It ’s hard to envisage that anything literally hanging from public-service corporation poles across Manhattan could be deliberate " enshroud , " but throughout the borough , about 18 mi of translucent wire stretches around the skyline , and most masses have in all probability never noticed . It ’s call an eruv ( pluraleruvin ) , and its existence is thanks to the Jewish Sabbath .
On the Sabbath , which is view as a 24-hour interval of quietus , observant Judaic peoplearen’t allowed to carry anything — Book , groceries , even children — in public seat ( doing so is consider " work " ) . The eruv encircles much of Manhattan , acting as a symbolic bounds that turns the very public streets of the urban center into a secret outer space , much like one ’s own home base . This allow people to freely communicate and socialize on the Sabbath — and carry whatever they please — without have to worry about breaking Judaic law .
Along with everything else in New York City , the eruv is n’t cheap . It costs a group of Orthodoxsynagogues $ 100,000a year to observe the wires , which are visit by a rabbi every Thursday before aurora to confirm they are all still attach . While wire do from time to time fall , the overall eruv has survived events such as the Macy ’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Hurricane Sandy . When eruv wires do break , it can cause enough of a stir to make news . Most notably , in 2011 a wirebroke near the United Nations building , which caused a problem when resort crews could n’t get past security to fix it . The issue was finally resolve , but not before a good deal of panic set in .
Manhattan has had an eruv in one figure or another since the early twentieth one C , but the present - day incarnation beganon the Upper West Sidein 1994 . It has since expanded from 126th Streetto Houston Street , and its precise locations can now be viewed on Google Maps ( and an intermittently updatedTwitterfeed ) . The urban center does have some rules in place regarding the eruv : The wire can only be a quarter - inch thick , and they must be pay heed at least 15 groundwork off the ground .
New York City is n’t the only city in the U.S. with an eruv . They can also be construe ( or not get wind ) in St. Louis , Atlanta , Baltimore , Chicago , Dallas , and numerous other cities across the land . Rabbi Adam Mintz , co - President of the United States of the Manhattan eruv , talks more about it in the video below , good manners of Business Insider :
