On a Hot and Restless Day, a Hydrant and a Wrench Turn a Block Into a Water Park

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By Corey Kilgannon

It was noon one recent weekday in the South Bronx and playing conditions were perfect: 90 degrees, no breeze and a sidewalk like a stovetop. The players -- a roster of men who were hot, bored and mischievous -- lined up behind a fire hydrant on St. Ann's Avenue near 138th Street and shouted in Spanish for a big wrench.

They borrowed one from a plumber working nearby and opened the hydrant's side cap. Then they cranked open the top valve and a jet of white water shot out, growing in force, volume and length until it gushed like a geyser across the street. The men stood at the hydrant -- la pompa, they called it -- and beheld its sheer power.

"You've heard of a water gun?" said Jay Rivera, 29. "We call this our water cannon."

Among the many symbols of the rougher, grittier 1970's and 1980's New York City is that of the illegally opened hydrant drenching streets, blasting pedestrians and lowering water pressure to dangerous levels on scorching days. They were once a staple, with hundreds flooding the gutters, but they have faded: air-conditioning has taken its toll, as has increased enforcement, officials say. The city has equipped many hydrants with sprinkler caps and turn-on valves that require a special wrench.

To be sure, no one who ever had a car drowned or damaged misses those great gushers of years gone by -- and the lawlessness they implied. (Anyone caught opening a hydrant can face a fine, and can be arrested and charged with criminal mischief in the case of damage.) But like any vestige of old New York, a few examples remain, as well as a few practitioners. Here, as the unofficial last weekend of New York's summer comes to a close, is their story.

With the authorities seemingly occupied with more serious misdeeds, a group of neighborhood men practice this urban sport on St. Ann's Avenue. Success is not scored by runs or hits but rather by car parts one has sniped off; payback to prankster neighbors; or aqua-flirting with the girls.

"Sometimes it's just about wetting people and having fun," said Michael Rojas, 27. "But we can step it up and blast the sign off a truck or put dents in cars. We don't really squirt nobody if they don't want it, and we don't shoot straight at windshields or windows."

Mr. Rivera squatted at the hydrant and cupped his hands around the stream. He began shooting cars heading up the avenue and then used his baseball cap as a nozzle. Some cars received only a serious power-washing. For others, the force bent windshield wipers, rattled side-view mirrors and thumped door panels. At one point, the stream banged a big dent in the side of a minivan and knocked off part of a plastic part of a bumper, which Mr. Rivera grabbed and held up like a trophy. The driver didn't stop to complain.

Then the secret weapon arrived. Miguel Calderone, 29, walked up with a metal tool resembling a tire iron: a thick metal cylinder with two metal handles extending from it.

He stood behind the hydrant and gathered himself like an Olympic high-diver. He squatted like a baseball catcher and notched the base of his cylinder to the top lip of the hydrant opening. The cylinder peeled off a smaller stream of the full blast, which Mr. Calderone directed with the precision of a sniper.

The tight stream shot through the air in an arc that he controlled well enough to power-wash store signs and aim into the open windows of third-story apartments across the street (a practice he says he does very infrequently).

"We used to do this with a regular tin can, like a Goya can, with the top and bottom cut out, but they're sloppy and hard to hold," he said. "Then I got some old-timer to make this for me in a machine shop. We getting serious about this business now."

As proof, he shifted his arc over to El Vaquero restaurant across the street and doused a man who was exiting. The man shouted something in Spanish and laughed and ran up the block.

Two women across the street began taunting Mr. Calderone. He sprayed them and they screamed and sought retreat in a bodega.

The jet stream of cold water turned the block into an urban water park, creating a flume on the street and sidewalk, a rushing river in both gutters and a palpable cool breeze flowing down the street. The water had flowed about 100 miles from the city's Catskill-Delaware watershed system and was gushing about 750 gallons per minute and at a force of about 45 pounds per square inch.

An audience materialized on stoops and boys ripped off their shirts and joined in. Mr. Rivera approached the shooting stream of water and began walking into it like he was barreling into an ocean wave.

"This is real Puerto Rican," he yelled as he ducked his head into it and yelled the Spanish words for hard head. "Cabeza dura, baby. Real Puerto Rican. We don't play." He stood up and was knocked down and over about five feet.

The term for this among city officials is hydrant abuse, and according to Charles G. Sturcken, a spokesman for the city's Department of Environmental Protection, it can be dangerous and cause serious problems.

In the 1970's and 1980's, decreased water pressure from open hydrants hindered firefighters' efforts to put out fires and affected hospital water systems, he said. In at least one case, a child was pushed into traffic by the force of hydrant water.

According to Mr. Sturcken, a gushing hydrant puts out roughly a million gallons of water a day, which can add up to a significant portion of the average total of 1.2 billion gallons used in the city each day. The water costs about $2 for a thousand gallons, and is treated in wastewater treatment plants, which is also expensive.

The neighborhoods with the most frequently opened hydrants have traditionally been, and still are, Washington Heights, the South Bronx and South Jamaica, he said. A third of the city's roughly 110,000 hydrants now have caps that require a special wrench with a magnet to engage the cap mechanism. But some hydrant bathers say they handle that problem by taking strong magnets from discarded stereo speakers and fashioning their own hydrant wrenches.

There was a break in the action on St. Ann's Avenue when a fire truck rolled up from Ladder Co. 29 and two firefighters with a large flat wrench shut the hydrant, as the players cursed at them.

The firefighters left and the wrench was borrowed again and soon the hydrant was pumping and the game was back on.

"It's 90 degrees, and they gonna stop us from getting wet," Mr. Rivera said. "If they give us a ticket, we'll start a riot."