To help New Yorkers beat the latest heat wave, the city has opened hundreds of “cooling centers” over the past few days. These locations — which are really just community centers and public libraries that are specially designated and instructed to accept anyone who needs an air conditioned space — should be easy to locate thanks to an online directory. But they aren’t always.

Two years ago, as part of the Harlem Heat Project, WNYC's Julia Longoria found wrong addresses and misleading directions when she tried to visit three cooling centers in Upper Manhattan. As a result, the Emergency Management Department last year promised to send out large re-usable signs to all cooling centers to make them more visible in the neighborhoods.

This Tuesday, WNYC tried to locate five cooling centers in East Harlem; despite having the addresses, a map and asking passers-by, we couldn't find one of them at all, while none of the other four had posted the signs outside indicating people could drop by to cool off.

“I have not seen any signs since I have been here,” says Jennifer Miller, who has worked at one of the locations, the King Towers Community Center, for more than four years. “Maybe a lot of the people don’t even know that they have a cooling center here. So they can’t come in and use this facility."

Instead of the large vinyl signs, one of the locations — the Lehman Social Club Senior Center — did post information sheets on its door in three different languages about what to do during a heat wave, which may have indicated to potential visitors that they were welcome.

A spokesman for the city's Department of Emergency Management, Omar Bourne, said that two of the locations  that WNYC visited only operated as cooling centers in the evenings. But he also appeared to acknowledge that the centers needed to be better marked.

"NYC Emergency Management remains in constant communication with our cooling center partners throughout a heat event," Bourne said in an email, "and will continue to follow up to ensure that signage is posted at locations that are designated cooling centers during heat emergencies."