This is the Manhattan Grit Chamber (whose Hurricane Sandy high-water mark we saw on a previous visit), sibling of the Bronx Grit Chamber. From the NY Times:
The best places to see the celebrated products of New York — its Broadway talent, its skyscraper architecture — are well known.A guy who works here was standing outside when I walked by. He told me nothing too crazy has washed in lately, other than the 50 bucks he found not long ago.
But the best place to see Manhattan's byproducts — what is stuffed down its sinks, flushed down its toilets and washed from its gutters — cannot be found in tour guides. There is perhaps no better vantage point than the Manhattan Grit Chamber, which strains solids from much of the borough's sewage as it flows underground to the Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. . . .
"We get a lot of turtles and fish. . . . We've had a canoe come in here; it got caught on the screen. We've had pieces of telephone poles, Christmas trees. Oh, you name it — mattresses, dead dogs. We got a live dog once."
