During the day whether you are driving or walking the dog when do you actually look down at the ground. In this episode, we talk to three people who made discoveries while simply looking down. We talk to an engineer, an artist, and a local historian from around the world.
All of them shared a common trait. They discovered manhole covers not far from their homes. These discoveries impacted their lives in ways you will discover here shortly. After you listen to this episode, you may look down and see the world a bit differently. I know we did.
Meet our Guests
Bill Davis, Engineer – Join his Manholes of the World Facebook page here.
Calvin Payne – Author, ‘Hidden Sheffield Walks’ tour guide and Historian. Learn more here.
Russell Muits, Artist and Street Printer. Learn more about him here.
Manhole Covers and Drains From Around the World
Transcript
Robert Osborne:
You’re listening to the Outfall. I’m Robert Osborne. During the day, whether you’re driving or walking the dog, when do you actually look down at the ground? If you’re like David, Amy, and me, you really don’t pay much attention. On this episode, we talked to three people who made discoveries while simply looking down. We talked to an engineer, and an artist and a local historian from around the world. All of them shared a common trait. They discovered manhole covers not far from their homes. These discoveries impacted their lives in ways you’ll discover here shortly. After you listened to this episode, you may look down and see the world a bit different, and that’s okay. I know I did.
Bill Davis:
At some point around, I’d say 2015, I started taking pictures when I was running. I would look down and there’d be a manhole cover. I thought, “Hey, I’m going to take a picture of my feet over the manhole cover. Then I’ll post my mileage, from my app, my Nike app. I’m posting these pictures with these numbers for my running, but it was a manhole cover.
Robert Osborne:
That is Bill Davis. He’s an extremely likable engineer from Columbia, South Carolina.
Bill Davis:
It started drawing a little attention, because people were seeing it posted on Facebook and a lot of other social media platforms. I started getting some interest from people as far away as California and Europe. I’m thinking, “I’m maybe the only weird guy in the world that’s taking pictures of manhole covers, but it turns out there’re hundreds of people that do that. As I began to take these pictures, and one of my friends, Doug Wilson, who works for a rep firm called Hayward Incorporated, Doug told me, he said, “Well, why don’t you create a Facebook page, a group page, and then we’d post pictures from all over. When people go on vacation and things, they’ll post pictures of manhole covers.”
Bill Davis:
We ended up creating this page, probably October or so of 2016, and we now have about 530 followers on the Manholes of the World, is what it’s called. If you go to Facebook and type Manholes of the World, you’ll find our Facebook page. It’s really fun. I started scrolling through all the pictures posted through the years. Five minutes, and I was still scrolling. Yeah. I was surprised at the variety and the sheer number of folks submitting manhole cover pictures from their travels. Who knew this was a thing?
Bill Davis:
I think one of the biggest surprises I had was the Asian manhole covers. They actually, probably are one of the only groups that I’ve seen. They paint very colorful pictures of fish, and flowers and very beautiful, intricate artwork on manhole covers. It’s just the most intriguing thing you’ve ever seen. When you start getting friends from all over the world, and they’re posting when they go on vacation and things like that, you start seeing manhole covers, another one from Europe and Russia. I had a friend from Russia that was sending me all these Russian manhole covers. They’re very intricate, but it’s all steel and bronze colors. It’s pictures of buildings and people. They are cool.
Robert Osborne:
Bill is not alone in his interest in manhole covers. We traveled next to Chicago and talked with graphic designer and artist, Russell Muits. He has a big obsession for the coolest and oldest manhole covers. How’s that for an obsession? How did he discover the overlooked and forgotten manhole cover?
Russell Muits:
I was working in Seattle for an online education company. I’m a graphic designer. I had probably walked over this specific cover hundreds of times. This one day, it was probably around 2007, I looked down. I noticed the design, and in Seattle they have a program where they have been commissioning artists since 1975 to actually design the covers. This particular cover was a relief map of downtown Seattle. It had all the streets, and then had all the landmarks and it had a legend with icons that went around the edges. Every morning and every evening, I would stop, and look at it and just be like, “Man, this is so cool.” I just never realized it was here.
Russell Muits:
One day during happy hour, I was telling my team about this cover, and I made everyone go outside and look at it. We’re sitting there talking about the design. Everyone’s just like, “Wow, I never saw this.” Then the idea just hit me, “We should make a print of this.” Someone on my team actually ended up going to the art store. She got some paper and just some crude materials, just basic printmaking materials. The next night, we went out there, and threw some black ink on it and ended up making three prints of it, probably around eight o’clock at night.
Russell Muits:
What I didn’t really think about was what we were going to do with it afterwards. This one is probably about 42-inches wide. It’s one of the biggest ones that I’ve seen that I’ve printed. We pull up these three prints and lay them onto the sidewalk, then realize that we had to wait for the ink to dry. At the time I had no car, I lived about 15 blocks away. I just thought, “Well,” so we sat on the curb for a few hours actually, until the ink dried. Then I rolled them up, and I brought them home. I laid them out on my floor and went to bed.
Russell Muits:
Then the next morning I woke up, and I’m looking at them closer in the daylight. Then I started seeing all of these things on the print that I actually didn’t see on the street, which was like, “Wow, what is that? There’s a fish on there. There’s a book there. There’s all these little pieces on it.” Then I went back to work that day. Then I started kind of putting two and two together and saying, “Oh, there’s the fish. There’s the book. There’s the library.
Russell Muits:
I mean, after that, I kind of just pretty much became obsessed with finding the coolest, the oldest, and then kind of capturing them or re-imagining them through with the ink. It was kind of a spontaneous idea, and then the print actually made me notice even more details that I didn’t see when I was standing on top of it. That’s kind of how the whole project started.
Robert Osborne:
So what is a cool manhole for Russell? [inaudible 00:07:14]
Russell Muits:
It’s kind of hard. If there’s not an actual date on there, you’re almost kind of guessing or trying to pinpoint a range based on the design. Maybe the foundry, if the founder’s name is on that. Yeah, if you find a date, to me, That’s cool. People are like, “Well, what is it?” I’m like, “Well, I’m making prints from the street, kind of call it street printing. But I guess it’s really just kind of capturing and preserving significant pieces of iron through ink and canvas.”
Robert Osborne:
Next, we meet Calvin Payne from Sheffield, England. Sheffield is about two hours north of London. Calvin got interested in not only manhole covers, but all pavement features in his local community. He even helped author a book about these features.
Calvin Payne:
Seven or eight years ago, in the area, a part of the city I lived, and worked, and walked to work each day, and I’ve always been interested in history. I was a member on our local history website that covered the city. I’d never posted anything. I was just a reader on there. I took some photographs of items I’d seen that I thought were old, and interesting and a bit of a mystery. I posted two or three posts with some of my discoveries and I was expecting to get the answers. I was expecting some people to come back and tell me what things were, and I would have been happy and moved on, probably. But the answers came back that they don’t know, people shrugging their shoulders and telling me to go and find out more, and so I did. My webpage there now is one of the most read and commented pages on the site. It’s still going from seven years ago.
Calvin Payne:
After about six months, people said, “You should write a book about it,” so I did. Well, it turns out some of those interesting things I’ve found, I found at the beginning, accidentally. The first objects I asked about were obviously old, and they’re drain covers. They’re obviously of an age. I asked what they were, and I asked about the name of the organization that was on the cover. It turns out they were installed as an anti-cholera measure in 1849. They’re still just sitting there on the street that they were installed on, just sitting there. They’re still doing their job, and they’re still there, unnoticed. Actually, it turns out there are thousands of pieces of 19th century infrastructure on Sheffield streets.
Robert Osborne:
Calvin even organizes walks in Sheffield and serves as a tour guide, looking at the hidden aspects of the city’s drainage history and heritage. How cool is that?
Calvin Payne:
I like on the walk, I like telling, you talk about people’s reaction. I’ll tell a story, and then I’ll show them beneath my feet, there it is. You’ve got the story first, and then you’ve got, “Look down. There it is.” I think that makes all the difference. I think that’s the bit where you go from, “That’s an interesting story,” to, “oh, wow.” Yeah, that’s the difference, showing something that’s still there. It fits in. It’s not abstract. You’re not just showing people an object. You’re standing in a street, and we can look around, and we can see other things. We can see the buildings. We can see other things from that time, as well. Yeah, I think that the main fascination is that people are seeing something that’s in their city, on their street and that they haven’t noticed before.
Calvin Payne:
The best thing I get is people coming on my webpage, and they found something, and they’ve taken the photograph, and they’ve uploaded it. Quite a few things I didn’t find, other people found, and I did [inaudible 00:10:38] to my page on the Sheffield history website. I quickly got reputation on there finding interesting things.
Robert Osborne:
So why are manhole covers important? For Bill, it’s a reminder of the vast infrastructure of collection pipes that are unseen for the general public.
Bill Davis:
We want people to be aware, because awareness of the importance of the system comes from knowledge. If people don’t see it, and it’s out of sight out of mind, they don’t understand why they have to pay money for it, and to keep it up, and to keep the sewer in the pipes. In order for it to be kept in the pipe, it has to be maintained. This draws attention, especially to our elected officials who have to fund these repairs. It’s really important that they understand what we do and why we do it.
Robert Osborne:
For Russell, manhole covers are an important way of connecting people to their streets.
Russell Muits:
When someone says, “I’ve been living in this neighborhood for 20 years. I walked over this every day, and I never noticed it until now, I just really love that. I love connecting people with their streets and also just connecting with them, in general, so totally right. I mean, it’s a big part of the project and a big part of my inspiration to kind of keep going. There’s a couple of blocks in Philadelphia where you can walk the street, and you’re going to see one foundry’s name, 23rd and Sherry, and then you get to the corner, it’s another foundry. They were almost like pouring them for their neighborhoods. That whole historical aspect, how rare they are, gets me pretty excited when I find something like that.
Robert Osborne:
For Calvin, manhole covers are an important way of connecting people, not only to their streets, but also to history.
Calvin Payne:
Sheffield is a Victorian city. I mean, the steel industry, it was a powerhouse industry in Victorian times, and that’s reflected by the things that are on the ground. It was in the city’s heyday. There’s a lot of pride. The city’s name appears on almost everything, because of this, the whole Made in Sheffield thing is cutlery and knives and Sheffield. All the small parts of the [inaudible 00:12:56] pavement features of furniture, have Sheffield in big letters. There’s a pride in that. It’s definitely of the era. You can tell the era when the city was proud and when it was a producer of things. I like to think of that. I like to think that just on everyday objects, there’s a message from the past there.
Calvin Payne:
It quite appealed to me, I think, that the most mundane of all items, the drain cover for the wastewater. I mean, you can’t get more everyday. The [inaudible 00:13:24] is all on the ground, and people actually walk over to them. Then I show people all the time, and obviously, I get the reaction of, “Well, I’ve walked down the street for X number of years, and I’ve never noticed that.” That’s the most common thing you get, because who looks at the ground? You don’t really.
Robert Osborne:
So true. Hopefully, after you listen to this show, you’ll try to rediscover the joy of just looking down, and maybe you can find some artifacts, like manhole covers, just waiting to be discovered. Thanks again to Bill, Russell and Calvin for talking with us. If you want to see Bill’s favorite manhole cover pictures, or Russell’s fantastic artwork, or some of Calvin’s favorite objects in Sheffield, please visit our show notes. As always, go to our website, the outfall.com, and leave us a comment. We’d love to hear from you. Oh, don’t forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter where we share what’s interesting in the world of water and infrastructure. We actually emailed our first newsletter last week.
