Douglas Greeley, the Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau for Wastewater Treatment at New York’s Department for Environmental Protection, is a very generous man. When I visited him for my book, way back, he gave me sewer cover and fire hydrant badges, a copy of Art Carney from the Honeymooners, a series every American who was sentient in the 1950s will know, singing The Song of the Sewer. Doug is also curious; his bookshelves are full of works about the infrastructural history of his city, and on his wall he has a section of an early water pipe laid in New York. It is wooden, curved, and rather beautiful. I thought of this this morning when reading the latest in the New York Times’ praiseworthy obsession with infrastructure, which it points out is held together with Spit, Glue and Maybe Even Chewing Gum. There are no sewers in the story, oddly, but there is something about the waterworks in Alaska, which still run perfectly functionally using wooden pipes wrapped in iron.The state’s drinking water chief, James Weise, is quoted saying, “What we’ve found, kind of unbelievably, is that the wooden water mains wrapped in that wire actually perform better than ductile iron. They are less susceptible to fracture due to earthquake activity, and they are more flexible.” So of course the wooden pipes are being replaced with ductile iron. Whether they will keep things rolling along, as Art Carney would say, as well as the wood won’t be obvious for a century or so.
It’s Bank Holiday here. The sun is shining. People are at festivals and doing holiday things. In the spirit of those things, here are the lyrics to the only song about sewers sung to my knowledge on a mainstream TV sitcom.
The Song of the Sewer lyrics:
I work in the sewer,
It’s a very hard job.
You know they don’t hire
Just any old slob.
You don’t have to wear
A tie or a coat.
You just have to know
How to float.
Chorus:
We sing the song of the sewer
Of the sewer we sing this song.
Together we stand
With shovel in hand
To keep things rollin’ along.
I work down the manhole
With a guy named Bruce.
And we are in charge
Of all the refuse.
He lets me go first
While he holds the lid.
I’m telling you, sheesh…
What a sweet kid.
Chorus:
We sing the song of the sewer
Of the sewer we sing this song.
Together we stand
With shovel in hand
To keep things rolling along.
Oo-oo Oo-oo Oo-oo-Oo-oo
A funny thing happened
To Bruce yesterday.
The tide came along
He got carried away.
He come out in Jersey.
But it’s O.K. now.
Cause that’s where
He lives anyhow.
Chorus:
We sing the song of the sewer
Of the sewer we sing this song.
Together we stand
With shovel in hand
To keep things rolling along.
My father he worked
In the sewer Uptown.
I followed his footsteps
And worked my way down.
That’s how I began
In this here industry.
I just sort of fell into it.
Sheesh, lucky me.
Chorus:
We sing the song of the sewer
Of the sewer we sing this song.
Together we stand
With shovel in hand
To keep things rollin’ along.
© Matt Dubey and Harold Karr, 1955