In the Cooled-Down City, the Rooftop Choirs Come Back Out

The eleven-day heat dome emptied the rooftops, and its lifting filled them again. In Lagos, Jakarta and a dozen other megacities, the loose evening choirs that have become a fixture of the hot months returned this week, neighbors climbing to the cooler air to sing off the summer the way earlier generations gathered on stoops. "We do not sing because things are good," said Ngozi Balewa, a retired schoolteacher who has organized her building's rooftop gathering for six seasons. "We sing because we are all still here to." The songs are half hymn, half weather report — verses added for the water session, for the migrants passing through, for the ones the heat took. Sociologists at the Pacific Rim University who study the phenomenon call it a coping architecture; the singers call it Tuesday. On the first cool night, the harmonies carried for blocks.