A 5-Minute Journey Down a Manhole in New York

“ It ’s dead quiet , and you feel like you ’re the last military personnel on land . That ’s fantastically rarified in New York , ” says urban IE Steve Duncan . Filmmaker Jon Kasbe followed Duncan — who many of you might recognise from 2011’sUndercity — down a sewerage for the short photographic film , A Beautiful Waste , publish in July .

As they make their way through the shadow , they come across john newspaper , yes , but also unexpectedly beautiful sights like a clean , natural spring bubble into the sewer . As Duncan document on his on the face of it dormant websiteWatercourses , the island New York was built on was once a tangle of small rivers and current ; the current sewer internet simply trace those long - forget path :

Almost all of the the streams , ponds , swamp , tidal intake , rising tide plains , saltation , etc that once dotted the fertile land seem , at first glance , to have go away underneath the lunar time period of New York City ’s urbanization . This is not completely truthful . In many case , the city keep the imprint of these features ; in the shape of a route , for instance , like Water Street in low Manhattan , that used to observe the edge of a stream or river ; or sometimes just in the name of a neighbourhood or street . Spring Street is named after a spring ; Canal Street was shortly a functional canal under the Dutch ; and throughout Brooklyn and Queens north along the Hudson , street with names like “ Mill Street , ” “ Lake Ave , ” “ Mill Pond Road , ” etc show the honest-to-goodness internet site of water system factory locate along streams or ponds .