In the wake of tragedy, sometimes it's difficult to figure out how to follow it. This one hit close to home -- murderer and victims could easily have been people I worked with.
At the circus, they'd send in the clowns. Real life is not a circus.
So, in attempt to get back to normal, I have some images of the occasionally-James-Bond-scale of my part of the bigtime world of mass communications from high atop a building that must remain nameless:
It's a nice view, especially if you don't think about it too much. And it's safe enough -- you're inside railings and much farther away from the edge than it seems. This is looking north, with the gutted remains of the Paul Cret-designed library visible just over the rail. The big curved thing behind it is where they keep the books -- pardon, "media" -- now; the bluish glass is a connector atrium where the stacks once were. I do not approve.
When I call the stadium "monstrous," I'm not referring to the manner in which it is a huge tax sink so much as I am describing the size of the thing. I've lived in towns that would have fit inside it -- might take four levels, but they would have fit.
"Inside a railing," I wrote. Sometimes only barely, but inside it nevertheless.
To get up there, you have to climb a caged ladder from here, which is above a heat-exchanger the size of a two-story house. (This is where the villain would leave James Bond, no doubt dangling over one of the big fans with the protective screen removed.) The uncaged ladder in the distance is a shorty, and pretty much "trained professionals only" because of where it leads to.
To get to the top of the heat exchanger, you go up this spiral staircase. Very carefully.
And on the way home, an apartment building designed by an ocean cruise line! --C'mon, if you had the penthouse, you'd put a binnacle and ship's wheel on that balcony, wouldn't you?
So that's what that pyramid hides. Cool.
ReplyDeleteI think the greatest elevation I've attained in this town while being paid for it was the top of the Acme-Evans (maybe ADM, now) grain elevator at 18th and Montcalm. That would have been back in about 1981, when I worked for the (people and freight) elevator company. Yes, I was working on the elevator elevator. That thing is taller than it looks, too.
Quite a view from there, even if the penthouse was coated with yellow dust and smelled like burned popcorn. But nothing like the view you get :)
So how high up was that?
ReplyDeleteBrad: Around five hundred feet.
ReplyDeleteFuzzy: That, plus a two-story concrete blockhouse with all the radio gear in it, floors 50 and 51.
Are you the lucky person that gets to keep the anti-airplane lights blinking in addition to your other duties?
ReplyDeleteWorld trade center north tower, helped install one of the smaller towers for UHF landmobile. You could not see them but from the air. Scary place even from the
ReplyDelete"safe points". The upside was on a clear day you could see the Delaware Water Gap
to the west maybe 120 miles or more and the east end of Long Island.
The south tower had a observation deck.
Both caused ear pain going up and down.
Eck!
Rickn8or: Nope! Not my building. Looks to me like these need a new controller: it was too bright out for them to be on.
ReplyDeleteYou'd have to put up a mast on that building too... :-)
ReplyDeleteYes, I would, and everyone would think the crazy captain from Mary Poppins lived there.
ReplyDelete