Incredible photos. Amazing how the building on each side look ok.
this must of been taken from inside an apartment. probably taken from twitter.
OK, I’ve only been to Manhattan once, and I never realized they have the weirdest building numbering scheme I’ve ever seen.
I started out by wondering why 1646 Park Ave. is at 116th St, when Park Avenue starts all the way down at 34th St.
So, Google being my friend, I looked it up and found this.
One has to wonder how and why the august city fathers settled on this scheme. That information doesn’t seem to be so easy to find out.
Roddy
caveat: I’ve lived in Japan, and their numbering scheme is completely different, but it’s internally logical once you learn it. This seems just weird.
Roddy, I especially liked that one group of streets was preceded by the statement:
It appears to me that they are all special cases.
Looks like a question for Cecil!
Because the infrastructure of NYC in general, Manhattan in particular and the older sections (=less rebuilt in recent decades) are outdated to old to ancient, and the complexity of overlapping components is almost beyond human comprehension and well beyond any nominal record-keeping. Everything leaks, no one knows where the pipes are much less the leaks, and NYC is no better off financially than most cities.
So they concentrate resources and fix things when there’s no other option, not when someone thinks they smell gas.
Just read this article…
Park Ave doesn’t start at 34th Street; it’s just called different things: Park Ave South, Union Square East, and 4th Ave.
As for the numbering, I blame the Dutch.
For purposes of numbering buildings, I assumed that Park Avenue South would start a different set (which it does, but not in the way I expected). Those other names also occur south of 34th St. What I was trying to say is that the street is named Park Avenue runs uninterrupted all the way from 34th St up well past 116th St (unless you want to count Park Avenue Viaduct around Grand Central as an interruption), but the numbering is, ah, unexpected.
Yes, let’s blame the Dutch. Or let’s ask Cecil.
Roddy
Numerical addresses don’t mean a thing in NYC unless you are a postal worker. Everything, and I mean everything, is done by intersection. For example, if you are going downtown you aren’t going to 75 Broadway even if that is your destination, you are going to Broadway and Wall St. If you get in a cab and give them the physical address of a building I’d bet $1000 they couldn’t get you there unless you gave them the nearest intersection as well.
Unless they have GPS, which more of them seem to have these days.
At least it’s not the system used in Pacific Northwest cities, with four-corners numbering from an arbitrary point, which all residents stoutly defend as sensible and logical and everyone else just rolls their eyes and puts up with, especially when trying to ship stuff there.
Lucky you don’t live in London, where street numbers and even road names themselves reset every other block. (That’s typical just about every European city, I think.)
I thought both Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew are long dead!
Wonder if they will now undertake to locate and inspect and repair pipelines all over the city now.
On Sept. 9, 2010, there was a massive pipeline explosion in San Bruno, Ca. (near San Francisco Airport) that turned a residential block into a crater. In the aftermath, it became clear that Pacific Gas & Electric didn’t really know what kind of condition all their pipes were in, they are all so old.
Ever since then, they have been tearing up streets all over Northern California, inspecting pipes. They appear to be having a serious program of inspecting their entire infrastructure. They also now publish the locations of their underground pipes, which was kept more or less secret before.
Cops let a guy with a drone take some photos and video.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/uptown/drone-captures-e-harlem-explosion-scene-video-article-1.1719988
That first photo really is amazing. Where did all the debris go from the building? I guess the brick just turned to dust. Looks like a couple Bobcats could clean it out in a few days. The hardest part to clear will be the exterior shell that is in the back of that photo. That will have to been taken down before the Bobcats can clear the site.
I wonder if that building on the left can be saved? Looks like a lot of debris on its roof. It must have taken a hard hit.
This.
Unfortunately, tragedies like this are going to continue until problems America’s aging infrastructure are addressed. There are literally millions of similar time bombs out there waiting to go off because people don’t to spend the money to fix them until after they cause deaths and destruction.
Think about that when you are bitching about tax increases and yet driving across a 100 year-old bridge every morning on your way to work.
Man survives New York blast thanks to ‘cocoon’ of pianos
That’s crazy
Death count is up to 8: