#Check out these crazy, creative outdoor work from home setups in NYC

In this work from home summer, New Yorkers are ditching their apartments for creative outdoor office spaces.

Take Arina Zanin, 28, who’s secured a patch of grass under a willow tree near West 70th Street and the Hudson River. She sits in a folding camper chair, her bare feet propped on the rocks with a laptop resting on her knees, looking out onto the river. Laid off from her job as a banker at a finance startup at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she’s decided to go al fresco with her job hunt.

“This is two blocks from where I live,” Zanin says. “I’m freshly unemployed and applying for jobs. I might as well do it outside.”

The city’s office buildings were allowed to reopen June 22, but many companies are still encouraging their employees to continue working from home. And faced with the prospect of permanent remote employment, job seekers and job havers alike are looking to trade their cramped apartments for cubicles with leafy canopies and fresh air.

Andrew Miller, 35, works at a tech company. But instead of firing off emails from a hip, open-plan office with unlimited snacks, he’s been getting his work done on a beach mat in the middle of Tompkins Square Park.

“I’ve been working here as often I can, since things started to loosen up,” says Miller, an East Village resident. “I spend about half my time trying to protest and half my time trying to get out into the weather, just to recoup some sanity.”

Miller lives alone and admits he has the “luxury of choice” about where to get work done. But he doesn’t feel as if he’s competing for a spot — at least, not yet.

The most sought-after outdoor offices have amenities, such as ample shade, working bathrooms and strong Wi-Fi and cell signals. There should also be plenty of room to stretch out, keeping at least a 6-foot distance between others. Waterfront locations offer an added breeze reminiscent of office A/C. Parks that offer these perks in spades — including Hunter’s Point South Park and Gantry Plaza in Long Island City, Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side and Domino Park in Williamsburg — may well emerge as the safest, and hottest, new co-working spaces.

“It’s Domino Park that really works for us,” Regina Ynestrillas, 26, says of her co-working routine with Mayra Bravo, 31. “We usually come early in the morning, so we always find a table.”

The pair work for the same nonprofit — Bravo is Ynestrillas’ boss — and regularly meet up to seek out one of the coveted metal tables in the tight green space along the East River, where the Wi-Fi is strong and the towering nearby Tacocina structure casts a cooling shadow. From there, they say, they can have all of their regular meetings and even take calls, so long as there’s no construction noise in the background.

“We make sure the restrooms are open first,” Bravo says.

On a recent summer morning, Xia, a corporate planner in her mid-30s who declined to give her last name, claimed her office space for the day, a picnic table in Greenpoint’s McGolrick Park where she camps out five days a week. Her WFH supplies include a wired mouse and mouse pad, fresh fruit to snack on, a portable phone charger and a resistance band for workouts during her downtime. Sometimes, Xia says, she’ll rent a Citi Bike from one of two nearby docks for quick rides around the park — even brazenly leaving her laptop on the table to hold her spot.

Watching city dwellers repurpose the outdoors into their own personal office spaces can seem both sensible and self-satirizing: camper chairs dot the landscape, cold-brew coffee and AirPods abound. Ilana’s “SheWork” scam on “Broad City” — in which she charges 50 cents an hour for an outdoor setup with a free public charging station — suddenly feels on-the-nose.

Elsewhere in the borough, a pair of roommates experiment with a more private version of the outdoor office: their own fire escape.

Molly Birnbaum and Michael Linares, both 33, transformed their Fort Greene fire escape into a mini work-from-home wonderland, replete with AstroTurf, fresh flowers and pastel-colored furniture.

“I got COVID really early, at the start of the quarantine,” Birnbaum says. “So when I finally got better, I went out onto my fire escape and it was sunny out, and it was the first time I felt relatively normal. And I was like, ‘Wow, I’m gonna have to work from home for a really long time … let’s trick this out.’ ”

Birnbaum, a strategy manager, and Linares, a product manager, take turns working outside on the fire escape, making sure to pack up everything but the turf and the table at the end of each day. (Be aware: It’s against the law to “encumber” your fire escape with permanent fixtures or furniture.) The roomies run charging cables out of Birnbaum’s window and occasionally bring out a speaker to play music.

Co-working in the outdoors may prove something of a seasonal trend; rising summer temperatures will soon make the prospect of en plein air workdays far less tempting, if not altogether untenable, and it’s hard to picture portable heaters taking the place of parasols. But for now, and certainly so long as indoor spaces continue to be virus vectors, one can expect to see more and more pop-up desks among the greenery.

Zanin admits that she’s grown so attached to working in the park, even the prospect of landing a job that provides income feels bittersweet.

“I don’t know how I’ll go back to an office,” she says, laughing and gesturing to the river views around her. “I’d struggle for a while.”