Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura

“I’ve become a horrible person to walk with,” Daniel Fireside warns me as we set out for a stroll. It’s hard to believe: Fireside is very pleasant company, quick to smile with an ebullient stride. But barely half a block into our jaunt around Union Square, in our joint hometown of Somerville, Massachusetts, Fireside comes to a dead stop.
He gestures to me. He looks down at the ground with love in his eyes.“Quality Water Products,” he intones, reading off the hunk of metal that has grabbed his attention. “They have kind of a funky Q!” He pulls his phone out, furrows his brow, and snaps a photo.
Fireside is one of the Boston area’s most prolific and celebrated manhole cover photographers. While most people step around manhole covers—or on top of them, taking advantage of their textured, anti-slip surfaces—Fireside is pulled toward them, zigzagging from one to the next as though he is magnetic.

Fireside stands over each disc, then stretches out his arms balletically—his phone poised above his subject, the rest of him out of the way—so the sunlight streams down uninterrupted. “I always say my enemies are shadows and oncoming traffic,” he says. “My older son is worried I’m going to win a Darwin Award.”
The history of manhole photography is narrow, but deep. In 1974, husband-and-wife team Robert and Mimi Melnick published Manhole Covers of Los Angeles, which is exactly what it sounds like. They followed up 12 years later with the broader and more ambitious Manhole Covers, which features photos gathered during a roadtrip across the United States.
“Little has been written on the subject of manholes,” Mimi writes in the introduction to the latter. “What does exist, of course, are the covers themselves … in some cases their surfaces broadcast all the information we desire; in others, they hang onto their histories, leaving us to wonder.”

These days, a large community of manhole-cover enthusiasts—many of whom call themselves “drainspotters”—are dedicated to cataloguing these silent badges of the street, and teasing out some of their mysteries. Some publish photography books or make art projects. But many are hobbyists who take photos on their phones: as Fireside points out, this makes it much easier to compare covers, and see small differences. They tend to gather on the internet, pooling their finds under hashtags like #ManholeCoverMonday and #IronworkThursday.
Fireside—who, when he isn’t drainspotting, works as the capital coordinator for a worker-owned fair-trade coffee company—first dove in about three years ago, after a fateful walk around his neighborhood with his…
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