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This week on the Omnibus, we have something a little different for you. After almost 30 years at the Urban Center, the Architectural League is moving. And after exactly one year at the Old American Can Factory, Urban Omnibus is moving back in with the fam. From now on, we’ll all be working together in some very sweet SoHo digs, all the better to integrate more fully our coverage of design innovation in the built environment of New York City with the programs, events, exhibitions and publications that make the League one of the country’s premier presenting organizations for architecture, urbanism and related fields. We’ll be back in full force next week with our regular Wednesday feature and posts to our forum throughout the week. But while we attend to the details of moving, instead of a regular feature this week, here’s a little story about infrastructure, citymaking and the weird and wonderful sights this city offers up every now and again.

The Urban Center, housed in one wing of the historic Villard Houses, has for decades been home to a wide variety of non-profits dedicated to improving and illuminating our shared urban public realm – in addition to the Architectural League, the roster of tenants includes the Municipal Art Society, New Yorkers for Parks, the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, and our favorite bookstore in the whole world, Urban Center Books. But, as they say on Wikipedia, it is probably best known as a frequent location for the hijinks of Serena van der Woodsen et al in that other showcase for urban, er, innovation that we call Gossip Girl.

On one of my last trips to the League’s soon-to-be-former HQ this past weekend, I was treated to an incredible sight that reminded me why I love this city and this job. When we launched the Omnibus in January, I called out one shared quality among our intended audience as the insatiable curiosity that draws your eyes to a gap in a construction barrier. You want to know what’s going on behind the scaffolding, how buildings and choices and cities are being made, how New York works. Well, needless to say, the Omnibus team has that kind of urban nerdiness in spades, and so the scene along Madison between 47th and 53rd streets was something pretty cool to behold.

Directly in front of the Urban Center, the eastern lane of Madison Avenue was open at the seams and a construction crew was busy inserting a very large plastic pipe. According to Insituform Technologies, subcontractor to Halcyon Construction in this effort,

Insituform Blue, the company’s potable water business, will rehabilitate 10,000 feet of 48-inch diameter water line using a high-density polyethylene (HDPE) product that will create a new pipe-within-a-pipe. The company’s technology and processes make it possible to rehabilitate the water main line without digging an open trench the entire length of the line.

10,000 feet? This did not look like 10,000 feet. There appeared to be three main work stations spread along only six blocks of Midtown: one  for the crew to connect pipe components, one for them to pull it into the ground, and one in the middle to tape the pipe up. The taping part took me by surprise. On the corner of 50th street, in what can only be described as a rental wedding tent, a team of construction workers was busy encircling the tube with what looked like duct tape. Insituform, it turns out, is a leading “provider of proprietary technologies and services for rehabilitating… underground piping systems without digging or disruption.” And, indeed, while the scene was dramatic, the disruption was minimal: traffic still zoomed by on the remaining lanes of Madison, though many rubber-necked drivers were distracted by the sight of a seemingly endless plastic tube, four feet in diameter, inching further and further beneath the street plane.

The tape, it turns out, is crucial. It constricts the diameter of the new water main such that it fits inside the existing pipe, which is one hundred years old (the plurality of water mains were built in the 30s). When the water is once again directed through this main, the new pipe will expand to its maximum size. The City’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC), which is in charge of the project for the client agency, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), cites this approach as part of DDC’s ethos of innovation in the research and development of technologies to support ambitious public works projects:

An R&D objective has been the incorporation of … trenchless lining technology for the reconstruction of select water mains. Trenchless technology involves installing water mains and other pipes under active streets, using various tunneling and boring methods. These innovations vastly reduce disruption to the lives of those above. A trenchless project on a large-diameter water main lining on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue is in progress and will reduce inconvenience experienced by pedestrians, motorists and businesses.

This lining will replace the trunk main between East 37th Street to East 78th Street, about seven feet underground. While that’s nearly two miles, it represents a fraction of the city’s water main system, over 6,000 miles of which criss-cross the city. Water mains are rarely a hot topic of conversation; mention of them is pretty much limited to when they break. But every now and then the city provides unexpected glimpses of how it works, how, in this instance, the network of water delivery interfaces with other infrastructural systems like the street grid or advances in construction technology. Every now and then, the city invites you to peak behind the curtain and to witness the effort, the innovation, and the design choices that go into keeping New York’s unseen machine running.