It was one of those late-morning moments in downtown Manhattan where the weather seems to cooperate—sun high in the sky, people gathering around the corner from City Hall. Last Tuesday, around midday, the air even felt springlike… even though the day’s forecast had promised high winds.
On the sidewalk, municipal employees and delivery workers clustered near a sleek, modernist-looking shed. Years ago, that spot held a vacant newsstand. Now it holds what the city is calling its first “deliverista hub,” an outdoor structure designed so delivery workers can safely rest on the job, charge e-bike batteries, and get out of harsh weather when heat waves, flash flooding, cold snaps, or heavy rain roll through.
The hub didn’t appear out of nowhere. Since 2021, Los Deliveristas Unidos—a union of app-based delivery workers—has been campaigning for outdoor facilities that acknowledge how much time workers spend outside. This effort sat at the intersection of workers’ rights and climate justice, and for a long stretch, it was stuck in the slow churn of permitting delays and red tape.
Then, Mayor Zohran Mamdani stepped in with a push to expedite the building process. The day of the opening, the crowd buzzed when delivery workers showed up in jeans and tactical-looking jackets, bike helmets on, rolling in with the kind of excitement that’s hard to manufacture. “This is what the public realm is made for,” Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura said from behind a podium, standing beside the structure’s clear glass windows and tall metallic columns. “This is what it means for our city to serve the people who keep it running.”
In a city where more than 80,000 people board their vehicles each day—many on two wheels, riding e-bikes, scooters, and mopeds—the vulnerability is obvious. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more severe due to climate change, and that hits delivery workers first. The city’s plan, according to Misryoum reporting, is to expand these hubs across the five boroughs over time, offering respite from inclement weather and a space for workers to talk to one another.
The Lower Manhattan hub is also expected to be staffed five days a week by a member of the Worker’s Justice Project, the worker center that helps organize Los Deliveristas Unidos. At the ceremony, speakers included representatives from the New York City Parks Department, the delivery workers union, Worker’s Justice Project, and the Department of Transportation. New York Senator Chuck Schumer spoke as well, securing $1 million in federal funding for the hub, along with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and City Council Member Shaun Abreu.
And then there was the mist. For a second it looked like the drizzle might actually be rain—until it turned out to be something else entirely. It was just a drizzle from window-washers working across the street, yet the effect was still cinematic enough that some delivery workers posed for photos beside the shed. Standing with Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project, the group chanted “Deliverista! Power!”—a moment that carried real energy, even if the logistics of the space were still coming together.
Guallpa called the opening a victory for the working class, saying the project is “redefining what’s possible” in cities where public spaces have “historically been built for cars, for the wealthy, and for the privileged.” Gustavo Ajche, the co-founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, said his inspiration came during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when workers were “really isolated” and everything was closed. He pointed to abandoned urban infrastructure—like vacant newsstands—that could be repurposed for shelter.
But the path to last week’s ceremony wasn’t quick. Ajche criticized the previous mayoral administration, saying permits took a long time to approve. Under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, he said, things moved differently. Misryoum newsroom reported that the mayor pushed to open the hub within his first 100 days in office. Ajche said construction itself took about a month. When asked about the longer timeline during the question period, Shimamura said she “can’t really speak” because she’d only been commissioner for eight weeks.
Even with the hub now formally open, it wasn’t fully operational in the ways people might imagine. The structure sat largely empty—no charging stations, no HVAC system—at least for now. Currently, workers and cyclists can swap a dead e-bike battery and rent a fully charged one for $2 a day. Other operations will come later, a representative from the Worker’s Justice Project said. Ajche and Shimamura also cautioned that one hub can’t cover the scale of the city’s delivery workforce, and that expanding to more locations depends on financing and partnerships between agencies, since not every potential site is owned by the Parks Department.
This story has been updated to better reflect the current deliverista hub operations.
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