Everything Goes Somewhere And That Place Is There

This is where your goldfish goes:

The best places to see the celebrated products of New York — its Broadway talent, its skyscraper architecture — are well known.

But the best place to see Manhattan’s byproducts — what is stuffed down its sinks, flushed down its toilets and washed from its gutters — cannot be found in tour guides. There is perhaps no better vantage point than the Manhattan Grit Chamber, which strains solids from much of the borough’s sewage as it flows underground to the Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant.

“This is where it all winds up,” said John Ahern, who oversees the chamber, a large building at the eastern end of 110th Street in Manhattan, next to Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.

. . .

Mr. Ahern is the superintendent of the Wards Island plant, which, after Newtown Creek, is the largest of the city’s 14 treatment plants. The list of things he has seen and seen strained from New Yorkers’ sewage provide enough fodder for a one-man show.

For starters, he pointed into a bin of screenings. There were mostly rags, soiled paper towels, condoms, rubber gloves, MetroCards, dental floss and tampon applicators — that and a dead rat. There is no demure way of describing other contents.

“Sometimes you find money,” he said, looking into the bins. “We get a lot of stuffed animals, anything kids throw down the toilet. We don’t get much feces or toilet paper because it gets dissolved into the flow.

“We get a lot of turtles and fish. We got a carp this big,” he said, holding his hands 15 inches apart. “We’ve had a canoe come in here; it got caught on the screen. We’ve had pieces of telephone poles, Christmas trees. Oh, you name it — mattresses, dead dogs. We got a live dog once.

“Once we got this thing: it was a wire that started gathering rags and stuff in the sewer and just grew like a snowball and came washing in, a big ball of garbage,” he said. “We called it the Volkswagen.”

He stood on a catwalk between the canals and looked down at the dark gray waters, pocked with bubbles.

“That’s from the methane gas released by the sediment,” he said.

And yes, the sewers sometimes become a grave for the unfortunate.

“We’ve had a few dead bodies,” he said. “We got a homeless woman, but it’s mostly men. Once we had a guy who was shot. The last one we had was a homeless guy, a few years ago in the Bronx. They go into the manholes to look for jewelry and money, and then they get overcome with gas, go unconscious and die down there. When we get a dead body, we shut down the operation and call the cops.”