Deep Dive: Manhole Covers
1,400 Words | Manhole covers - from Brooklyn explosions, to Microsoft interview questions, to the mythological motifs motivating urban explorers.
Thank you for reading The Gargoyle – my newsletter exploring themes of authenticity, creativity, and curiosity.
Picture yourself walking down the avenue one quiet city evening.
Perhaps you’re walking your dog before dinner, or meandering home from happy hour with work friends, or carrying takeout sushi to your lover’s place. The night is brisk, yet comfortable; a light breeze whistles past your earbuds - streaming your favorite dance playlist.
Then, just as you near your destination, you feel it – a muffled ((BOOM)) somewhere underground and behind you, followed by subterranean clattering and vibrations. Just ahead, a large, rusty manhole cover rattles slightly in its base. Then, a blast of gas and POP! – the iron cover shoots high into the air like a champagne cork.
People gasp. Time slows. The manhole cover flips like a tossed coin, silhouetted by streetlights. You (and your sushi, or your colleague, or your French bulldog) have just one precious, fleeting second to dodge harm as the 300 lb. disc comes plummeting back to earth…
Manhole covers do not typically explode.
However, a series of New York City manhole “incidents” made headlines in the 2010s – notably, the story of an underground gas explosion in Brooklyn which caused multiple manhole covers near Prospect Park to explode, with one flying and striking a dog walker (Thankfully, injuries were minor).
Living in NYC at the time, this and other stories totally changed my perspective on these unremarkable metal circles I had so carefreely strolled directly over my entire life – never realizing that:
That random ConEdison (gas company) failures might suddenly transform commonplace manhole covers into flying projectiles.
That each iron manhole cover typically weighs 300 lbs. (!)
Knowing these metal discs might explode beneath your New Balances is something you just can’t un-know ever again. That kind of knowledge is unsettling – but then again, knowledge like that also opens pathways for curiosity and intrigue. At least, it has for me.
Manhole covers are everywhere; yet at the same time, they are so ubiquitous and blend in so well with their surroundings that we tend not to notice them, or realize just how many of them exist in the wild.
How many manhole covers do you think are in New York City, for instance? Take a moment before reading the next paragraph, if you want to make a guess.
Ready? The answer turns out to be 350,000 (my guess fell short). Across the entire United States, the EPA estimatesthere are “20 million… one manhole for every 400 feet of pavement.”
That’s a lot of cast iron – which, by the way, is what makes these covers heavy enough to stay put while vehicles pass over them, and helps prevent unauthorized civilians from removing them. At least, not without special hooks – or really strong fingers.
Manhole covers are low cost, strong, and durable – a great case study in practical product design. And of course, their characteristically round shape famously inspired The Question That Launched A Thousand Tech Interviews: “Why are manhole covers round?”
When I graduated college, my family, friends, and mentors constantly advised that this was the sort of outside-the-box interview question they would be asking over at Google, or Facebook (pre-Meta) or Instagram (pre-Facebook acquisition).
Actually, it was Microsoft* who had incorporated the question into their job interview process, to psychologically assess “how one approaches a question with more than one correct answer.” But in the 2010s tech boom, it didn’t matter where the question originated.
The manhole riddle had entered the zeitgeist, becoming word-of-mouth wisdom passed along, nudge-nudge, from everyone and their mothers to noobs like me trying to get a foothold (Please God, any foothold) in the agile, intimidatingly-streamlined industries of the ascendant present moment. This, while “traditional” industries (and job prospects) imploded like the casino-demolition scene in Ocean’s 11.
The manhole riddle never actually came up in the handful of tech interview I went on – but I would have been ready ! In retrospect, job-seeking in the Great Recession felt so intense that this trivia lodged in my mind as something to always remember – kind of like my high school locker combo, which I still have nightmares about forgetting.
With age and experience, I view things differently. Back then, manhole covers were these commonplace objects somehow, strangely charged with the power to make or break a crucial job interview – if you comprehended their cryptic significance. Now, manhole covers stand out to me in a different (and far more fun) way – as channels for creative exploration and discovery.
In Irish mythology, “thin spaces” are places in our world where the imperceptible boundaries between the material and the spiritual realms are thin – so delicately thin, in fact, that one might be able to slip through them, or at least catch a glimpse of realms beyond.
To me, manhole covers possess the same kind of mythic allure.
Go down through one, and you descend into a massive underworld of fantastic passageways and chambers housing the nervous system of the city itself – where dynamic currents of water, electricity, gas, telecoms, and subway lines pulse like neurons and flow like the very lifeblood oxygenating the mad, brilliant cacophony of the City above.
It’s no wonder this dizzyingly complex network causes the occasional unintended explosion. It’s also no mystery that its chthonic labyrinths have inspired artists and writers for ages.
Michelle Young (author founder of Untapped New York ), beautifully expresses this point in her excellent article on the history of New York City manhole covers:
“Each manhole cover is a portal to an underground world below. In popular culture, what lies beneath has been explored repeatedly, perhaps most notably by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who would pop a manhole cover to go down to their underground lair that they shared with Splinter, the mutant rat who raised them. The NYC Sewer manhole cover also doubled as a weapon.”
Young goes on to connect modern urban explorers’ fascination with subterranean systems to the Greco-Roman myths of “Fabled underground[s]” and Hades as an “underground world of arrivals, transition, and temporality.” She adds: “Manholes still remain as a portal between the city as us mortals experience it and the underbelly that supports our existence.”
After all, manhole covers in their most basic, utilitarian aspect are access points – which can both metaphorically and literally transport people to worlds beyond their own. In the aforementioned article, Young provides great examples of creative individuals who, by following their curiosity, have opened their own creative work to the transportive, world-juxtaposing potential of manhole covers:
Natasha Raheja, professor and anthropologist, directed the documentary Cast in India, exploring how NYC manhole covers are made. This journey took her all the way across the globe to West Bengal, where NYC Sewer manhole covers are manufactured.
Don Burmeister founded the site A Field Guide to New York City Manhole Covers, where connections between past and present come alive through exploring significant manhole history – ex. there are still manhole covers from 1861 within Central Park.
Lawrence Weiner (1942-2021), a text-based visual artist from the Bronx, designed the 19 cryptic manhole covers that appeared in Greenwich Village in 2000 – all bearing the mysterious words, “In Direct Line with Another and the Next.” This iconic project was an initiative of the Public Art Fund, assisted by ConEdison.
To learn more about these three stories, check out Michelle Young’s Untapped New York blog and podcast episode here!
To me, each of the individuals above (plus the creators of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of course), express a crucial aspect of the creative journey:
Anything, no matter how mundane, can serve as a jumping-off point or launchpad for your next creative ideas.
Manhole covers, pay phones (if you can still find one!), telephone poles, stairwells, fire escapes – hell, even a weatherbeaten stop sign – could provide the next spark you need for your song, your poem, your short story, your painting.
In the case of manhole covers specifically, it certainly helps that they possess a kind of natural, transportive quality. But the real “spark” isn’t in the inanimate object – it’s in you, the creator, who sees possibility and opportunity where others see mundane background scenery.
Maybe something to think about the next time you walk along the sidewalk. Just, you know… be sure to duck and cover if you hear a BOOM and a POP!
*From Wikipedia:
The question of why manhole covers are typically round (in some countries) was made famous by Microsoft when they began asking it as a job-interview question.[8] Originally meant as a psychological assessment of how one approaches a question with more than one correct answer, the problem has produced a number of alternative explanations, from the tautological ("Manhole covers are round because manholes are round")[8] to the philosophical.