Mr. Kilgannon wasn't being punished when he was being sent to these outposts in the city's infrastructure. It is a first rate story about what no one usually thinks about: where does the water go when I flush the toilet?
Turns out it can go to any one of 14 treatment plants within the five boroughs. There are eight public gold courses in NYC and 14 wastewater treatment plants. The ratio seems about right for 8.5 million residents and untold number of visitors.
There are even treatment plants in Manhattan, but no golf courses. The closest I ever heard of someone hitting a golf ball legally in Manhattan is when I read that Bob Hope and Bing Crosby used to spend their time between shows at the Paramount Theater in the '30s by going over to a driving range that was then under the Manhattan side of Queensboro bridge. I think Bob Hope described this activity in a book he wrote, 'Confessions of a Hooker.'
I love these New York infrastructure stories. When there was a horse show and rodeo held at Madison Square Garden I would get great joy out of telling people that the dirt they poured on the floor for these events was stored underneath the West Side Highway, an elevated roadway that is pretty much gone, with what is left being renamed the Joe DiMaggio highway.
Buildings need names, and sewer plants are no exception. Mr. Kilgannon tells of the Newton Creek, the Bowery Bay and the cutely named Owl's Head plant in Brooklyn, itself sounding like a quaint B&B in Vermont.
I'd love to know the origin of that name. The Bay Ridge plant is off the Belt Parkway and 68th Street, adjacent to Owl's Head Park. Was there once a street named Owl's Head nearby?
Hunter's Point in Queens was named that because decades ago it was a spot for hunting quail I believe, in the era when Queens was pretty rural and there were numerous farms in the borough. The Queensboro Bridge and the incorporation into NYC changed that, but it took time.
I think the sign is still there, telling us that the squat brick signal building along the LIRR tracks in Long Island City is named HAROLD. Why? Because once upon a time, before they renamed the streets in Queens and tried to use more numbers, Harold Street ended at the tracks.
I grew up on 41st Avenue in Flushing, which before the renaming was Madison Avenue. I tell people I grew up on Madison Avenue.
The neighborhood butcher run by the Stimmel family was called Madison Meat Market. The building is still there on Barton Lane, hard by the LIRR Murray Hill Train Statin, and the gold leaf lettering just under the mansard roof is gone, as is the family and the butcher shop.
Mr. Kilgannon's piece basically tells us that even our poop can help in detecting the presence of the corona virus. If we are what we eat, we also revel ourselves when our excrement is examined under a microscope.
But it's not all wastewater. There are solids that are coming through. Mr. Kilgannon tells us the water "is strained for stray objects—which included a dead pigeon, a $20 bill and clumps of sanitary wipes."
Who gets the keep the $20 bill was not disclosed, but my guess is it's dried under some sort of ultraviolet light and used to buy Subway sandwiches for the staff for lunch. God money should never go to waste.
There was no mention of the problem with the sewers that London experienced in 2017 when a "fatberg" clogged the pipes. The link also takes you to no less than 5 stories on U.K. 'fatbergs."
Fatbergs are a coagulation of grease, sanitary wipes, condoms and tampons and just about anything else that doesn't dissolve in the water. They grow so large in size that there is as story of an eight-man crew being assigned to breakup a clog that took three weeks to unclog. The fatberg was so large it reduced the sewage capacity to only 20%.
When my wife and I were first married and in our own home I noticed my wife was pouring the cooking grease down the sink in the house in Flushing. I nearly screamed, "What are you doing?"
My wife grew up in apartments in the Bronx and the kitchen sink was the natural spot to dispose of grease. At least the way she was raised and observed. And I'm sure untold others in apartment houses. Everything that goes wrong is the landlord's problem, not yours.
Home ownership is different, and I explained that the grease will cause clogs. When it's liquefied it should be poured into a coffee can and then eventually discarded in the trash, or poured outside on the ground. (I know, that last part is probably now considered environmentally unsound.) It was bad enough that the sewer line was back pitched as it connected to the street, and there were three trees on the front lawn, one a giant pin oak, whose roots sought water and would work there way into the terra cotta drain pipes through the joints and eventually cause clogs on their own.
The Kilgannon reveals another aspect of New York City, the multi-generational employment at the same type pf job within families. Cops and firemen are the usual occupations thought of when you think multi-generational careers within the same family. That show I never watched, 'Blue Bloods' was all about a family of police officers.
But it is revealed that Mr. Kilgannon comes across a third generation sewer worker at one of the plants, who suffers the joke that sewer water runs in his veins.
The most famous NYC sewer worker would of course be the fictional Ed Norton from Jackie Gleason's 'The Honeymooners' series. Unless it comes on as a New Year's Day marathon, 'The Honeymooners' is slipping into ancient, unseen television.
Norton of course was Ralph Kramden's neighbor and sidekick who lived upstairs in that cold water flat on Chauncey Street, in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn.
Norton, played by Ed Norton always came downstairs and told Ralph, Jackie Gleason, how hard a day he had working in the sewer. Ralph always tried to top him with how hard it was to be a bus driver in Manhattan on he Madison Avenue route.
I don't know if there was ever an episode where Ed described taking on a fatberg, but in an episode of 'Younger' the boy friend Enzo (from Staten Island, of course), of the prim and proper coiffed clothes horse, publishing editor Diana Trout, is rescued from a fatberg that has him pinned in the sewer. His rescue of course makes the TV evening news.
All of which goes to show you that NYC sewers are interesting, even if Orson Wells isn't running through them.
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