Chava Kronenberg is on a manhole hunt.
“Oh! Wow! There it is! We have a winner!” she exclaims near the intersection of Geary Boulevard and 5th Avenue in San Francisco.
Kronenberg is a volunteer helping a local artist with a project. She’s biking around the city with her partner for the day, Lucas Keijning. They’ve got a list of the potential locations of a specific kind of manhole. Their assignment is to find as many of these manholes as they can, take a picture, and grab the GPS coordinates using a smartphone app.
When they find one in the middle of a crosswalk, Keijning darts out into traffic and snaps a picture of it.
The manholes they’re hunting look just like any other, but these ones are each surrounded by a ring of bricks about 20 feet across.
“A lot of people have noticed the brick circles around San Francisco,” says San Francisco artist Scott Kildall.
Kildall is the one who sent Kronenberg and Keijning out out on their mission. He’s working on a project to make people more aware of city infrastructure. As far as he knows, no one has ever created a complete map of all of these brick rings. So that’s part of his project.
“And once you point them out … you can’t not see them in San Francisco,” Kildall says. “Everywhere you look seems to be these brick circles. And I, like many other people, have wondered, ‘What the hell is underneath those brick circles?’”
