Manhole Covers

As usual, @corekilgannon has come through and proved to be a muse. He can be found walking around the city—a flaneur—posting photos from either an iPhone 14 or a camera camera, I  don't know which. Mr. Kilgannon has an eye for the unusual, and should be posting his photos into an urban calendar. I know I'd buy one. 

However, Corey did not take the photos you see here of 19th-century N.Y.C. manhole covers. The people at @NYCWater, a city agency responsible for delivering clean water daily to 8½ million residents and businesses in 5 boroughs—outer or otherwise—so reliably that no one gets typhoid, botulism, or cholera. They are very proud of their delivery system.

Right now, Mr. Kilgannon has re-Tweeted two images of manhole covers from the Bronx (location not disclosed) that show their dates of origin going back to the 19th-century. This is the 21st-century, so these are examples from the 1800s.

The original Tweet comes from @nycwater, and obviously Mr. Kilgannon, being a senior reporter for the NYT, keeps his ear to the ground for a story, from any source.

Without a ruler placed alongside these images you have no real point of reference as to their size. A quick look might lead you to think these are some kinds of old coins. Nope. Part of the old infrastructure of New York City.

No photos or any mention of manhole covers would be complete without reference to what Chicago Bears player Mike Ditka said of the stingy owner of the Chicago Bears: "George Halas throws nickels around like manhole covers."

That's a subtle double dig, because a nickel is not much and a manhole cover is as easy to move around as a dead elephant. They are dense, heavy, and need an iron bar and lots of pulling power to slide one off its moorings sitting in the street. They need to be heavy with all the traffic that goes over them. Nothing worse than living near a loose manhole cover in a heavily trafficked area. Also nothing worse than having an explosion under one that propels a manhole cover through the air like a frisbee.

In 1879, Brooklyn wasn't yet part of New York City, nor was Queens. Nor was Staten Island. By the very late 1890s these counties were merged into New York City. For Da Bronx, west of the Bronx River joined N.Y.C. in 1874; East of the Bronx River, 1895. So, depending on where in the Bronx these specimens are from, at least one of them would have been installed by the N.Y.C. Sewer agency.

I quickly replied to Mr. Kilgannon's Tweet telling him that there are manhole covers in the city that were, or are still being forged in India. In fact, I read it in his paper in 2007. (You gotta love digit search engines.)

At some point I came across another story about coal covers and where they can still be found in the sidewalks of Manhattan where coal was poured into a building's cellar. I remember noting the address of one and finding it in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan, just east of Park Avenue in the '30s. I found the 2002 story (not in the NYT) that authenticates my memory again.

I remember seeing a house in my neighborhood in Flushing still getting a coal delivery in the 1970s. Since our Flushing home was built in 1923 it was originally heated with coal, as were all the homes in the neighborhood.  When my parents bought the home in 1946 there was a coal furnace that heated to two halves of the two-family home. I don't remember the coal heating, but there were still coal shovels left over from those used by my parents to shovel coal into the furnace. They were long-handled and my father used them as snow shovels after the conversion to oil heat.

My father told me of some homes that had an "automatic fireman" that fed coal into the furnace automatically, or at least with less manual labor. The cellars had a coal bin, a large wooden structure that held the coal as it was chuted by a truck that came down the driveway and delivered coal to the adjacent homes at the same time through small cellar windows. I remember a neighbor of ours who retained his coal bin when the switch was made to oil and used it as an enclosed workshop.

Our P.S. 22 on Sanford Avenue in Flushing in the '50s was heated by coal. One of the teachers took us on a tour of the cellar where we saw the maintenance man pushing what looked like a huge hamper filled with coal toward a blazing furnace.

The NYT once ran a 1978 story with the cute headline: They Still Chute Coal, Don't They? It was a cute headline because the movie titled "They Still Shoot Horses, Don't They?" had come out in1969 starring Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin, Gig Young, Susannah York, Red Buttons, and other notable cast members about marathon dancing in Atlantic City during the Depression. Gig Young won a Best-Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the emcee. It was depressing fare about desperate times.

I can be nostalgic as well as loving a good sight gag. When you enter our house and wipe your feet in the vestibule you wipe them on a circular rubber mat that says: N.Y.C.  SEWER. The mat has the authentic look and size of a manhole cover. We've now had the mat quite a few years. I can't remember where I got it from, but we moved into this house in 1992 from Queens, a part of New York City, that despite the NYT calling it an outer borough is connected by numerous rail links, bridges and tunnels. I never get over their adjectives sometimes.

Anyway, I don't know when I bought it, but my wife was a little nostalgic for the old place. She no longer is. But to recognize her nostalgia I saw the mat, ordered one and it's been between the doors ever since.

I told her when I plopped it down and she might still have been a bit wistful, that wiping her feet on a replica of N.Y.C. manhole was as close to moving back to the city as we we're going to get. She no longer tells me, "very funny."

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