Busy, busy, busy!

My dear friend Steve Dunn shares this memory of a visit to the streets of New York City, thanks Steve.

About 1968, I was working for a drywall contractor in Los Angeles when he secured a contract to build a large department store in Waterbury, Connecticut. He asked for volunteers to make the trip back there and help to supervise the construction. I was one of three volunteers and in no time at all, I was deep in the heart of New England.

After a few months of hard work, the three of us decided it was time to visit New York City; Manhattan Island! After all, we probably wouldn’t ever get another chance to see this part of the country. (How little I knew!) And so we planned a weekend road trip.

We came down the expressway and passed through New Rochelle, the Bronx and Harlem. At this point I began to see New York as a vertical city, something I wasn’t used to experiencing. We passed a construction project where they were building 24 high rise apartment buildings. 24 tower cranes were being used on one site! We thought it was quite spectacular to see 4 or 5 of those cranes in Los Angeles. We also saw dismantled automobiles sitting in the center divide area of the expressway. Wheels gone, hoods up…apparently stolen and stripped, all while in the middle of a busy expressway.

Finally, we were on FDR Drive, the road that loops around Manhattan. Now it was even more apparent that we were in a vertical city. My neck hurt from trying to see the tops of the buildings. We must have looked like real country bumpkins as we cruised slowly down the street; lost of course, while we stuck our heads out the window to see the buildings.

Up and down, back and forth across the island we traveled. No one had warned us that it wasn’t smart to drive to New York and so we were faced with astronomical parking fees if we were to try parking, and there were no parking places! We did see some unique parking strategies, cars being double and triple parked, but we were not ready to brave that. And at the same time we noticed that there were police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, all hurrying through the crowded streets at just about every intersection. I don’t think a minute went by where we didn’t hear a siren. Chaos seemed to reign.

So what does a native Californian do when faced with a situation like this? He flees, and we did. We had spent almost 4 hours driving in frantic traffic, unable to stop and thoroughly lost. It was time to leave and get back to the peace and tranquility of the Connecticut countryside.

A few years later, I was in New Jersey, running another department store construction job and I decided that wanted to try out the new 747 airliner on my bi-weekly flight home. The closest airport for a ride on one of those was JFK and so I took the helicopter shuttle from Newark airport and passed right over Lower Manhattan on the way to JFK. As I looked out the window, I had one of those déjà vu moments…I could see flashing red lights, tiny police cars and fire engines, racing up and down the streets. No wonder they say it’s the city that never sleeps…with all that noise and commotion, who could?

I’ve never been back and I regret now that my only New York experience was so short…but, it was exciting!