Shivering for Luxury

By ALLEN SALKIN

MACY'S is colder than Old Navy, but Bloomingdale's is colder than Macy's, and Bergdorf Goodman is colder than all of them.

It is the frigid season in New York City. Not outside, where temperatures have hovered in the upper 80's and 90's for much of June, but inside: in shops, offices, restaurants and museums, where air-conditioning makes temperatures feel more like November.

"I don't like that super-cold air-conditioning," said Madeleine Marchese, who was stepping out of the chilly and dry 68.3-degree air of Bergdorf Goodman into the humid 79-degree air of Fifth Avenue on a June Thursday. She does what many New Yorkers do in the summer: she carries a sweater, the better to cope with what Henry Miller titled his 1945 critique of American culture, "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare."

"Nowhere else in the world," Miller wrote of the United States, "is the divorce between man and nature so complete."

Fifty years later that divorce seems more popular than ever, especially among businesses selling luxury goods. A recent experiment in which a reporter visited various commercial corners of Manhattan with a high-grade thermometer found that almost without fail, the more ritzy the establishment is trying to be, the colder the air-conditioning is kept. In other words, the higher the prices, the lower the temperatures. Consider the clothing stores: Bergdorf Goodman, 68.3 degrees; Bloomingdale's, 70.8; Macy's 73.1; Club Monaco, 74.0; the Original Levi's Store, 76.8; Old Navy 80.3.

For the experiment a pair of professional-grade Mannix HDT303K digital thermometers were used. The temperature was measured as close to the center of each establishment as possible, away from any vents, moving air or doors. When the thermometers' readings differed (never by more than 0.4 degrees), the two were averaged. The reporter did not announce his presence as one but entered each place of business as a normal customer would. While a few degrees' difference might not sound like much, the feeling on bare skin can be surprising. Tiffany & Company (70.3), where a sterling silver baby rattle sells for $200, lacked the meat-locker-like sting of Hermès (68.6), which sells a stainless steel thermos for $1,200.

"There is still a status symbol in almost over-the-top air-conditioning," said Craig Childress, the director of prototype design for Envirosell, a New York-based consulting firm that studies retail stores' designs to help them maximize sales.

High-end retailers argue that cool air is a positive part of their image. "It's part of the whole environment package that we try to offer to our customers," said Tony Nicola, vice president for operations at Bergdorf Goodman. "We're offering the best of service in New York City, and what comes with that is how the store looks, how it's lit, the cleanliness and the temperature."

Last year Bergdorf's installed a new air-conditioning and heating system that features an array of software and sensors designed to keep the air near the target of 68 degrees. "I don't think it's too cold," Mr. Nicola said.

At least one shopper agreed. Sylvia Pastor, who lives on the Upper East Side, said she found the cool temperature invigorating, adding that it kept her shopping longer than a warmer temperature might have. "It's good for the store," she said. "But not for my pocketbook."

At some luxury stores, where heavily dressed customers have arrived in air-conditioned cars straight from their air-conditioned homes, 68 might be right, Mr. Childress said. But many businesses make the mistake of setting the thermostat more for the comfort of employees than for customers.

"You may have a high-end jewelry store where the staff is wearing shirts and ties," he said. "But the shoppers are wearing T-shirts and shorts, and that makes shoppers uncomfortable and decreases the time they stay in the store."

In one case Envirosell studied three locations of a high-end apparel client with stores in New York City and found that customers were spending less time in the coldest one. Studies have shown that the longer shoppers stay in a store, the more money they are likely to spend.

Lower-end stores tend to be more frugal. The 88-cent shoelaces at National Wholesale Liquidators on Broadway near Houston Street were curled up in 76.6-degree air, while half a block away, an $11.95 frosted soap pump at Crate & Barrel sat in a comparatively frosty climate of 70.9. The Energy Department says that each degree setting on a thermostat below 78 degrees increases energy consumption by 8 percent.

The consistency of the luxury-equals-cold pattern in the experiment was striking. The book-strewn NoHo offices of Workman Publishing - which had a recent best seller with the lowbrow "Bad Cat," a collection of amateur photos of strange-looking cats - were 76.0 degrees. The sleek, impeccable SoHo lobby of Scholastic, which publishes the best-selling Harry Potter books, was a chillier 73.0.

While there are tales of executives making their offices cold in order to keep visitors off balance, some financial firms say they have good reason to keep temperatures low. A trader at a prestigious Wall Street firm said the air-conditioning there was kept icy "because we get stirred up during big trades, and we'll complain if it's too hot." But the trader, who would speak only anonymously because of the firm's rules against employees' talking to the press, admitted that most traders keep extra clothes handy for slower times. "We all have fleeces we wear."

Even the most finely calibrated central air system can never arrive at an ideal temperature for all people in all circumstances, said Robert Helt, technical director of the Home Comfort Institute, a research arm of Trane, the air-conditioner maker.

"Air temperature, humidity levels, heat radiation effects, air quality, air circulation or movement, and sound levels from comfort systems or even lighting all factor into our perception of comfort," Mr. Helt said. "Everyone has different needs."

Gail Cooper, the author of "Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960" (Johns Hopkins, 1998), said the music, lighting, traffic flow and hygiene of modern retail stores would be impossible without air-conditioning. "You don't get outside air, you don't get dirt," Ms. Cooper said. Without air-conditioning, many stores would not be able to use the brightest lights because of the heat they give off, she said.

The first modern air-conditioner, installed in 1902 in Brooklyn by Willis Carrier, was designed to control humidity in a printing plant so that ink would stick to paper. Now air-conditioning is so common, it is used to make eating peas more pleasant. At Café Boulud, on the Upper East Side, where a dish of spring pea ravioli is $29, the temperature was 68.8.

Restaurants were slight exceptions to the luxury-is-always-colder rule. In Greenwich Village, EJ's Luncheonette, at 68.7, was almost exactly the same temperature as Café Boulud, but both were much colder than a McDonald's in Chelsea (72.0).

The idea of enticing customers with air-conditioning dates to early-20th-century movie houses. The managers would often keep the front doors open to allow cool "advertising air" to spill out onto the sidewalk to attract sweltering passers-by.

For some, cold air is not about luxury but about what's natural and necessary. Thus the coldest place tested was the penguin observing room at the Central Park Zoo: 67.2. But for a lesson in coping with whatever Mother Nature deals out, a short jaunt from the penguin exhibit proved enlightening. There, in its open-air habitat (78.8 that day), was the arctic fox. A placard outside its pen explained that the fox is protected by the warmest coat of any mammal and that it "can remain comfortable at negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit." The fox appeared totally comfortable in the New York summer.

Sometimes the summer's heat can instill a dreaminess that is the opposite of Henry Miller's air-conditioned nightmare. That was the case at the Stiles Farmers Market on Ninth Avenue near 41st Street, where there was no air-conditioning at all.

A workman in a tank top had a healthy sweat going as he pushed honeydew on a handcart. Nearby, shoppers moved lazily among wooden bins containing eggplant, apricots and other fresh produce. "I'm in a good moment," said one Hell's Kitchen resident, Jeffrey Eiche, 50. "I'm shopping for a picnic."

Staying cool wasn't as easy as flipping a switch, but the exertion of enduring the afternoon's heat had its rewards. The cold and refreshing watermelon, 59 cents a pound, melted luxuriously on the tongue.