Once on this island, there was a terrible storm...

As always, fervent apologies for my slackness in updating--I've been busy since early June directing two back-to-back musicals and am now recuperating! With that I'll wade right into today's topic:

Man v. [Mother] Nature

The Empire State has had some rare visitors in the last year--a couple of genuine, honest-to-God hurricanes. We get plenty of wet weather [and how!] but hurricanes are a relative novelty. Even Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm, a massive weather system that spanned the Outer Banks of North Carolina to the Grand Banks off of Nova Scotia [where the Andrea Gail went down]

and which hit Massachusetts very hard indeed, was mostly a mésalliance between an unnamed tropical cyclone, a good ol’ fashioned nor’easter, and the remnants of Hurricane Grace.

The reason hurricanes are rare in the northeast is because tropical storm systems, which generally start to form off the northwestern coast of Africa in the late summer months, derive their energy from one essential element—warm water. New York and New England are far enough north that usually by the time a storm has traveled all the way up here over several days, it has started to cool down and hence lose its cohesion and so, unlike the Atlantic South and the Gulf Coast, the New York area is generally protected.

However there was one notorious exception 1938, a September storm that devastated Long Island and Points North (in fact it is still New England’s most destructive, deadly storm). This was before the United States Weather Bureau had started trying out official naming systems, and so the 1938 storm had a plethora of sobriquets, including:

• the Great New England Hurricane
• the Yankee Clipper [gotta wonder how Joltin' Joe felt about that one!]
• and my favorite--the Long Island Express.

I first became interested in this bit of meteorological history when I came across a child’s book of famous storms—according to the book, this hurricane got its locomotive nickname because of its incredible speed. Hurricanes have two kinds of speed metrics--wind speed within the storm, and how fast they actually move across the land. Most hurricanes travel relatively slowly, around 15-20 miles per hour. The Long Island Express, in contrast, moved at a whopping 70 miles an hour, zooming up the length of the Atlantic coast, from Cape Hatteras in North Carolina to New York in six hours. When it finally made landfall, it slammed into the coast so hard, seismographs on the other side of the country picked it up. In other words, it literally shook the continent.


Needless to say, in those ancient days before radar and when meteorology was in its infancy, Long Islanders had no way to expect this monster. One famous story about the Express tells us of a man who received in the mail that morning a barometer that he'd ordered. But upon opening the package he was annoyed--his new device was apparently already broken, as it was a clear beautiful day out and yet the reading seemed to be stuck on the lowest level:

Hurricane.

The Express also ripped the coastline asunder, its fury shaping a permanent reminder in Shinnecock Inlet, which was carved into the barrier island south of Long Island as the storm tore through.

New York City started on an island and is surrounded by rivers, tides, bridges and seawalls--and yet for most of our history we’ve been able to take that uneasy relationship with Mother Nature for granted. Denizens of the Gulf Coast, the Caribbean, Florida could have told us--ignore the power of the planet at your peril. All very well for King Lear to shake his fist at the skies:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout...

…but the white cliffs of Dover didn’t really have to worry about storm surge.


PSA:

Occupy Sandy is a boots-on-the-ground organization that is helping areas in the New York City area that have been devastated by Hurricane Sandy, including Red Hook, the Rockaways and Coney Island. Please consider volunteering with them--if you can't offer your elbow grease, you can help by donating through their gift registry on Amazon. Every generator, every blanket, every flashlight helps--let's rebuild our wonderful city!

Two Flights, Two Rivers

A few weeks ago, January 13, was the 30^th anniversary of one of Washington DC’s saddest stories, the ill-fated Air Florida Flight 90.

I am the daughter of a commercial airline pilot (former Navy) and my family and I have always been hyper-aware of airplane crashes.  Having grown up in the DC area, I vividly remember this accident when it happened—the magnitude of the disaster stunned me.  A heavy snowstorm, the really wet, icy, messy kind in which the DC area seems to specialize.  14^th Street Bridge taken out.  78 people killed, mostly immediately.  In the water. They were never even really airborne, the plane just kind of lumbered into the air and flopped down into the river like a dodo bird, breaking through the ice and disappearing almost completely.

And worse and worse.  

• The federal government had released its employees early that day because of the storm, so the roads were packed with commuters—4 of the killed were on the bridge.

• Metro, the DC area’s subway system, had its first fatal accident that day—so the Orange and Blue Lines were both suspended.

The few passengers who survived the crash found themselves in the Potomac River—a dangerous river even in optimum conditions, it was now choked with ice floes.  Stunned, broken and literally freezing, they could do nothing to help themselves—they could only wait to be rescued.  And wait they did—the only way to reach the survivors was now either by air or by water.

There is something especially haunting about dying underwater—the claustrophobia, the dark, the horrible inversion of Freudian birth imagery.  And the river was cold, so cold.  The survivors had only minutes to spare before hyperthermia would kill them, and many were blind from the aviation fuel that now covered the surface of the river.  The helicopters arrived and hovered over and on the waters, throwing down rescue lines to tow the people to shore.  At one point the skids of the 'copter went below the surface.

Bystanders on the bridge and the riverbanks were shouting encouragement to the flailing survivors.  Hold on, just hold on.  Help is coming.  Stay strong.  The river was so narrow, the survivors so close, everyone could see them easily--you could feel their struggles, you could read the expressions on their faces. 

Eventually Priscilla Tirado, who’d broken both her arms and had lost her husband and baby in the crash, simply could not hold on any more and began to go under.  In a breathtaking feat of heroism, Lenny Skutnik, one of the bystanders on the bridge, stripped to his shirtsleeves and bare feet and dove in to help her.

To this day, if you asked a DC-er who was around in 1982 who Lenny Skutnik is, they will remember.  A month after Flight 90, the Washington Post published its annual Valentine's Day personals, and one anonymous admirer captured the gratitude of a region, saying simply WE LOVE YOU LENNY SKUTNIK.  But Skutnik was only the most famous--the day had several other heroes.  Roger Olian, who jumped in merely to give comfort to the survivors, even though he believed the situation was hopeless.  Arland Williams who survived the initial impact and passed the rope to several other passengers until he slipped under the waters. That section of the 14th Street Bridge is now named after him.

Flight 90 happened 30 years ago, when the airline industry was very different from what it is today.  In the early '80s airline travel, in the midst of de-regulation, was nonetheless comparatively glamorous and exotic.  My father and his cohorts were widely admired.  And gradually the glamor eroded--as customers compared bargains, precipitating a race to the bottom, the legacy carriers, with infinitesimally small profit margins, eliminated more and more perks.   Airlines are considered by some today little better than buses in the sky, the highly-trained pilots and crew dismissed as mere functionaries.

And then, a few years ago, another airline disaster nearly happened, and the parallels were striking.  A southbound flight, crippled just after takeoff.  A river in a major metropolitan area.  Mid-January.  But Captain Sullenberger and his crew rewrote the narrative and gave us the Miracle on the Hudson.  Instead of 78 killed, every single passenger and crew member was saved, with scant injury.*

To put this in perspective, this was the most successful ditching of a commercial liner EVER--all previous commercial ditchings incurred fatalities.  The margin of error is so much less forgiving with commercial jets--they are more unwieldy and more difficult to maneuver, the wings are longer, the number of possible casualties much higher.  But Sully never blinked--cool and calm he told his passengers to "brace for impact"** and guided his wounded craft onto the freezing water.

He and his crew made me proud, so proud, to have a father who's an airline pilot.

*Admittedly faced with a very different kind of challenge.  Pilots [i.e., military ones] are trained for ditchings, whereas Captain Wheaton and First Officer Pettit, the Air Florida pilots, never had a chance, as the plane never even really lifted off.


**Sully seems to have a gift for pithiness--I love his reply to the air traffic controller's suggestion that he turn around and land at LaGuardia.  One word: "Unable."  

Name by Name, Face by Face...

Last week we observed the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11.

As someone who was living in New York City on that day, who stood on Fifth Avenue with countless other Midtown cubicle dwellers and messengers and deli workers, wondering at the burning towers, who bore witness to mass murder with the rest of her city...

From the background, these people are right by St. Patrick's Cathedral, on  Fifth Avenue at 50th Street.  
They would've been half a block away from where I was standing.  
All of us, filling the sidewalks and even the street itself, staring up at the sky downtown, unable to look away.

...the anniversary stirred up an unexpected well of emotions in me.  I thought I had moved past most of that sadness but it hit me harder than I thought.  And I didn’t even lose anyone—I reacted as a New Yorker, an American, and a human being.

There are so many approaches to history—political theory,  social theory, et cetera.  But as I told one of my classmates at Columbia, I’m an actor and to me, history is first an aggregate of people's lives.  The collective narrative of all of us. 

There were these flyers that sprang up almost immediately all over the city.  "Have you seen...?"  "Missing..."  You had to stop to read them. But carefully.  You didn't want to start crying again on the streets.  Which we were all doing anyway, on the streets, walking to church, at your cubicle.  But I would read these flyers when I could.  I felt I had to, to bear witness.  The least I could do was learn these peoples' stories.

 Visit Pompeii and see the graffiti scratched into the wall by a bored centurion millennia ago, 

now carefully notated and photographed by archaeologists.  Every cathedral, every bridge, every pyramid, every Book of Kells and Bayeux Tapestry, all the opera magna we take for granted were put together with the collective hands of millions of men and women exactly like us, who each had their own story to tell, to question, to live.  They cared about their children and worried about the future and struggled with the larger stones and swore when they made mistakes etching calligraphy onto the vellum.

I still remember some of the faces on the flyers--one was an Asian man, a businessman, "last seen at Windows on the World.*"  I remember thinking, what a beautiful, hopeful name...Windows on the World.  Who wouldn't want to be there on such a gorgeous morning?

"It is a story," said Sara.  "Everything is a story.  You are a story--I am a story.  Miss Minchin is a story."

There was a young black woman, whose relatives implored anyone with information to call the number below, "We're very worried about her!!!"  Oh, God.  That last... 
It just breaks your heart.

Our lives become the stories that we weave...

I remember reading about a young woman, 20s, dark blonde hair with an unusual name that jumped out at me...Giovanna.

History's deconstructed essence, its atom, is one person’s story.  StoryCorps is an oral history project, dedicated to capturing Americans' lives on tape.  They have interviewed several relatives of 9/11 victims and animated the results.







When you think you can bear it, go to the StoryCorps site and watch some of the videos.  Past the sadness and grief, there is just so much love.

To Giovanna--

I remember seeing your pretty face in the flyers posted all over Midtown after that day.  
Your name stuck with me--such a beautiful, old country name.
It's obvious your family loved you very much, I saw your flyer everywhere.
Bless you, dear one.

Buried Treasure in Lower Manhattan!

Last summer, as excavators dug up what had been the base for the World Trade Center before its collapse in 2001, they came across an unexpected discovery--a ship buried in the landfill!

This, along with another section of the ship uncovered last week, PLUS an excavated seawall

The red mark is where the ship was uncovered--the greyish blurry areas west of the
purple line are reclaimed shoreline, added to make the island bigger.

added up to an embarrassment of riches for students of New York City maritime history.

I was able to see the uncovered seawall last summer, and even get some pictures.

Walking through Lower Manhattan is like an andante journey through time--as you cross 14th Street and all the streets start going haywire, it becomes easier to envision what the city used to be before the grid was laid down in 1811.

And as the island narrows, you start to hear the sound of gulls and feel the whip of the breeze. You appreciate more and more that yes, Manhattan IS an island--a patch of land forming part of the Hudson archipelago and laid down “like a smelt in a pan,” as one New York writer put it, surrounded by its life’s breath, the Hudson River. What do the river and the grid have in come? One word--trade. The river brought trade, and the grid facilitated it, with its many cross-streets that lead directly from the waterfront to the center of town, thus making the offloading of merchandise that much quicker. Washington DC’s elegant constellation of wide state-inspired avenues was designed by a Parisian specifically to highlight its new status as the seat of the new federal government,

but New York City‘s brutally efficient grid is much less high-minded!

And how poetic that this ship was uncovered under the World Trade Center? Like a huge beast come to earth, two hundred years ago an aged vessel was laid to rest, helping to build Manhattan one last time, a literal layer of the past serving as a foundation for future trade.

A Fire In Greenwich Village

100 years ago 146 people, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant girls, many of them teenagers, died in a fire in Greenwich Village.


Previously the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a sweatshop located on Washington Place, had tried to organize the shop and improve the working conditions.  The owners of the shop, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, vigorously opposed all effort at organization, even resorting to hiring men to physically beat the picketers.  Eventually they grudgingly agreed to some concessions, but insisted on locking the doors during working hours to prevent the seamstresses from sneaking out early or stealing.


A fire started on the 8th floor.  Fed by scraps of fabric, nurtured in the dusty, wooden, cramped surroundings, it spread extremely rapidly.

The top three floors of the Asch Building--the fire is alongside Greene Street. 

Workers frantically tried to escape the fire.  Some tried the rear fire escape--which quickly buckled under their combined weight and peeled away from the building, dropping them to their deaths.  Some tried the elevator--which was only able to make a couple of trips before the cables started melting.  Some even jumped down the shaft after the elevator. Some were able to run down one of the two staircases, but access to the other one was impossible--because the doors were locked.  And the foreman who had the key had already escaped.


The foreman with the key had already escaped--and left them locked up on the 9th floor.


The fire engines arrived immediately, but could do little because their hoses and ladders only reached up to the 6th floor.  The fire had attracted many observers--including a young Frances Perkins--but no one could help.  All they could do was bear witness.  All they could do was watch as doomed workers appeared framed in the windows, the flames behind them, and made the only choice they had left--how they were going to die.


Assistant cashier: [I see] my girls, my pretty ones, going down through the air.  They hit the sidewalk spread out and still.


Reporter: The last workers were trapped against the blackened windows, burning to death before our very eyes. The glass they were pressed against shattered. Down came the bodies in a shower -- burning, smoking, flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward.


It all happened so quickly--less than an hour from start to finish.  All those young girls falling from above.  All those families they never had--those husbands they never married, those children they didn't bear.  Those stories never told.  All those bodies lying on the wet ground, their faces turned to the evening sky.

The policeman who recovered the bodies along the sidewalks wept--some of them recognized the girls as the strikers they'd harassed and beaten the year before.  All that work, all that effort for the strike--for nothing.

Imagine having to identify your sister.  Your wife. Your uncle.


It was Mama's hair. I braided it for her. I know...I know.


Blanck and Harris, of course, denieddenieddenied.  They denied that they knew about the locked doors, they denied negligence, they denied all responsibility for the massacre whatsoever.  They were indicted, tried, and by smearing the testimony of one of the survivors because of her lack of fluency in English, and attacking another's truthfulness, were eventually found not guilty--legally.  The court of public opinion, as they say, was another matter entirely.

Blanck and Harris, and most other industrialists, protested the cost of the workplace reforms in the wake of the disaster.  But they didn't need to worry--they actually turned a profit on the fire, since they overclaimed damages and their insurance company was bullied into giving in.  They were overpaid about $400 per body.  As a final act of despicability, Blanck was found guilty two years later of locking the door in another factory during working hours.

There are a couple of different conventional memorials to the Triangle victims--statues and headstone and so forth--but I rather like the poetic simplicity of this one:

וְאֵלֶּה, שְׁמוֹת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, הַבָּאִים,


These are the names...