By Beauty Damned

City Disaster

This is the second time a crane has collapsed in Manhattan in as many months. What's going on?

Since I moved here in 2000, I have certainly seen and otherwise become aware of all of the treacherous possibilities that this city has in store. The rest of the country has its many dangers, no doubt, and all big cities seem to offer an even greater potential - or some might even say "odds" - for bad things to happen than do more rural areas. But New York, people, New York is *special.* Manholes combusting, electric currents zapping, subway grates falling, paved streets inverting, subways flooding, skyscraper cranes collapsing, even the skyscrapers themselves imploding. This is not even to mention the risk you take getting into a taxi cab or the backseat of the average over-machismo-bearing Brooklynite on his yearly steroid cycle. (Watch out! They could be one in the same!)

A couple of years ago, my friend Frannie and the rest of her family were getting ready for bed in their apartment on the upper east side when the building behind theirs went up in flames. They were evacuated and spent the night in a Red Cross van. If they'd lived in the country, yeah, their neighbor's fire probably wouldn't have affected them (and also they would be living in the country), but because of the close living quarters of the city, we are all butted up against each other. There is only so much space on the island of Manhattan, in particular, as most non-morons know. Therefore, people decided to build upwards. That is why we have skyscrapers and why New York has more of them than anywhere else in the world. It irritates me that people say things like, "Why don't they just stop building skyscrapers?" Why don't we stop having wars? That's killing more people than these crane collapses. Skyscrapers...ehhh, they're nice to look at. But boy do these contractors need to be more careful!!! (I realize that may be a small understatement.)