I think of how my friends and relatives would chortle over a particular episode of Seinfeld and remark on how clever the writers were. After a few years of living here, I didn’t doubt their creativity or skill, but I did come to recognize how some of the most effective gimmicks were in fact anthropological exposition. It’s not as if they claimed otherwise, but I have found that people who have not lived here are surprised when you relate a real life version of a Seinfeld episode.
The one I usually told of was the episode where Elaine fakes her address to receive food delivery, because her apartment is redlined by the restaurant. Several years ago I lived on the corner of Tenth Avenue and 57th Street. The building had entrances on both street, with separate addresses. The River, a decent pan Asian restaurant on Amsterdam, would deliver as far south as 57th. A friend lived in the back half of the building, but had the Tenth Avenue address, which tipped the restaurant to its prohibited status (for the out-of-towners: starting north of 57th, Tenth Avenue becomes Amsterdam Avenue). My friend would order food and wait on our stoop for the food to arrive.
Any “classic” New York-based film or television show resonates as “authentic” — The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three, or All in the Family — but that authenticity is more likely than not simply the accurate representation of a personal anecdote. One such moment in Die Hardest is when the Bruce Willis character meets up with Jerry, who drives a dump truck, and knows a little too much about Water Tunnel Number 3, and that Chester A. Arthur is the twenty-first president. Though his knowledge is convenient and moves the plot along, he also, at least to my twisted mind, seems more realistic than anyone else in the film. That’s probably a result of a late night confab over a different hole in the ground, with a employee of the inscrutable Empire City Subway.
I spend plenty of time looking at holes in the ground, of any kind: the lengthy rift that precedes new construction, the temporary openings for repairs, the permanent ones that provide insight into the netherworld. Nighttime is best, because there are less restrictions to observation, and more holes. The steel plates that straddle crevices are removed, and secrets are revealed. Oh, and I’m often drunk.
One night, walking along Third Avenue, I came across a hole, one not exceptionally unique from a distance, attended to by an Empire City Subway truck. I had long wondered about this company: given the odd confluence of names, I wondered if it were simply an obscure city or state agency, sticking to an arcane naming convention. They turn up pretty much everywhere, without any apparent rhyme or reason, except to stand guard over and service holes.
So I stuck my head in, and came almost face-to-face with a man holding one hell of a telephone cable. I recalled an interview with Ridley Scott about giving directions to set dressers on Alien: he instructed them to make a section of the ship bridge “look like hair.” This repair worker was holding a six-inch diameter cable that was an explosion of copper.
Normally I leave people to their jobs. Maybe he looked friendly, maybe I was really drunk, or my equally so friend was simply excusing my fetish and interest. So we asked. Turns out someone was taking a core sample (which involves basically drilling a pretty wide hole and removing the contents as a seamless chunk) but didn’t call around to find if there were any existing services, and went cleanly through the cable. Pain though that was, they missed gas and water, and thus necessitated Empire City Subway.
I asked that too: turns out Empire “has held a franchise from the City of New York to build and maintain a conduit and manhole infrastructure in Manhattan and the Bronx” since 1891. If they come out for subways, or anything else, it’s only because there is copper nearby. He wasn’t as eloquent as the website, but still full of information.
I asked about the mess of wire in his hand. “About 2,000” strands ran through it, a trunk line, if I recall correctly. One of us asked if he would be knitting it back together.
“No, I don’t do that. A splicer does that.”
Is a splicer a person, or a machine? “A person.”
We silently imagined a job that entails getting called out at 5AM to sew together 2,000 individual strands, intensified by a misunderstanding that each strand was unique, requiring finding its mate, but copper doesn’t work that way.
I asked him who he worked for. “Verizon.” I raised my eyebrows in appropriate surprise (though at the time I think it was still NYNEX). He then proceeds to tell us he can’t find any evidence to this fact in public. Gets a check with the logo on it, that’s all. He tells us he’s scoured the 10-K for details. Nada.
Now, it’s not the mystery it was then, being right there on the homepage, but I too did a scan of the 10-K, and right he seems. After all, monopoly rights for over a century is probably some solid cash flow. I don’t know that wholly owned subsidiaries have to be reported as a line item, and really didn’t feel like reading the whole 10-K. The way he talked certainly made it seem like they operate from a pretty cushy place, not counting the climbing in the ground at 5AM part.
We chatted some fifteen minutes or so about job satisfaction, monopoly control of utilities, and the his mysterious understanding of his corporate overlord. I doubt James Cramer could have given any better insight. All the while he was fussing with the conduit through which phone lines for a good three block chunk of the city patiently waited to be restored. Well before the Internet made such detailed research possible, and the fabled UPS driver/day trader, we still had street-level analysts ready were you to bother them for insight at sunup. He went back to his digging, and we stumbled off to breakfast, no more confident that some fool wouldn’t blow up a building because they didn’t follow procedure, but, provided they didn’t, at the very least, those dispatched for remediation knew the score.
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Wednesday Lore: Neither city, nor subway, but Empire.
I think of how my friends and relatives would chortle over a particular episode of Seinfeld and remark on how clever the writers were. After a few years of living here, I didn’t doubt their creativity or skill, but I did come to recognize how some of the most effective gimmicks were in fact anthropological exposition. It’s not as if they claimed otherwise, but I have found that people who have not lived here are surprised when you relate a real life version of a Seinfeld episode.
The one I usually told of was the episode where Elaine fakes her address to receive food delivery, because her apartment is redlined by the restaurant. Several years ago I lived on the corner of Tenth Avenue and 57th Street. The building had entrances on both street, with separate addresses. The River, a decent pan Asian restaurant on Amsterdam, would deliver as far south as 57th. A friend lived in the back half of the building, but had the Tenth Avenue address, which tipped the restaurant to its prohibited status (for the out-of-towners: starting north of 57th, Tenth Avenue becomes Amsterdam Avenue). My friend would order food and wait on our stoop for the food to arrive. Any “classic” New York-based film or television show resonates as “authentic” — The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three, or All in the Family — but that authenticity is more likely than not simply the accurate representation of a personal anecdote. One such moment in Die Hardest is when the Bruce Willis character meets up with Jerry, who drives a dump truck, and knows a little too much about Water Tunnel Number 3, and that Chester A. Arthur is the twenty-first president. Though his knowledge is convenient and moves the plot along, he also, at least to my twisted mind, seems more realistic than anyone else in the film. That’s probably a result of a late night confab over a different hole in the ground, with a employee of the inscrutable Empire City Subway. I spend plenty of time looking at holes in the ground, of any kind: the lengthy rift that precedes new construction, the temporary openings for repairs, the permanent ones that provide insight into the netherworld. Nighttime is best, because there are less restrictions to observation, and more holes. The steel plates that straddle crevices are removed, and secrets are revealed. Oh, and I’m often drunk. One night, walking along Third Avenue, I came across a hole, one not exceptionally unique from a distance, attended to by an Empire City Subway truck. I had long wondered about this company: given the odd confluence of names, I wondered if it were simply an obscure city or state agency, sticking to an arcane naming convention. They turn up pretty much everywhere, without any apparent rhyme or reason, except to stand guard over and service holes. So I stuck my head in, and came almost face-to-face with a man holding one hell of a telephone cable. I recalled an interview with Ridley Scott about giving directions to set dressers on Alien: he instructed them to make a section of the ship bridge “look like hair.” This repair worker was holding a six-inch diameter cable that was an explosion of copper. Normally I leave people to their jobs. Maybe he looked friendly, maybe I was really drunk, or my equally so friend was simply excusing my fetish and interest. So we asked. Turns out someone was taking a core sample (which involves basically drilling a pretty wide hole and removing the contents as a seamless chunk) but didn’t call around to find if there were any existing services, and went cleanly through the cable. Pain though that was, they missed gas and water, and thus necessitated Empire City Subway. I asked that too: turns out Empire “has held a franchise from the City of New York to build and maintain a conduit and manhole infrastructure in Manhattan and the Bronx” since 1891. If they come out for subways, or anything else, it’s only because there is copper nearby. He wasn’t as eloquent as the website, but still full of information. I asked about the mess of wire in his hand. “About 2,000” strands ran through it, a trunk line, if I recall correctly. One of us asked if he would be knitting it back together. “No, I don’t do that. A splicer does that.” Is a splicer a person, or a machine? “A person.” We silently imagined a job that entails getting called out at 5AM to sew together 2,000 individual strands, intensified by a misunderstanding that each strand was unique, requiring finding its mate, but copper doesn’t work that way. I asked him who he worked for. “Verizon.” I raised my eyebrows in appropriate surprise (though at the time I think it was still NYNEX). He then proceeds to tell us he can’t find any evidence to this fact in public. Gets a check with the logo on it, that’s all. He tells us he’s scoured the 10-K for details. Nada. Now, it’s not the mystery it was then, being right there on the homepage, but I too did a scan of the 10-K, and right he seems. After all, monopoly rights for over a century is probably some solid cash flow. I don’t know that wholly owned subsidiaries have to be reported as a line item, and really didn’t feel like reading the whole 10-K. The way he talked certainly made it seem like they operate from a pretty cushy place, not counting the climbing in the ground at 5AM part. We chatted some fifteen minutes or so about job satisfaction, monopoly control of utilities, and the his mysterious understanding of his corporate overlord. I doubt James Cramer could have given any better insight. All the while he was fussing with the conduit through which phone lines for a good three block chunk of the city patiently waited to be restored. Well before the Internet made such detailed research possible, and the fabled UPS driver/day trader, we still had street-level analysts ready were you to bother them for insight at sunup. He went back to his digging, and we stumbled off to breakfast, no more confident that some fool wouldn’t blow up a building because they didn’t follow procedure, but, provided they didn’t, at the very least, those dispatched for remediation knew the score.