Designs Underfoot: The Art of Manhole Covers in New York City by Diana Stuart $29.95

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Review
"The Melnicks' work occupies a rather indeterminate genre category: part history of material culture, part exercise in obsessive photographic cataloguing of related objects, part crypto-Pop artist's book. There is a crisp and even elegant matter-of-factness to their writing and their pictures, a spare functionalist precision."
-- Allan Sekula

Product Description
They lie underfoot, embellished and gleaming. They seal off and provide entry to an underground world of conduits, water mains, power lines, and sewers. They appear by the thousands in our cities, but very few people ever look at them or think about them as art. At once completely ordinary and totally unexpected, manhole covers present an infinite variety of design in the commonplace as well as a record of defunct utility companies, forgotten business firms, and obsolete foundries. Manhole Covers documents this singular form of urban industrial art and its place in American culture.

Mimi and Robert Melnick first revealed their obsession with street hardware twenty years ago in a remarkable little book called Manhole Covers of Los Angeles (1974). Printed in a small format and a limited edition, it quickly went out of print and is now a scarce collector's item. But that was just an introduction to their larger project, which has come to fruition in this book of 200 photographs and an extended narrative documenting manhole covers throughout the United States and discussing the history of their use, manufacture, and function.

A subject that at first seems straightforward and commonplace becomes redolent and poetic in the Melnicks' hands, for their hieroglyphic reading of manhole covers reveals a chapter of urban history that can only be recovered from the logos and markings of these early disks. There are square lids, convex lids, perforated lids. And the older ones wear an astonishingly diverse range of anything-but-blank faces expressed in raised crosses, waffle grids, cut-out diamonds, radial stars, floral patterns, and honeycomb treads. The diversity of design corresponds to an equally diverse typology of form and function, as indicated by their evocative labels: handholes, vents, coalholes, grates, lampholes, storm drains, steam covers, meter lids, traffic buttons.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews   9 of 10 people found the following review helpful: My Aunt and Uncle's Book, January 12, 2000 By  Todd G. E. Melnick (Highland Park, NJ) - See all my reviews    Mimi and Robert Melnick are my aunt and uncle. Uncle Bob is my father's brother. A lifelong non-smoker, Uncle Bob died of lung cancer in his late fifties. Uncle Bob and Aunt Mimi became objects of mild derision in my family when they first announced their project of documenting the manhole covers of Los Angeles and beyond. We found it a somewhat frivolous and Quixotic project; in a word, flakey. My wall-to-wall shag carpeted and formica topped parents thought Bob and Mimi were a little eccentric. Memory is fragile. My memory of them is fading and full of holes. I know that their house was full of antique farm implements. A large tangled mass of found wire hung above their mantle. Their fireplace screen was made of chains of old soda can pull tops. I know that I am wrong about this but I remember books in their library covered in yellow paper and shelved backwards. My parents were amused and puzzled that Bob and Mimi liked to vacation in Bakersfield but my aunt and uncle must have found something very rare there that my parents did not have the patience to see. I didn't really know what sort of incredible treasure Bob and Mimi were until Uncle Bob was dead and Mimi no longer attended our family gatherings and holiday dinners. I am very sorry that I didn't know them better but I loved them very much and their example inspired me to try to find a place for the whimsical or extraordinary in my life. You will find their book beautiful and strange. It is beautiful not least because Mimi and Bob found art and design, found humanity and dignity, in a gritty and ignored urban artifact. And this is pioneering work. Very few before them sought life in the abused quotidian. Now such books documenting the gorgeousness and variety of everyday or even debased objects are rather common.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you?