose pandemic-era masks for the walk to the subway, then removed them once they packed into air-conditioned trains. In the Bronx, playgrounds were empty, their jungle gyms nearly obscured by the haze. In Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty was barely visible.
Many New Yorkers canceled plans and simply stayed shut up in their homes.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said New York had been among the worst places on “the entire planet” for air quality on Tuesday. She urged schools to cancel all outdoor activities and for people to stay inside. “The bottom line is this: If you can stay indoors, stay indoors.”
Some outdoor excursions were unavoidable: When Marcus Vinicius De Paula, 36, an artist who lives in Dumbo, stepped outside to walk his golden doodle, Henry, he had been overcome with not just a headache, but a sense of foreboding.
“Everything is sort of hazy and in this apocalyptic context. It’s like something’s not right,” Mr. De Paula said. When he took Henry out on for another walk, this time it was with an N-95 mask he had on hand from the pandemic, adding to the sense of doom. “It’s triggering,” he said.
With reports saying that the smoke would grow thicker as the day wore on, Michael Kuehn, 48, a health care consultant, took his 4-month-old daughter, Niva, out in the morning before the air quality plummeted. AirNow, an air quality data monitor, indicated that air quality would dip to “very unhealthy” in the later part of the day.
In the morning, at least, the conditions seemed to have been an improvement over Tuesday evening, after the haze first rolled in. Mr. Kuehn had participated in a bike race — a decision he regretted.
“It was not a good idea,” he said.
While Mayor Eric Adams warned that Wednesday was “not the day to train for a marathon,” some New Yorkers refused to skip their exercise routines — and were paying for it.
At the Central Park Tennis Center, Joe Feldman, 68, showed up on Wednesday morning hoping to get a game in, a mask in hand. “I know it was going to be a little smoky, but I didn’t know how much,” he said. “I felt it. I actually felt it in my lungs.”
On a run through Crown Heights, Patrick Doerksen, 32, who works in communications, paused to catch his breath. “I started coughing — I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’” Mr. Doerksen said. “But I still just need to move.”
Animal welfare advocates asked the city to suspend carriage rides, a tourist staple around Central Park, until air quality returned to normal levels. “The current toxic conditions caused by hazardous wildfire smoke necessitate the protection of both” humans and horses, Edita Birnkrant, the executive director of New Yorkers for Clean, Livable, and Safe Streets, an anti-carriage industry group said. Around midday, the city’s Health Department issued a notice to all equestrian businesses in the city for the animals to stop work.
Vahid Durmic, a building superintendent in the South Bronx, said that air quality is regularly so bad in his neighborhood that he rarely opens the windows of his apartment, and uses an air filter. The blanket of smoke, he feared, would exacerbate already poor conditions. “There is a lot of asthma here,” he said. “Today is really bad.”
A few New Yorkers shrugged off the clouds of smoke. Puffing a cigar while perched on a low fence on West 118 Street, Freddy DeLarosa said he felt nothing at all.
“It’s not affecting me,” Mr. DeLarosa said, between puffs. “But my kids say it’s hard to breathe.”
Ana Ley, Michael D. Regan, Dana Rubinstein, Sadef Ali Kully, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Sean Piccoli and Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.