Above: shirtless buildings reclining in Bryant Park heat, and the way to fix it.
I love walking in New York, but it's easy to boil over in summer. If I'd been awake enough yesterday, I'd have tried to catalog all the heat-related facial expressions (winces, grimaces, etc.) I saw in the sweaty river of people between 14th and 42nd Sts.
Whoever laid out Manhattan made a big mistake. Even with skyscrapers turning streets to canyons, there's next to no shade for the hottest part of the day. Aligning streets in a grid was fine, but they oriented the grid in the wrong direction, so the summer sun burns straight down.
Which brings me to the idea: I suggest we saw Manhattan off its foundation, fill a giant air bladder beneath the crust, and float the island free -- so it can be tilted and rotated (see map) to make streets diagonal to the summer sun -- to create at least a little shade.
Note that Long Island will have to be moved a mile or so further out to sea. I would guess a string of tactical nuclear weapons could be buried and detonated to crack a huge trench (and create a fertile breeding ground for super-sized lobster and shrimp).
As an added benefit, after global warming turns the region into a hellhole that rotation can't fix, the luxury cruise ship Manhattan -- riding low in the water with all the gold Wall Street made off burning the candle from every direction -- could cast off and set sail for more pleasant shores.