You may have registered but never stopped to think about all those colored markings around the city. The marks are everywhere, hiding in plain sight. A cross between hieroglyphics and graffiti tags, they’re mostly put there to tell excavators what’s below ground before crews start digging up the streets.
Tom Wilson and I have spent this summer noticing them. Wilson began to photograph painted dots on sewer drains and then he started to focus on funny signs and words and small colored discs, called A-tags, embedded in the asphalt. Now, he says, he can’t not see tags and markings whenever he’s walking around town.
Each year New York processes hundreds of thousands of applications for excavations around the five boroughs to fix what’s broken underground. If you live in the city and think your street is constantly victimized by jackhammers and street saws, you may not be wrong.
All digs begin with spray-painted lines and dots on the sidewalks and streets that are akin to the surgical markings doctors draw on patients before operating.
These excavators’ hieroglyphs were standardized decades ago by the American Public Works Association, after a breached petroleum pipeline in California blew up a city block, killing nine people. Now, across the country, prospective diggers start by dialing 811, a federally-mandated call center, which combines GPS and old records to geolocate pipes and wires in a dig area.
The call center alerts relevant utilities and agencies, which send crews, ASAP, to paint where their equipment is buried.
In a city as vast as New York, excavation is a multibillion-dollar operation, conducted by an alphabet soup of sprawling, divergent agencies, private owners and utilities, who don’t always agree with one another, but must all follow certain rules. White lines indicate the area to be excavated. Pink ones are made by surveyors. Red paint designates electricity; blue, drinking water; yellow, gas; orange, communication cables for phone lines and alarms; and green, sewers, while dashes, arrows and brackets track pipes.
The codes are sometimes inscrutable but can be simple shorthand: G is for gas, S is for sewer and 6” PL warns excavators there’s a pipe underfoot, six inches in diameter, made of plastic.
A-tags in the asphalt record who excavated what when. Those colored dots on sewer drains, the ones that caught Wilson’s eye, are something else, painted by the Department of Health to record the delivery of larvicide dosages. Catch basins are notorious breeding grounds for mosquitoes with West Nile virus.
The proliferation of GPS notwithstanding, subterranean city records can still be as unreliable as the B train. Emergency responders sometimes find themselves relying on old yellowing utility maps spread over the hoods of cars when an underground pipe bursts. Mistakes happen.
But there’s a city project now underway to address the problem and put together a high-tech, top-secret map of all the buried infrastructure. “We’re getting to a better place,” said Thomas Wynne, deputy commissioner for infrastructure at the Department of Design and Construction.
That said, excavating in a city as complex as New York will always entail a mix of science and art.
Are the markings themselves art?
There’s an art to the way skilled crews wield the spray cans, if you’ve ever watched them. The lines and colors sometimes turn New York’s sidewalks and streets into fleeting, accidental Cy Twomblys and Damien Hirsts.
Often the tags, hieroglyphs and the odd scribbled words create a ready-made, deadpan sort of comedy.
One thing is certain. There’s a plain-spoken, civilizing beauty to all these daily, under-the-radar routines and practices, like the markings, without which New York would cease to function.
What the scribbles and hieroglyphs speak is the language of a city at work.
Produced by Jolie Ruben and Josephine Sedgwick.
