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Behind the Manhole Cover

Indian-made manhole cover in the Alabama steel belt.

Indian-made manhole cover in the Alabama steel belt.

If you live in an American city or town, the odds are good that one or more 250-lb pieces of India are not far from where you live or work. Unless you work for a public utility, or have a technical inclination (like me), it is not likely that you would have noticed this imported item. But if you walk around your city and look at the manhole covers, it is almost inevitable that you will come across at least one bearing the words “INDIA” or “MADE IN INDIA.” Almost all of the other manhole covers you are likely to see are from the United States. It makes sense to see American manhole covers in the country where they were made. But what are all of those Indian covers doing here?

The answer to this question lies in decisions made by India’s planners after the country attained independence in 1947. India has a long mettalurgical tradition, but it was not until the early twentieth century that steel manufacturing in India began on a large scale at a plant built on western industrial lines. The first modern steel mill in India was Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) in Jamshedpur, a private undertaking established in 1907. Another private steel plant opened before independence, the Indian Iron and Steel Company (ISCO).

After independence, India’s planners deemed steel a strategic asset that should be under state control. The TISCO and ISCO plants remained under private ownership, but subsequent plants built in the early independence period were public enterprises. A primary motivation for expanding the Indian steel industry was import-substitution. Buying imported steel drained India’s foreign exchange reserves. It would be better, the planners reasoned, to import a mill and then produce steel domestically.

With technical and economic assistance from the Soviet Union, West Germany, and the United Kingdom, the Indian government set up large steel mills in the iron and coal belt of eastern India. The Indian government requested aid from the United States to set up a fourth public-sector mill at Bokaro, but the US Congress opposed loans to a public-sector industry that might compete with private industry. Ultimately, the USSR assisted the construction of the Bokaro plant as well.

With the public-sector mills in operation, India’s steel-producing capacity was vastly expanded, but the original problem of dwindling foreign exchange reserves persisted. The solution was exporting Indian iron and steel products. Manhole covers could be cast cheaply in labor-intensive foundries, and then shipped abroad while still realizing a profit. In this way, an industry that had originally been expanded for the purpose of import-substitution became increasingly oriented toward exports. Indian foundries even make customized covers for large American cities, such as this one in Manhattan:

manhole-cover_nyc

The irony here is that the high-quality iron manhole covers are produced mainly for export. The municipal corporations of many Indian cities have found it to be much more cost-effective to use reinforced concrete manhole covers.

Concrete manhole covers in India.

Concrete manhole covers in India.

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Wasting Well on the High Line

New York City’s High Line is the most unusual park I have seen. The park occupies an abandoned rail bed in lower Manhattan. Reuse of redundant industrial spaces—what Kevin Lynch called “wasting well”—is not uncommon in cities in the deindustrializing West. What is unusual is that the park’s rail line is elevated above street level. It was originally built in the 1930s to remove dangerous freight trains from Manhattan’s crowded streets. Traffic on the line declined during the 1960s, and the last train ran on it in 1980. During its decades of disuse and abandonment, the rail bed grew over with wild vegetation. Threatened with demolition, the line was saved by a group known as Friends of the High Line, which successfully lobbied to have the abandoned structure converted into a park. The first phase of the High Line Park opened in 2009.

The High Line’s conversion into a park did not obscure the place’s past lives as a functioning rail line or a derelict structure. As far as possible, the redevelopers left the original rails in place, or reinstalled them. In some places, the rails run alongside the park’s paved pathway. Elsewhere, the rails have been integrated directly into the pavement.

View of High Line Park.

View of High Line Park.

Rails integrated into the pavement.

Rails integrated into the pavement.

The park’s landscaping emphasizes the post-industrial nature of the site. Trees grow between the ties of the abandoned tracks.

Trees growing through the rails.

Trees growing through the rails.

The current southern end of the High Line ends abruptly where the remainder of the original line was chopped off to make room for new development. The park’s developers left the cut open, allowing a glimpse of the heavy steel structure that was strong enough to hold freight trains above the street.

The southern terminus of the High Line.

The southern terminus of the High Line.

The substructure of the High Line.

The substructure of the High Line.

Since the early period of the republic, Americans have had a reputation for always wanting to throw away the old in favor of the new. This reputation is not undeserved. Americans built much of their industrial infrastructure cheaply, in the belief that something new and better would have come along by the time their infrastructure wore out. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the British were making railway viaducts out of stone so they would last forever, the Americans were making theirs out of wood, which was cheap but not durable. The ruins of abandoned rail lines can be seen all over the country, especially in places such as the mountain West where they have not been replaced by new development.1

In the latter half of the twentieth century, some Americans finally started to realize that the Old, as well as the New, has use and value. The High Line Park is one example of the Old being put to a creative and interesting New use.

  1. Arnold Pacey contrasts the nineteenth-century British interest in monumentality and permanence with the contemporary American obsession with newness in The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 209-15. []

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