A hole lot of love

Could somebody explain to me the fascination people have with holes in the ground? This week, workmen are digging up our street and laying pipes. Apparently it will improve drainage and prevent our cellar from filling up with water - submerging our freezer - when it rains hard. This has to be a good thing, but is the hole itself really that interesting? People - crowds of people - stand there for HOURS. You can't see him very well in this photo from my balcony but there's a little old bloke on the right who has been looking at the hole all morning (honestly!).
I'm thinking of selling tickets.
The photo itself is about as interesting as I find the hole, but my take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the hole is getting me worried. Am I missing something?
It must also be weird for the blokes actually digging the hole. They're enclosed in this steel fence designed to keep out kids like Esther and Julia and their friends in the street who also are affected by the magnetic pull of the excavations. But from here, they look to me a lot like animals prowling around their cramped enclosures in a zoo.
The only things I care about are that the digging doesn't trigger some kind of land subsidence that swallows up our house and that it's over soon because it's causing parking problems in our street, which has a self-regulating and strictly observed parking policy. The unspoken rule is that everybody has a minimum one parking spot in front of their own house. Second cars (I think we're the only ones in the street with only one car and don't think the neighbors haven't noticed the fact) are parked as near as possible to one's own house without encroaching on a neighbor's parking privileges.