Canal Street pothole now has a name and a fan club
It is called Gerald. It is 14 inches deep. It has 3,200 followers, a birthday and, as of Friday, a small plaque.
There is a pothole on Canal Street at Lafayette that has been there, by the most generous estimate, since March. The Department of Transportation says it is "scheduled." The neighbourhood says it is called Gerald.
Gerald is 14 inches deep and roughly the shape of New Jersey. He has a birthday (March 9, the date of the earliest complaint on the city's 311 log), a social media account with 3,200 followers, and a fan club that meets on Friday evenings at a bar on Mulberry Street to discuss, as the club's founder puts it, "Gerald's progress."
Gerald does not make progress. That is the point.
How a pothole gets a name
The account was started in May by Priya Nair, 27, who works at a print shop on the block and watched a delivery van lose a hubcap to Gerald "in a way that felt personal."
"Everybody on this block had already been calling it 'the hole,'" Nair said. "I thought it deserved better. Gerald is a name you can't be angry at."
“Gerald is a name you can't be angry at.”
Priya Nair, founder, Friends of Gerald
By June the account was posting daily updates: Gerald's depth after rain, Gerald's first traffic cone, the day a tourist tried to take a photo in Gerald and had to be helped out. In August, a figure in red and blue was photographed leaping over Gerald in a single bound, which the account captioned "even he won't go in." That post has 40,000 views, the most in Gerald's history.
The plaque
On Friday a member of the fan club fixed a small brass plaque to the kerb beside the hole. It reads: "GERALD. Est. March 2026. He was here before you." The DOT said the plaque is "unauthorised" and would be removed "as part of the scheduled repair." The club has taken this to mean the plaque is safe.
The DOT responds
Asked for a repair date, a DOT spokesperson said Canal Street is "a complex corridor" and that the pothole is "on the list." Asked how long the list is, the spokesperson said the department does not comment on the list.
Nair said the club has mixed feelings about the repair. "We want the street fixed," she said. "We also want Gerald. I don't know how you have both. Maybe a smaller Gerald."