The manhole cover weighs two hundred and fifty pounds and it is the heaviest thing on the street and nobody thinks about it. You walk over it every day. You drive over it. You stand on it waiting for the light to change. The manhole cover is the lid on the city's secrets. Under the manhole cover is the real city. The pipes and the cables and the steam and the rats and the water that keeps the city alive. The manhole cover is the line between the city you see and the city that works.

The manhole cover is cast iron and it has a pattern on it and the pattern is there so you do not slip. But the pattern is also beautiful. Somebody designed it. Somebody at a foundry in Pennsylvania or New Jersey sat down and drew a pattern for a piece of iron that would sit in the street and be walked on by ten thousand people a day. That is the most humble kind of art. Art that expects to be stepped on.

In summer the manhole cover gets hot enough to cook on. I have seen a man crack an egg on a manhole cover on Delancey Street in August and the egg cooked. In winter the manhole cover steams. The steam comes up through the gaps and the street looks like it is breathing. The manhole cover is the city's exhale. The street is alive and the manhole cover is where you can see it breathing.

The sound of a manhole cover when a truck drives over it is the percussion of the city. That metal clang. That hollow boom. You hear it in your sleep if you live on a busy street. The manhole cover ringing at three in the morning. A taxi hitting it just right. The manhole cover is a drum and the traffic is the drummer and the song never stops.

Con Edison lifts the manhole covers to get to the cables underneath. They prop them open with a barricade and an orange cone and you can look down into the hole. You can see the cables and the pipes and the steam. You can see the other city. Most people walk past. But if you stop and look down you will see the infrastructure that keeps the lights on and the water running and the heat coming up through the floor. The manhole cover is the door to everything that matters. And we step on it without thinking. That is the most New York thing there is.

See also: Steam Pipe, Subway Grate