When I walked our dog this morning, two muscular officials were urgently pressing our young doorman to rouse the building’s superintendent on the phone.
The super is a Romanian with a warm heart and an unfortunate resemblance to Saddam Hussein. His voice came blaring up on the intercom.
“The gas leak is in the school,” I heard him say, meaning the high school that abuts our apartment building. “Everything here is hunky-dory.”
“Nothing is hunky-dory,” said the younger of the muscular officials into the intercom. “The leak is in the Chinese restaurant, too. It’s definitely in this building.”
As I worked through the early morning morning, I heard many fire engines.
The Wife called to tell me that a natural gas odor was being reported all over the city. We decided not to panic, and to phone each other again when we knew more.
A while later we knew more. We knew the “smell of gas” was being reported from Battery Park to upper Manhattan, and in parts of New Jersey.
We knew that the smell was not natural gas but mercaptan, a chemical that is injected into natural gas to let people know when there’s a leak.
We knew that some trains to New Jersey were suspended. Some buildings had been evacuated. The subway was still working.
We discussed sending our two-year-old to Brooklyn with a baby-sitter, in case Manhattan blew up.
If we were going to do it, we’d better do it while the subways were still usable. If a state of emergency was declared, the underground would clog with terrified human beings, trampling each other.
We decided, on the basis of no evidence one way or the other, that Manhattan was not going to blow up today.
A little while later, the mayor said the same thing.
Train service to New Jersey was restored before lunchtime.
Nobody knows what caused the smell.
