Things That Go Thump

People who live across the street, or down the block from major gas explosions can be counted on to appear on some edition of the televised news giving their description of what it sounded like. Sometimes they make a sound to try and imitate it, or they use words to describe it. Sometimes they use words and sounds, and these are usually the best. Because when they only tell you it sounded like the "end-of-the-world," you're left on your own. The end? What, again?

I settled on my own version of a sound and a feeling when I was asked to tell people what it sounded like when the first of two 767s started to use lower Manhattan for an airstrip on 9/11, with one plowing into our building as I was gazing at my computer screen. It took some thought, but I came up with the abrupt sound a plane makes on the runway when it lands, and the sometimes noticeable bounce you get when those wheels touch down. Almost ironic to think of the sound of a plane landing safely for one that clearly wasn't intended to.

Superstorm Sandy has produced many, many stories. And like 9/11, they are reaching the newspapers weeks after the initial impact. Some are tragic, some are not. But you have to understand New York and the Census tract you might have wandered into when someone describes the sound of an enormous construction crane collapsing in the wind to resembling the way the double basses play as "they're starting to cut off John the Baptist's head in the opera 'Salome.'" Personally, I can't relate to that.

But the quote and the nice story that produced it comes from a thankful tenant at a tenant party in New York's landmark Osborne apartment house. The party was held to thank the building's residence manager who cared for the pets that had to be abandoned when the building needed to be evacuated, and stay evacuated while days passed before the wobbly boom could be made secure.

The Osborne is no single-room occupancy place. It so resembled the fabled Dakota that significant parts of the movie 'Rosemary's Baby' were shot inside the Osborne. I've been telling people that for years whenever I think there's chance they've heard of, or seen 'Rosemary's Baby.' Time marches on.

That the apartment house sits diagonally across from Carnegie Hall perhaps has something to do with someone being able to channel a musical beheading into their description of the sound of crashing steel.

But, like I say, it's a nice story and has a good ending. And whatever happened to John the Baptist, well, it was a long time ago.

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