By now I think I’ve made it perfectly clear: I’m not an expert on anything. I don’t know what company leads the nation in crane production, or what type of fuel cranes run on, or how many moving parts cranes have, or even if there are different type of cranes. But as a reluctant student of gravity and someone who, like all New Yorkers, walks under a few dozen construction sites a day, I think I know this: Cranes don’t just fall. And if two relatively similar things happen in relatively the same place within a relative amount of time while doing relatively the same work, I tend to assume that there’s some relative relation.
So when a crane falls and kills two people two months after a crane fell and killed seven people, discounting any divine interference, my first conclusion is that something wasn’t right then and must still not be right now. A causual trip to the Deli revealed that, far from me being insane, everyone else in New York had put together a similar theory. Enter The Honorable Mike Bloomberg: 
“Two crane collapses in a short period of time look like a pattern, but there’s no reason to think that there’s any real connection,”
Now, I’ve always been a closet fan of Mayor Mike, his flamboyantly boring Jewey businessman thing seemed right for the times, but the ‘Your Lying Eyes’ defense is for faux Texans in the Whitehouse and Louisiana politicians, not the Mayor of the most cynical city on earth. Yes, they were connected. Yes, you screwed up. Please, do fix it.
New York is currently undergoing one of the biggest building booms in modern history, and the biggest for a place that wasn’t completely leveled by war. The lifeless communist-inspired high rises are becoming more a noticeable sign of New York than a hot dog stand or a Subway entrance. Of course, this process of empty growth has moved forward like a steam roller, with little regard for beauty, culture, history, or, now, human life.
We seem intent on turning ourselves into ‘just another city’: With just more ineffective government, just more stores, just more buildings, and just more workers being killed to build them. A boring, uninteresting city; unrecognizable from any other in the country or the world.
Perhaps one thing is still different: Our people. We may have long given in to gentrification and urban renewal and every other process of destruction that turns neighborhoods into rows of condos and streets into highways, but for the time being we’re still interested in preserving the lives of our fellow citizens. I think I speak on behalf of most New Yorkers when I ask Mike, et al. one thing: Get your shit together!
Have you considered Subscribing to all of this madness?
