Column: Life in the big city
Our apartment building in Manhattan was started in 1925 and completed in 1927, or that’s the common wisdom around here. It is a nearly cubical 20-story edifice and, if not an architectural wonder, a respectable addition to our Upper East Side neighborhood.
The super and his crew of handymen, porters and doormen insist that they would much rather work in an old building than some new construction, which some knowledgeable people insist are plagued with shoddy workmanship and cheesy materials.
Ours is a substantial fortress that is vulnerable mostly to water mishaps/disasters with the occasional broken pipe wreaking major damage. We once had to move out after an outdoor deck failed to drain and flooded our apartment two floors below the site of the catastrophe.
But other than that, life proceeds calmly here, not counting the commonplace notices of water stoppages to perform repair work in an apartment beneath us.
As for the neighborhood outside, not much of consequence happens there either. But this spring, the city put in new gas lines along our street, producing a daily symphony of jackhammering and pavement sawing, along with closed roadways and sidewalks and ever-changing mounds of fresh asphalt.
We are on the 16th floor and far enough away from the cacophony that it was never an issue for us. I cannot imagine how the residents on single-digit floors withstood that audio onslaught. It went on for nearly two months.
But this being New York City, you come to understand that the vast underground webs of water, gas and electrical lines have been there for a very long time and that getting new ones is very much worth the nuisance. The fact that water main breaks and gas line explosions are so rare is something of an urban miracle.
Our miraculous string of explosion-less years ended a month ago. On a Sunday, a manhole cover a block away rocketed into the air carried aloft on a tube of flame. It happened at 4 in the morning so no one was hurt. But when I was working at the Ford Foundation some years back, a colleague walking toward Grand Central passed near a manhole explosion that lifted up a bus.
Ever since, I make a habit of never stepping on manhole covers.
Such explosions, I’m told, are caused by road salt slowly eating away the insulation on buried electrical conduits and shorting them out. Knowing this, Manhattan suddenly to me becomes a vast mine field of such dormant corrosion.
ConEd had to immediately shut our building off from the grid, forcing the arrival of a large portable power plant across the street. Since they didn’t know exactly where the short occurred, they massed an impressive array of trucks and equipment to begin digging up lines in a several block area. The trenches are still there.
While the subterranean utilities have their vulnerabilities, one routine of everyday Manhattan life seems impervious to surprise disruption: the U.S. mail. My wife wouldn’t head to the mailroom to get the daily distribution with a gun to her head, a critical gene never having been supplied. Picking up the mail is hard-wired in me and over the years I have come to know some swell mail carriers here.
Our present carrier shows up around 5 or 6, throwing my midday routine off completely. Nice guy, but he’s the only one in 20 years to arrive so late. A couple of weeks ago, it didn’t matter when he came. Our mail had been stolen.
The various carriers gather a block away to get their allotments of mail from a large truck and then fan out on their routes. Our carrier left his cart on the sidewalk outside the building to do some business in the lobby.
When he went to retrieve his load, it was gone. The cops came and, using nearby building cameras, determined that the mail had been tossed into a waiting getaway car. The perpetrators are still at large, as is our mail. I was expecting a new debit card on the day of the theft and crossed the street to alert the bank. No problem, they said, we always use UPS to send new debit cards.
The staggering question remains unanswered: What in tarnation were the thieves looking for? Credit cards have to be activated, and the vast majority of checks arrive electronically. The rest is unwanted catalogs, one’s magazines and an unstoppable flood of junk mail. Given the severe penalties for mail theft, I began to think that the decision to do it was not taken lightly and perhaps there is a profit-making scheme in stolen mail that we haven’t even figured out.
Russian involvement?
It’s the getaway car that intrigues me most. I have been trained by the movies to know that getaway cars are not for the off-hand or timid. These mail guys are the real deal, with lots of L.L. Bean catalogs to peruse at their leisure.
