A free, all-ages escape-room experience at the New Rochelle Public Library turns local air-quality data into puzzles, clues and action. By Energy Justice Law & Policy Center.

What if learning about the air we breathe felt less like reading a report and more like cracking a code?

This September, Air of Truth: Escape the T.R.A.P. transforms part of the New Rochelle Public Library into a hands-on escape-room challenge about the air we breathe. Created by the Energy Justice Law & Policy Center (EJLPC) with Hour to Exit, a local Black woman-owned business, the free, all-ages experience challenges visitors to solve puzzles about Traffic, Respiratory Impacts, Air Monitoring and Prevention.

Air of Truth builds on New ROAR’s Environmental Racism Trolley Tour that helped residents see the connections between environmental racism, development and the city’s neighborhoods. After New York State conducted block-by-block air monitoring, EJLPC started Air of Truth to engage the community on air quality. New Rochelle High School students, working with environmental science teacher Carmen Glenn and PAVE teacher Lexi Brock, turned the data into art and public education for the first Air of Truth exhibit in 2025.

Now comes Air of Truth 2.0 – and this time, you have to escape.

Visitors follow clues through a traffic jam, crank the Truth-bulizer to explore how pollution affects the body, investigate air-monitoring evidence and search a map of New Rochelle for pollution hotspots. Crack the codes, raise the city’s air-quality grade from a D-minus to an A-plus, and escape the T.R.A.P.

It’s fun, but the science behind it is serious. State monitoring produced millions of street-level measurements across southern Westchester. Analysis found that traffic contributes an estimated 25-55% of PM2.5 and 60-90% of NO2 in the study area. Air of Truth helps people connect numbers like these to the bigger story: what’s in our air, why some communities carry greater pollution burdens, and what can be done about it.

And evidence is still being gathered. EJLPC and the City of New Rochelle are establishing a state-funded community air-monitoring network around high-burden neighborhoods, including the I-95/LINC corridor. The goal is to measure air quality before, during and after The LINC and understand whether major greening and infrastructure investments actually deliver cleaner air.

As EJLPC Executive Director Raya Salter puts it, “People walk in curious about a puzzle and walk out understanding what the data says about the air on their own street.”

Air of Truth: Escape the T.R.A.P. runs September 8-26, 2026, at the New Rochelle Public Library, 1 Library Plaza. It’s free, open to all ages and requires no registration. Join  a community reception September 14, 5-7 p.m. The exhibit and self-guided audio experience are available in English and Spanish.

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