Fire Hydrant Sprinkler Party
The creativity of 1900's street urchins, and what we can learn from watching people do unexpected things with their city.
The stoop was just a staircase until some everyday-genius decided you could also sit on it and watch the world go by. Ordinary people are incredibly creative when it comes to using the city. Some creative uses, like stoop-sitting, are so commonplace they’re now mundane. Others draw more attention. Here are some random instances from my camera roll.
There is a sort of Murphy’s law to cities: People will use spaces in ways you, as the designer or manager, would never think of. Another delightful example. Last month was the CitiBike race, an unofficial sprint over the Williamsburg Bridge organized by a crew called citibikeboyz using New York’s ubiquitous bike-share — which was certainly never intended for such a thing. The joy is palpable, although I’m sure everyone driving/biking alongside of this was terrified (as was CitiBike management).
Planners sometimes call this informal use or informal design. The idea is that everyday people look to satisfy their physical and social needs with whats available to them. These glitches in the urban Matrix can be revealing. Jane Fulton Suri, the writer and design director at IDEO once said that “unintended use tells you a lot about unmet needs.” If we look at these everyday acts, we see people goofing around (citibike boyz), but also clues about whats wrong with a place. Below is a common example.
The lady needs to sit! And, seeing that the environment lacks designated seating, she’s taken matters into her own hands and refashioned the standpipe into her chair. A lot of the time, people in charge of space actually observe this behavior and go in the other direction. I have a whole folder on my phone of hostile architecture and contraptions designed to get people not to sit on things.
Its a shame that the managers of space would rather build stuff like this than build actual seating (there are reasons for this, to be discussed in future posts). But, I actually want to talk about when cities embrace informal use through one of the purest examples around — the NYC fire hydrant sprinkler party.
Not surprisingly, wholesome activities like this used to be illegal. Here is an actual New York Times headline from 1904 about a boy opening up a hydrant on 14th street.
The Times has a great, short history of the hydrant party. Children and their parents have been opening up hydrants since the late 1800’s, often during heat waves and often in poor neighborhoods. Before air conditioning, entire neighborhoods would actually sleep outside on sidewalks and in parks during heatwaves— a mass re-imagining of public space brought on by necessity (during an August heatwave in 1896, a temperature of 120 degrees was recorded in one Lower East Side tenement, and at least 1,300 people died). Police would regularly shut opened hydrants out of concern that water pressure was being lowered for actual fire fighting — prompting sometimes dramatic standoffs with the community and even protests.
Eventually the city stopped fighting the practice. I can’t figure out exactly when but at some point hydrant opening became tolerated, and the city even proactively opened them in some cases during heat waves. They even designed a nifty spray cap that cut down on wasted water.
Here is a photo of Mayor John Lindsay helping a youth fit a cap to a hydrant in 1970’s.
Today you can fill out an online form and have a your hydrant opened by the FDNY in a day. Making things “offical” sometimes makes them unappealing, and cities need to be careful when embracing informality that they don’t put up needless barriers or zap the magic. I think its slightly Orwellian (or at least, lame) that the London Underground has DESIGNSATED BUSKING AREAS marked out in stations where musicians can perform. But, the hydrant system NYC has put in place seems to be a workable compromise between citizens and the City, which does kind of have a case for controlling people playing around with its fire-fighting systems. An article from July 2023 said that 1,400 FDNY-approved hydrant openings had happened that year. The hydrant-party is now often combined with NYC’s other great informal-turned-formal occasion, the block party. With 60 days of notice the city will actually help you close your block to traffic simply to throw a party.
If I look at pictures of kids messing with hydrants through the ages, and reflect on my own experience, I’m struck by how something so simple transforms the street. Parents pull up chairs to keep an eye on their kids, vehicles slow down, kids invent ways to manipulate and enhance the spray with their hands or other props. There is a beautiful magnetism to the whole thing. I also think that these acts are subtle reaffirmations of citizen power in a time when the use of public space is increasingly controlled.
At the very least, we should be looking to people’s informal use for clues about what we could do better. But I think we could go beyond that to have more programs like the spray-cap system that allowed people to safely change their own city to meet their needs… or just for fun.
I’ll end with this excellent bit of research the New York Times recently did on perhaps the greatest example of everyday people’s place-shaping powers — naming different neighborhoods. The paper asked 30,000 people to draw the boundaries of their own neighborhood and compiled the results into a well done map. When the Times asked an NYC official if there was an official map of neighborhood boundaries she responded no, and added “‘it’s not our place to define them…we leave that up to New Yorkers themselves.’”
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There's a set of steps in Penn Station painted with the sign "Do not sit on stairs" that is invariably full of step-sitters. Also: I sit on standpipes.
What? No mention of the way NYers do garage and tag sales without any garage or lawn? STOOP SALES!