You open the fire hydrant and the street becomes a water park. The water comes out sideways and the water is cold and the water does not care who it hits. The water hits the kid in the swimsuit and the man in the business suit and the dog and the bicycle and the bus and the water treats them all the same. The fire hydrant does not have a schedule. The fire hydrant does not have an admission fee. The fire hydrant has a wrench and the wrench is the key and the key belongs to whoever has one and the whoever is usually a kid who found one or borrowed one or made one out of a piece of pipe. The fire hydrant is the most generous object on the block because the fire hydrant gives everything it has the second you open it.

Every summer in every city with hydrants the kids open them and the water arcs across the street and the cars slow down and the drivers sometimes curse and sometimes smile and the block becomes a beach that costs nothing. The fire department comes and closes the hydrant and the kids open it again and the fire department comes again and this is the negotiation and the negotiation has been happening since fire hydrants were invented. The city says the water is for emergencies. The kids say summer is an emergency. Both are right. The fire hydrant holds sixty thousand gallons an hour and the sixty thousand gallons are supposed to be for fires but the fires are not happening right now and the heat is happening right now and the heat is the emergency the city did not plan for.

Jean-Michel Basquiat grew up in Brooklyn in the nineteen seventies and the fire hydrant summers were the backdrop of everything. The water on the street and the steam rising from the asphalt and the sound of the hydrant roaring and the kids screaming and the whole block alive with something that was not supposed to happen but happened every July anyway. Basquiat painted the city the way the hydrant sprays water. In every direction at once. Without permission. Without apology. The fire hydrant does not ask if you want to get wet. The fire hydrant just opens and the world changes and you can stand in the water or you can stand on the sidewalk but you cannot pretend the water is not there.

The fire hydrant was invented in the early eighteen hundreds after enough cities burned down that someone said we need water on every corner. The fire hydrant is a piece of emergency infrastructure that sits on the sidewalk doing nothing for three hundred and sixty days a year and then one day someone needs it and the hydrant gives water and the water saves a building and then the hydrant goes back to doing nothing. The fire hydrant is the most patient piece of infrastructure in the city. The fire hydrant waits. The fire hydrant rusts. The fire hydrant gets painted and repainted. Dogs visit the fire hydrant daily and the fire hydrant does not complain. The fire hydrant endures indignity because the fire hydrant knows that one day the fire hydrant will be the most important thing on the block and the importance will last for twenty minutes and then the fire hydrant will go back to being invisible and the invisible is fine because the fire hydrant is not in it for the glory.

You stand in the spray of the fire hydrant and the water hits your chest and the water is so cold it takes your breath and the taking of your breath is the gift because for one second you are not thinking about anything except the cold and the cold is the only thing in the world and the world is this block and this hydrant and this water and this second. The fire hydrant does not teach you anything except how to be here right now. The fire hydrant is the most Zen object in the city. The fire hydrant opens and the water comes and the water goes and the hydrant closes and the street dries and the only evidence is the wet clothes on the fire escape above and even that dries by morning.