18/03/2026
What a telling story.
I have done repair jobs and sewer jobs, and the general idea is that nobody knows about the work, either the necessity or the issues if it isn't done. Everything just keeps on working.
The same with some computer systems. You don't always need to upgrade, to get a new release. You just find that the program, the software, the website, the app, whatever just work a bit smoother, better, more sensibly than before 😊
In 1904, New York City was building the largest sewer system in the world beneath its streets — hundreds of miles of brick tunnels that would carry away the waste of two million people. To build it, the city hired thousands of men willing to work underground in conditions that most people could not have tolerated for an afternoon. Patrick Nolan, a thirty-year-old Irish immigrant from County Mayo, was one of them. He worked underground for eleven years and never once found the work glamorous or meaningful or anything other than necessary. He did it because it paid one dollar and thirty-five cents a day and that was among the best wages available to an Irish immigrant laborer in New York in 1904.
The work began by descending a wooden ladder into a shaft cut through the street above — the street temporarily closed, the cobblestones stacked to the side, a hole in the city that pedestrians walked around without looking down. At the bottom of the shaft, perhaps twenty feet below the street surface, the tunnel began. It was brick-lined where it was finished, raw earth where it was not, and it smelled of everything that had ever been underground in New York, which was considerable.
Patrick's job was mucking — shoveling the loose dirt and rock broken by the men ahead of him into wooden carts that mules dragged out on temporary rails. He swung a shovel in a space where he could not stand fully upright, moving earth that was sometimes dry and crumbling, sometimes wet clay that stuck to the shovel and had to be knocked off after every throw, sometimes solid rock that required blasting first and then careful removal of the sharp fragments by hand.
The tunnel air was bad — thin on oxygen where the ventilation pipes did not reach, thick with clay dust and the smell of blasting powder and the methane that seeped from the rotting organic material in the ancient soil of Manhattan. Men worked with candles because the gas made open flame dangerous in a way that the foreman addressed by simply telling them not to let the candles go out. If the candle went out, there was gas nearby. Move back. Light it again somewhere safer.
Patrick Nolan never got used to the weight of the city above him. He knew, in the abstract, that the tunnel was shored properly and that thousands of men had worked in similar tunnels without the city collapsing on them. He also knew that some tunnels had collapsed. He thought about this every morning when he descended the ladder. He thought about it once and then put it away and picked up his shovel because the alternative was to climb back up the ladder and go home without the dollar thirty-five.
When the sewer section he was working on was completed and his portion of the tunnel was connected to the system, he was not present for the ceremony. There was no ceremony. The foreman said the section was done, the men moved to the next section, and the finished tunnel filled with water below the streets and nobody above ground gave it a second thought. Patrick thought that was exactly right. The city did not need to think about its sewers. That was the whole point. He had made it possible for the city not to think about them. That was the job.
"Nobody knows I am down here," he wrote to his brother in Mayo. "That is how you know the work is done right. If they notice it, something has gone wrong. I aim to never be noticed."
