Six NYC Teens Are Clocking In So the City Can Cool Down

From lifeguard chairs in the outer boroughs to slime stations at FAO Schwarz, a new crop of young workers is finding out what a summer paycheck actually costs.

Six New York City teenagers shared their summer job experiences with Curbed, covering gigs across retail, recreation, and city programs.
Positions ranged from lifeguarding at public pools to selling slime at FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue.
Several teens landed jobs through SYEP, the city's Summer Youth Employment Program, which places thousands of young New Yorkers each season.
Workers described long hours, demanding customers, and the specific exhaustion of standing on concrete for an entire shift.
Despite the grind, most said having a paycheck — any paycheck — made the summer feel different.

The city pool opens at nine, and by nine-fifteen the deck is already loud. Somewhere between the shrieking and the sunscreen, a teenager in a red swimsuit is watching all of it, responsible for every single person in the water. That is the job. That is the whole job.

Curbed published a feature this week profiling six New York City teens working summer jobs in 2026 — a quietly useful dispatch from the cohort that usually exists in the background of everyone else's warm-weather plans. The piece, filed amid a summer when youth employment is both politically visible and economically uneven, puts faces and shifts on a statistic that tends to get announced and then forgotten.

The range of gigs is pure New York: a lifeguard post at a public pool, a slime-demonstration shift at FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue, and several placements through SYEP, the city's Summer Youth Employment Program, which connects tens of thousands of young residents with paid positions each year and has a waitlist that routinely runs long. For teens without a family connection to land them something, SYEP is often the only path in.

What the Curbed profiles make clear is that the learning curve is less about the task and more about the clock. Standing for eight hours is a skill. Smiling at the fourteenth difficult customer of an afternoon is a skill. Counting down to a break that is twelve minutes away is, it turns out, also a skill.

The SYEP application window for summer 2026 has already closed, but the program typically reopens enrollment in the spring. The pool season in New York City runs through Labor Day.