Saturday was a cool and rainy day. The remnants of what is now mercifully called 'the Harvey System' drifted through the upper Ohio River valley giving us a gentle but steady all day rain. Thus began our Labor Day weekend. Today was sunnier, but still cool. Sweatshirt weather. The Potters took one on the chin Friday night losing to nearby rival Indian Creek 29-0. So the football team and the weatherman stumbled out of the gate for the last summer holiday weekend.
I was reminded through the early part of my Labor Day weekend of another Labor Day weekend years ago. It was my first big visit to New York City, a place I have since fallen deeply in love with. The noise, the motion, the aromas of dirty water hot dog carts and urine filled subway stations have spun their grotesque spell on me and I have become a convert.
My first jobs out of college and into engineering firms was as a land surveyor. I chose that career path because I truly love surveying. And what's not to love? You're outside, using your head more than your back. You have to have knowledge of botany, meteorology, mathematics, geography, entomology, and public relations.
My firm gave me a project in early September in the Bronx. We stayed at a hotel in Queens which was tough enough because the U.S Tennis Open Championships happens there at this time of year. My project took me over the Tri-Borough Bridge to the notorious borough of the Bronx. My team had to locate all the utilities at a five point intersection in the south Bronx.
I parked the 1979 Chevy Suburban on the island in the middle of the intersection. After mounting the $24,000 total station instrument on the tripod, I set everything up over a known control point on the traffic island. I mention the price of the total station because it was mentioned to me six or seven times before we left the office in Pittsburgh.
I was no more than twenty feet from the Suburban and amazed that not once, but twice, someone tried the back door even as I stood there surveying. We got maybe 80% of the shots done when I saw someone stagger from what I thought was an abandoned building across the street. The building was a five story walkup. All the windows were sealed shut with concrete blocks from the basement level to the third floor. Above that, the windows were missing and filthy sheets blew from where the windows once were.
This person, and I'll be magnanimous and call her a woman, stooped at a fire hydrant where the valve was not fully shut. She moistened a dirty rag in the flow and mopped the back of her neck, then her brow. She indignantly marched across Jerome Avenue and announced, "He ain't gonna sell us shit until youse get outta here!"
I glanced at my watch and noted the time as 2:45 pm. Not one to block commerce or interfere with the enterprises of someone potentially far more trigger happy than I would feel comfortable with, I complied and called the other two surveyors to say we were calling it a day.
I made my way done through Queens to the Ravenswood power plant on the East River right across the river from the United Nations building in mid town Manhattan. I took that day's notes to my contact at ConEd.
"Scotty! What are you doing here?"
"Hi ya, Pat! I'm dropping off the notes from today's work. We've got maybe another thirty shots to make tomorrow." I answered.
"No. You don't understand." said Pat "It's 4:00 in the afternoon. Why are you here now?"
"Well, we were doing fine until a quarter to three..." and I told him the story of the damsel in distress in the south Bronx.
"That's what I'm talking about" Pat said "The bad guys get up at the crack of noon! I want you and your crew to wrap it up at lunchtime, then bring the notes in! Don't be up there any later in the day!"
As luck would have it, we were able to get our last shots finished around 10:30 the next day and we bade a fond farewell to the charms of city living in the Bronx.
The next day we had to set panels for arial photography. Panels are large square or V shaped pieces of white Mylar or places painted on pavement that have been precisely located by distance, angle and elevation. A pass or three from an airplane taking stereo photographs pick up on the panels. Engineers can then examine the photographs through stereo glasses to determine the best routes for, in our case, a 10" natural gas pipeline.
We were on Northern Blvd. in Queens within sight of both the Steinway Brothers piano factory and the infamous Ricker's Island prison. This was a relatively easy day and I anticipated no problems. But two days later, I was called into the ConEd engineering department to explain the presence of an undocumented panel.
I studied the picture and racked my brain. We extrapolated the location of the mystery panel and I drove out to north Queens the next morning. I walked up and down the sidewalk where the panel had appeared in the photos. I could see nothing! On concrete and asphalt we painted the targets. In open fields, which are lacking in Queens, we set out Mylar panels secured with spikes and long staples. But there was no sign of a panel on this sidewalk.
Then, in an act of serendipity, a delivery truck stopped in front of me. The truck was carrying four foot by four foot square crates of live chickens. The address on Northern Blvd. the mystery panel was found turned out to be a poultry processing plant. Our pilots shot a crate of chicken on the sidewalk and confused us all. I measured the distance from the corners of the processing plant to the chicken crate on the sidewalk. I took a snapshot of it from my vantage point on the street.
The ConEd guys, jaded, cynical, urbane and witty all cracked up at the coincidence.
And so I was baptized in the faith of the Big Apple. We spent,the better half of our Labor Day holiday sucking the marrow from the bone of urban culture before heading west on I-80 and home. As I recall, it was really chilly on Labor Day that year too.
