The Thiccctionary

Most of the things in our archive are deliberately exotic. A 747. A 2,500-pound pumpkin. A Chesterfield sofa. They were chosen because they're easy to point at and say, "look at this thiccc thing." But there is a quieter category of thiccc that lives on every block in every city, and once you tune your eye to it, you can't go anywhere without seeing it.

This is a survey of five.

1. Fire hydrants

The metal cylinder on the corner you've walked past thousands of times. The first iron fire hydrant was patented in 1801 by Frederick Graff Sr. of Philadelphia, who was the first chief engineer of the Philadelphia Water Works. Before that, "fire plug" meant a literal wooden plug in a wooden water main, firefighters dug it up and pulled the plug to access the water below. The phrase survived; the wooden plug did not.

A standard modern hydrant is cast iron or ductile iron, weighs roughly 150 to 300 pounds, and stands about three feet tall. The bulk is not aesthetic. The walls have to be thick enough to handle the water-main pressure beneath them, which can exceed 150 psi. The base flange has to bolt directly to a high-pressure pipe and not crack when a car eventually hits it. Hydrants are designed to be hit. They are sized accordingly.

Notice one. It's solid. The shape is mostly mass.

2. USPS collection and relay boxes

The blue boxes are for outgoing mail. The green ones, usually a few feet from where mail carriers park, are storage boxes that carriers fill from in the morning and refill from a truck at midday. The green ones are larger and have proportionally more mass.

A standard blue collection box weighs over 200 pounds empty and is bolted to a concrete pad. The walls are heavy steel. The locking mechanism is steel. The chute is steel. It is overbuilt because it has to survive decades of weather, attempted vandalism, and the occasional truck mirror, in every climate the United States has.

The green relay boxes are sized for a half-day of mail volume for an entire route, anywhere from 24 to 36 cubic feet of internal volume, with the steel walls to support that load. They look stocky because they are.

3. Concrete bollards

The short cylinders in front of every storefront, bank, gas station, and government building. Until about 2002, most of these were decorative. Since then, vehicle ramming has become a known concern, and the standards have changed.

A bollard rated to ASTM F2656 standard K12 will stop a 15,000-pound truck moving at 50 mph and arrest its forward motion within 3 feet. A K4 rating handles a similar truck at 30 mph. The bollard is typically a 36-inch-tall steel pipe filled with high-strength concrete and embedded into a reinforced foundation that goes much deeper than the visible part. What you see above ground is about a third of its actual length.

The bollard is thiccc because the threat model is thiccc. The math has to work. Slim bollards are decorative. The rated ones look stout because they are.

4. The dumpster behind the restaurant

The word dumpster is a generic term that started life as a brand name. George Dempster, founder of Dempster Brothers Inc. in Knoxville, Tennessee, patented the Dempster Dumpmaster in 1937. It was a steel container designed to be lifted and tipped by a truck arm rather than emptied by hand. The brand name became the category. The patent expired. The shape is everywhere.

A standard four-yard front-load dumpster is approximately 8 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 4 feet tall, with steel walls thick enough to survive decades of corrosive contents and repeated impact from forklifts and truck hooks. Empty weight is around 600 pounds. A loaded one can weigh 2,500. The walls are not thin sheet metal, they are structural steel, sized to handle the dynamic load of being dropped back to the pavement after each pickup.

This is a heavy box pretending to be a trash can.

5. The HVAC condenser unit

The square gray box behind every house and on every commercial roof. This is the outdoor half of an air conditioner: it contains a compressor, a condenser coil, and a fan, all of which together transfer heat from inside the building to the outside air. Residential units for a typical 1,500-square-foot home are around 36 inches on a side and weigh 200 to 300 pounds. Commercial rooftop units can weigh several thousand.

The cube shape is dictated by the components. The compressor needs space. The coil needs surface area for heat exchange. The fan needs clearance. The casing has to be weatherproof and rigid enough that it doesn't deform when a heavy compressor cycles inside it. You can't make this thing slim, you can only choose how visible to make it.

Architects often try to hide condenser units behind screens. The screens, almost without exception, fail to disguise that there is a thiccc box behind them.

The point of the survey

The exotic items in our archive are easy to admire. The point of cataloguing them is the same point we want to make here: the urban environment is full of thiccc that we have stopped seeing. The fire hydrant. The collection box. The bollard. The dumpster. The condenser. None of these are shaped the way they are by choice. Each one is sized by a specific physical or operational requirement that allows no slimmer version. They are thiccc because the world they serve demands it.

Walk your block tomorrow. Look at the corners and the curbsides. Count what you find. The survey will be longer than you expect, because once you start seeing them, you don't stop.

If you spot something we should catalog, send it in. We are particularly looking for civic infrastructure of unusual character.

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