How the humble fire hydrant became an icon of New York street scenes

Surely the most joyous image of summer in the city is that familiar scene of kids playing in the spray of a New York fire hydrant. This pure pleasure, this frowned-upon subversion of a safety device for enjoyment encapsulates the mischief, the relief from the intensity of the urban heat and the tendency towards (and occasional necessity for) a little anarchy of street life in the big city.

Fire hydrant showers were a pleasure denied to us British kids, who only witnessed these scenes on Sesame Street or later in films such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing or the clichéd end-of-car-chase scene, as a speeding cop car inevitably crashes into a hydrant allowing the protagonist to get away and drenching the cop in water. Many will remember The Godfather when impetuous Sonny (played by James Caan) is lured to beat up his brother-in-law and returns to his death at the tollbooths on the causeway on the drive home. In the fight scene there is a fire hydrant spewing water over his victim. It stands as a visual reminder that Sonny needs to cool his famous temper.

In Britain fire hydrants tend to be small concrete paddles marked with a mean yellow enamel “H”. The mechanics are all underground, invisible. This was a development of an earlier technology used in Europe and Africa in which wooden conduits ran beneath the streets. Firefighters would have to remove the cobbles over them and drill into the water supply to power their pumps. They would then plug the holes with fireplugs and subsequently, the firefighters who guarded those plugs (often against competing fire brigades) would become known as fireplugs themselves. Stocky and muscular (in order to be able to fight off fellow firefighters, or angry burning-home owners), the phrase became associated with a short, stocky man. The phrase “plug-ugly” comes from the same source and gave rise to the name of the villainous gang in Herbert Asbury’s slightly fictionalised Gangs of New York as it did to Plug from the Beano’s “Bash Street Kids”. Before timber conduits, in China for instance, bronze vats of water had been left around important buildings in case of fire. The US hydrants represented another level. Highly visible and almost anthropomorphic, these chunks of cast metal seem a particularly American item of street furniture and associated with New York more than anywhere, as much a part of the city’s street scene and visual branding as yellow cabs and steaming vents. The function of the hydrant is revealed in the cap that crowns it, looking suspiciously (surely accidentally) like a fireman’s hard hat.

There had been hydrant upstands since the beginning of the 19th century. Before then — as is often still the case in Europe — firefighters would bring their own portable standpipes. A rather lovely patent for a design by John M Jordan of Baltimore in 1839 showed a standpipe that emptied after use to prevent the water inside freezing, but which also boasted a tapering timber octagonal cover, a blend of lighthouse and carefully crafted traffic cone.

Fire hydrant showers were a pleasure denied to British kids, who only witnessed them on Sesame Street

Cast iron hydrants also appeared around the beginning of the 19th century. In 1804, Frederick Graff Sr designed a hydrant that he had manufactured by Foxall & Richards, a firm better known for producing the cannon used by the US Navy. Some hydrants had flip-up tops, some were designed to look like chunky Doric columns (rather elegant). Various versions proliferated across the US until 1869 when engineer and inventor Birdsill Holly patented a design for New York able to cope with the high pressure water system recently fitted in the city. His hydrants can still be seen — more have survived in the backwaters of the deep south than in New York City, but the rusting hulks of his 1869 model with its bulbous Victorian vase of a base still survive.

The illicit tradition of citizens using adjustable wrenches to turn on their local hydrants seems to date back as far as the hydrants themselves. The first famous incident came with the heatwave of 1896 when a young police commissioner, Teddy Roosevelt, ordered the fire department to open the hydrants and spray the city’s streets to clear them of rotting garbage and animal carcases.

The most famous photos, however — and there are many — tend to show what locals rather than local government did. It is almost always African-American kids playing in the waters. The residents of poorer boroughs lived more on the streets than in their (often slum) accommodation and they would have seldom had air-conditioning. Today those brownstones in the background have mostly been gentrified, as has so much of the historic city and these events are less necessary and far rarer than they once were.

If the hydrant can be seen as a kind of safety valve for an overheating city, it can equally be used to control

Like most pieces of American hardware, the fire hydrant is a supremely practical piece of kit, chunky and slightly over-engineered. In sticking up above ground (unlike those shy British versions) it is easily accessible and clearly visible to firefighters but it also acts as a very obvious deterrent against parking, a physical obstacle rather than just a sign. During the bicentennial celebrations in 1976 it became fashionable for citizens to paint their local hydrants in stars and stripes or Uncle Sam colours, a few jolly and now slightly faded examples still survive.

The fire hydrant is also a very expressive object, the various outlets for fire hoses protruding from the column. If the hydrant can be seen as a kind of safety valve for an overheating city it can equally be used to control. It isn’t much known that one of the other longstanding uses for hydrants is for police to plug their hoses in to quell riots.

And the spraying isn’t all one way. Hydrants have become the favoured scent centres for dogs relieving themselves and checking out who’s been in the area. Spraying water or not, the hydrant’s scale somehow imposes itself more on the world of kids and dogs than adults. Which is perhaps appropriate. They are entitled to their urban markers and their own street furniture too.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic

Photograph: Clay Benskin