There are two things. One, many of the steam units have a knob which doesn&#x27;t actually work (landlords seal&#x2F;paint it to the point that you cannot move it.) One of the apartments I grew up in in Brooklyn had one of these &quot;units&quot;, and according to my grandmother, the knob hadn&#x27;t worked in many decades (she started living in that apartment in ~1930.) How this came to be is definitely a mystery.<p>Two, some steam apartments don&#x27;t have a unit at all, just a pipe from floor to ceiling. Older tenements feature these (the one I&#x27;m living in now has one, for example.) If you want to adjust the temperature with this, your only choices are A&#x2F;C or the window. These apartments were just built this way, and this was likely the cheapest&#x2F;only tech available at the time.