New York, NY

I had been planning a trip to New York for a while, mostly to come up with new slides for my lectures, but also to see if I could find one specific manhole cover.  Sounds like a daunting task, but really, it wasn't that bad.  In a book titled Designs Underfoot, Diana Stuart documented the wide range of artistic designs found on manhole covers in New York.  As luck would have it, a lot of those manhole covers have dates on them.  I thought it would be cheating to just go through her book and take pictures of each one that had a date on it, but I did want to use that book as a guide to find the oldest dated manhole cover in New York.  And thanks to her earlier work, I found it right were she said it would be.  For those of you familiar with New York, you know that Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets is basically in Times Square.  It is a little north, but not by much.  I can't think of many things near Times Square that are still as they were in 1866.  But there is at least one.  According to the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, the Croton Aqueduct provided fresh drinking water for New Yorkers beginning in the 1842, and continued to operate until 1965. 

And of course, there were other dates in metal as well.  Here are a few:

And regardless of where you go, with a hobby this odd you will continue to get the occasional funny look.  To wit: