The Sewers of New York City

One of my assignments, many years ago, as a young reporter for WCBS-TV in New York was to do a feature story on a guy who worked in the sewers of the city.

A magazine had done a feature story on the guy and my assignment editor, at the time, thought we should do it for television.

I was doing feature stories so I got the assignment.

I set it up to meet this guy, sorry I can’t remember his name, at a street intersection in the city and we would descend into the sewers. He would give me a tour and I would do an interview asking questions about the kind of requests a sewer worker would get in those days of the early 1970’s.

Mostly the requests were that somebody lost a valuable ring down the drain or down the toilet and he would have to identify the specific drainage pipe from the apartment building and feel around to see if he could locate the ring.

I remember he said at the time that he had located several rings in his career.

Now I will describe what it was like being the sewer. If you are Squamish, go get a cup of coffee and read something else.

It was January or February at the time this story took place. It was very cold outside. The guy opened the sewer manhole in the street. The Sewer department loaned us hip high boots and slicker jackets. I started to descend with the sewer guy and had to stop.  One of my crew guys at the last minute refused to go down. I called the office and they sent another guy who said he would do it.

Once we got down to the sewer flow level some ten feet below the street it was warmish and a wet smell. It was not a fecal smell, but distinct and semi-offensive. The ambient temperature was about 70 degrees compared to the below freezing temperatures at street level.

The most interesting feature was what the sewer guy called, “clingers”. These were mucus-like stalactites that hung from the ceiling; thousands of them clung all along the ceiling. I did ask him there were aligators in the sewers, but he'd never seen one and had only heard stories.

The sewer floor had raised sides that you could straddle and avoid walking into the few inches deeper channel in the middle of the sewer pipe. The slow flow of sewer water was probably around calf-high.

We talked and did the interview and the story aired that night and it is one of the many assignments that I will never forget working the scene in New York City.