The pothole is the city's autobiography. Every layer of asphalt is a year. Every crack is a decision somebody made and somebody else ignored. You look into a pothole and you are looking at 1947 and 1963 and 1981 stacked on top of each other like geological strata. The Romans built roads that lasted two thousand years. New York builds roads that last until March.

A pothole starts as a crack. Water gets in. Freezes. Expands. The crack becomes a hole. The hole becomes a crater. A taxi hits it and loses a hubcap. A bicycle hits it and loses a rider. A pedestrian steps in it and loses a shoe. The pothole is the most democratic hazard in New York. It does not care what you drive or what you ride or what you wear. It will take something from everybody equally.

The city fills potholes the way a dentist fills cavities. They drill it out and pour something in and it lasts six months and then it falls apart again and they come back and do it again. I watched the same pothole on Second Avenue get filled nine times in four years. Nine times. The same hole. The same crew. The same truck. The same asphalt. Nine times. And every time they left it looked like a patch on a pair of jeans that was more patch than jean.

Some potholes became landmarks. You gave directions by them. Turn left at the big pothole on Houston. Park behind the pothole on Rivington. The pothole in front of the bodega on Avenue C was there so long the bodega cat used it as a water dish when it rained. The cat outlasted three owners and the pothole outlasted the cat. Some things in New York are more permanent than the people and the businesses and the buildings. The pothole is one of them.

There is a phone number you can call to report a pothole. Three one one. You call and you give them the address and they say thank you and nothing happens for four months and then a crew shows up at two in the morning with floodlights and jackhammers and they fix a pothole that nobody remembers reporting and they leave a different pothole six feet away that is bigger than the one they fixed. That is city government. That is the whole thing. Somebody fills a hole. Somebody makes a new one. The street absorbs it all and keeps going because that is what streets do. They keep going.