The BOOM of the City

Let's see...evidently there was great fear and confusion in New York City last week when an 80-plus year old steam pipe exploded under Lexington Avenue.

I say "evidently" because I was home working on the computer with my earplugs in and the music pumped up loud.  I may have heard an explosion of some sort.  I suppose I thought it was yet another construction mishap; there are a lot of low-rise buildings being demolished around here, with glassy highrise condos that resemble 1970s office buildings replacing them, blocking little by little our view of the best midtown buildings (the classy GE Building was the first to go, last year).  Some crane operator's always like oops, honey I dropped the 2-ton kids.

I'd forgot that the construction workers go home at 3 pm, but I'm overmedicated.

Then I heard a wild dissonant symphony of sirens and cops on loudspeakers screaming at commuters on First Ave to pull ovuh pull the fuck ovuh!  I thought it all had to do with the shitty weather and roadway/subway flooding we'd been having.  You get used to the sirens -- UN bigwigs coming through, ambulances transporting the sick and dying through molasses-like traffic, another low-rise building burning on a Sunday morning (you don't need Robert Moses to have forcible urban renewal), cops on urgent doughnut runs, and so on. 

The day began and ended like something out of Bladerunner. The First Ave traffic howled like a wounded beagle till 11 that evening, no one could get to Long Island.  Is that a bad thing.

The CNN website informed me what had happened.  I looked out the living room window and saw a giant white cloud of steam that obscured the Empire State Building.  Of course, the sky was pretty gray and hazy already.  A silvery gray, a monochromatic scene, lacking in drama.  Breathless news reports made up for that deficit.

A NYT photographer caught the terror and the chaos, as well as the cell phone calls ("What?  You didn't hear what happened to me!?? Uh, well, actually I'm OK.  No, my new suit's OK too.")

As to our supposed cataclysm, the media were full of people's nightmare flashbacks to 9/11, etc., etc.  The earth shook, buildings were thought to be crashing, hot mud and a hail of asphalt and asbestos actually rained down on the terrified inhabitants of Metropolis, etc., etc., etc.  At least that's what some may have been hoping--goodie, a long weekend!

The streets in the hot zone, or whatever alarmist term they used, were closed even when I walked the dog over there on Friday. People with fanny packs and tight European jeans were snapping phone pix of workers laying down a sloppy patch of new asphalt here and there. They seemed quite excited, pleased to be a mere block from the fount of news.  There were camera crews of TV nets of many lands.  Maybe that fine day it was just remarkable to see so many empty streets in Midtown.  Can't imagine what the hell they were filming. 

Winnie the Pooch was eager to return to Second Avenue where there were more opportunities for her beagle self to scarf up bits of food outside the restaurants.  Fastfood places are her favorites because the clientele is so sloppy and, I guess, comforted by a robust rat population.

I'm used to a lot of noise.  There are these British travel guides that always counsel you to get a room at the back of the hotel or pensione because the front street is so noisy.  Unless there's "double glazing," which seems to make the sounds of the occasional British drunk or ragazzo on a Vespa bearable.  I find this pretty amusing.  We sleep with the windows open at night and hear the sirens and the horns and the Long Island drunks taunting the homeless people at 4 am.  OK, maybe they're Queens drunks.  Anyway, you get used to all the roaring and snarling of the city; you miss it when you go away. 

It's also why, when the street explodes ten blocks away, you barely notice it.  The thumping 1000-watt beat of the city goes on.

Comments

[East Village Wine Geek]

Man, I love New York! Great take on the whole sitch. This town really keeps us on our toes. Even with earplugs in. What a town!

EvWg

[Terry Hughes]

We're NY junkies.

The only other place you could induce me to live is Italy, almost anywhere but Naples.

Or maybe Rhodes, Greece.

Or Galway, Ireland if it didn't rain so damned much.

[Marco]

We unfortunately don't live in the City. There's simply no place like New York City. It makes most other cities seem like small towns. Viva New York!