Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll decode one of the mysteries of the city: the spray-painted symbols you see on streets and sidewalks. We’ll also get details on father-and-son guilty pleas in a FIFA corruption case.
Have you ever noticed the squiggles and arrows that are spray-painted on streets and sidewalks? The photographer Tom Wilson and the architecture critic Michael Kimmelman did, and found out that those colored markings are anything but random. They tell construction crews what they’ll find when the digging starts. Michael also sees the symbols as accidental art, right there in plain sight. I asked him to explain. This is not what they taught when you studied architecture, is it? You pretty much had to learn another language for this story. Yes. In the same way that we hear a million languages being spoken in New York but may not understand them, there is this language of the streets and the insanely complicated multistory underworld, where there are thousands and thousands of miles of pipes all mixed together like spaghetti. This is a language, a visual language, that can help you understand how the city is made and who’s making it. And the symbols matter because crews with jackhammers and street saws have to get into that underground universe. Right. Things are constantly breaking down, and there are hundreds of thousands of requests for permits for excavations to make the fixes. Anytime anybody gets a permit, they need to make sure that everything that is underground is marked on the sidewalks or so that the digging won’t burst another pipe or cut off your phone or your electricity. So if you need to dig in the street, what do you do? Call 811. It’s a federally mandated call center, a clearinghouse that brings together whatever information there is about a particular site that has to be excavated, including what’s underground. The call center alerts the utilities and agencies to send out crews with spray paint ASAP to mark where their equipment is buried. Those are the markings we see. Sometimes they’re super obvious, like “shallow” or “tree.” Sometimes they’re inscrutable. And they’re color-coded.
Pop quiz: What are the colors? I believe yellow is gas, and green is sewers. Blue is water. Orange is communications cables. Is red electricity? That’s what you wrote. Some of the designations tell you what kind of pipe might be under a particular site. You might see some that say 6” PL, which means a pipe that’s six inches in diameter and made of plastic is under that spot. And there are white lines designating the area to be excavated. Then there are dots along sewer drains in different colors. Those are larvicide doses for mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus. You see them around catch basins, which are notorious breeding grounds for mosquitoes. What about those little round light blue plastic markers? Those are supercool. They even have a name: A tags. They’re buried in asphalt by a utility or some agency that did some work underground. The tags have codes and a date which tells you who excavated what and when. You’re finding beauty in street markings. Not everyone sees them that way. No. Those of us who live on streets that are constantly being excavated may fail to see the beauty in these markings. But the city can’t function without them. And you really do see beauty in them, don’t you? Sometimes the markings are strangely, accidentally beautiful if you look at them a certain way. I can’t help but see relations to works of art. All those dots on the sewers can bring to mind artists like Bridget Riley and Damien Hirst. Some of those scribbles look like Cy Twomblys. Sometimes, when I see guys spray-painting in the street and they have these beautiful fluid lines, it’s almost inevitable that I think of Jackson Pollock. I don’t mean to be pretentious. There’s an art to making the city work. And we’ve got to find art and joy when we can, because the jackhammers and street saws are probably on their way. They are definitely graffiti art, but with a civic purpose. WEATHER A sunny day is ahead, with calm winds and temperatures near 83. Expect partly cloudy conditions tonight, with a low around 70. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Sept. 7 (Labor Day). QUOTE OF THE DAY “I believe we have restored confidence in people, in the state of New York.” — Gov. Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat who is well positioned to win a second full term in November, though she has struggled to push her approval ratings above 50 percent in her five years in office. AND … Before we go any farther, something to consider if you’re not a Times subscriber. You can explore all of The Times’s coverage for a month without any paywalls by downloading the New York Times app. You’ll be able to click through to all the links in New York Today. You’ll also have access to the recipes in Cooking, the product reviews in Wirecutter and — just in time for the U.S. Open — the sports coverage in The Athletic. One more thing: Did someone forward New York Today to you by email? Sign up here, and it will come to you every morning. The latest Metro news
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Two high-profile targets of a federal investigation into corruption in soccer have agreed to admit they paid “tens of millions of dollars in commercial bribes,” according to federal prosecutors. The targets, Hugo Jinkis and Mariano Jinkis, a father and son from Argentina, are expected to appear in Brooklyn federal court tomorrow to say that they have reached what is called a deferred prosecution agreement. Under such a deal, prosecutors typically drop criminal charges if the defendants satisfy certain conditions; the Jinkises are unlikely to face time behind bars. They have agreed to admit that they paid bribes to South American soccer organizations in exchange for television and sponsor rights to tournaments, prosecutors wrote. Lawyers for the men did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The payments, according to prosecutors, began in the 1990s and continued until 2015, when the Jinkises were indicted as part of a Justice Department investigation of corruption in FIFA, soccer’s worldwide governing body. Prosecutors have since won more than two dozen convictions in the long-running case. METROPOLITAN DIARY Barry
Dear Diary: I accepted an easy freelance job in summer 1980: lay out and deliver camera-ready button art for a group that was protesting an Army Corps of Engineers project upstate. On a sweltering summer day, I had a date to meet with the client at her Murray Hill apartment. I arrived on time, was buzzed up and greeted by her partner, Barry, an amiable guy in his 40s. He apologized for my client’s lateness. An earlier appointment was running longer than expected, he explained. He offered, and I accepted, a cold drink, and we chatted pleasantly about nothing in particular for the next 15 minutes or so. The client arrived, we got down to business and I left. We had one more meeting to finalize the artwork. I billed the client, was paid and thought no more about it until several weeks later when I turned on the news to see Barry, a.k.a. Abbie Hoffman, turning himself in to the F.B.I. — Elaine Caldwell Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
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