Mr. Palm Tree is a permit-legal way to productize what New York already does in a heat wave — but on about 1% of the water. It's designed to be bought the way the city already buys cooling: a small, photogenic, removable pilot that prices under the $20,000 micro-purchase line. We're looking for the agencies, districts, and makers to run the first ones.
Every track gets the same honest engineering: design-basis performance, disclosed limits, and a deployment path that never touches a street hydrant before the permit exists.
DEP owns the hydrants and the spray-cap program; Parks' Cool It! line already adapts hydrants into misting features; NYCEM moves fast in a declared heat emergency.
Business Improvement Districts control plazas, hold private budgets, and love a photogenic amenity. Deploy under a DEP hydrant-use permit with a named maintenance owner.
The whole design is open hardware — parametric OpenSCAD, a full BOM, and a field-calibration protocol. Print one, run the catch-cup protocol, send back real numbers.
The point of the whole design — removable in 15 seconds, ~$450 in parts, permit-first — is to fit an existing procurement lane instead of inventing a new one.
< $20,000 · micro-purchase line
A pilot pack — three trees, install, removal, one season of maintenance, and a measured data report — is scoped to sit under NYC's micro-purchase threshold. An agency or BID can authorize it with a signature; no competitive bid, no multi-month RFP.
What you get back: siting, a permit checklist, install and removal, season maintenance, and a report with catch-cup-calibrated cooling numbers you can put in the next budget line.
Business Improvement Districts — days to weeks (private budgets). NYC Parks — weeks (Cool It! is a natural home). DEP — months (owns the hydrant + water math). Council / participatory budgeting — a budget cycle. NYCEM — event-driven, when a heat emergency is declared.
Full buyer map and speed table is on the homepage procurement section.
Direct line to the founder. Serious inquiries get a reply with a one-page pilot brief, the permit checklist, and next steps.
Inquiries are relayed by FormSubmit straight to the founder's inbox; we use your details solely to respond, never sell them, and delete them on request. Performance figures labeled [SIM] on this site are first-order model outputs pending field calibration — nothing goes in a contract before it's measured.