Top This: Designer Sewer Lids Make Their Southland Debut

With a grin, John Hales stamped his seal of approval on the manhole down the street from his Hermosa Beach home.

In addition to the word “sewer,” its cast-iron cover was imprinted with ocean waves, an old-time rancho cattle brand, a modern-day house and a baseball bat, tennis racket and lawn-bowling ball -- all wrapped around a stylized Hermosa Beach monogram encircled by a sunburst.

The era of the designer manhole cover began in the Los Angeles area Monday with a 200-pound clunk as Hermosa Beach utility workers began installing a custom sewer lid that is representative of the place once known as “the aristocrat of the California beaches.”

“It’s all there,” Hales, 88, said of the elaborate city logo stamped into the top of the 25-inch-wide opening. And he should know: The retired graphic arts designer created the official seal 40 years ago after a series of storms damaged a municipal pier that had been depicted on the previous city emblem.

So no wonder municipal workers picked a manhole a few steps from Hales’ front door when they installed the first of the city’s new logo lids, at the intersection of Ardmore Avenue and 8th Place.

They will replace the generic nub, radial and diamond patterns of the type that have proliferated on streets across the nation for 50 years.

Manholes have been local fixtures since 1873, when construction of Los Angeles’ sewer system began. They’ve existed in cities on the East Coast and in Europe for even longer. Most early covers were forged at local ironworks and boasted ornate, fanciful designs that were often the source of community pride.

Suburban expansion after World War II, coupled with the closure of many small foundries, resulted in mass-produced, plain-wrap manhole lids that were eventually fabricated overseas in places such as India.

But the lowly manhole cover could once again become a platform for civic pride and promotion. Hermosa Beach officials said other cities that have heard about their new lids are already making inquiries.

“This is the first manhole in Southern California with a seal on it. We’re the first ones on the block to have them,” public works Supt. Michael Flaherty told Hales.

Creation of the elaborate lid was a fluke. Officials wanted to have “Hermosa Beach” stamped on the new generation of covers to prevent confusion with neighboring utility systems and to provide “traceability” in case they were purloined by scrap-metal thieves.

But when Flaherty handed his business card to the city’s manhole manufacturer, company representative Bob Lauritzen glanced at the municipal seal printed on it and commented: “We could put your logo on them if you want.” Best of all, the cost of the custom work would be negligible.

Lauritzen explained that his Santee, Calif.-based South Bay Foundry Inc. had successfully produced special manhole tops for Palo Alto that depict that Northern California city’s emblem, a tree.

Flaherty gave the go-ahead, and the foundry made a mock-up mold and poured a few test lids at its production plant in Mexicali, Mexico. “We corrected a couple of glitches” and delivered the samples to Hermosa Beach, Lauritzen said.

City officials promptly ordered 50 of the custom covers and promised follow-up orders as the municipality’s 1,000 manhole covers need replacement.

“We’re kind of weird in public works, getting excited about things like this,” Hermosa Beach public works chief Richard Morgan said.

Hales, who has become Hermosa Beach’s unofficial historian since moving to town 58 years ago, said he designed the seal in 1964 to reflect the town’s year-round sunny environment, its recreational orientation and its Spanish land-grant past.

The circa-1848 cattle brand depicted on the seal is that of Antonio Ignacio Avila, who held the grant to Rancho Redondo, on which Hermosa Beach now sits, Hales said.

The old city logo had been created in 1928 and depicted the city pier being bashed by ocean waves. It contained the slogan: “The Aristocrat of the California Beaches.”

Hales and his late wife, Lorraine, and their son Donald, 50, constructed a large mosaic-tile copy of the seal, which now hangs at City Hall. It was not his family’s first municipal art project: He said his father, George Hales, designed the galleon depicted on the rotunda floor of Los Angeles City Hall, built in 1928.

Hermosa Beach’s manhole covers and companion self-locking rings weigh about 300 pounds and cost about $275 each. With the town’s traffic flow, they should last 75 to 80 years.

“These are going to be here forever, John. They’re going to be everywhere in Hermosa Beach,” Flaherty told Hales.

And that, he added, is an iron-clad guarantee.