Stacy Horn

Yesterday a gas leak in a building in Harlem resulted in an explosion and the death of seven people so far. Con Ed was called and the building exploded before they got there. I have to wonder if they had gotten any calls before yesterday about the gas odor.

Because when I smelled gas in my building in 2007 and called Con Ed it took three months for the gas to be turned off. I kept a timeline of my efforts to get help. I’m going to give a Cliff Notes version first, but I think it’s worth it to read the expanded version, to see just how insane it was.

Cliff Notes Version

10/7/07: I call Con End and report a gas leak. They say no leak.
12/29/07: Con Ed finally agrees there’s a leak and turns off the gas to my apartment.
12/31/07: I tell Con Ed that I still smell gas coming into my apartment. Con Ed says I’m mistaken and I call the landlord, the EPA and HPD. No help.
1/8/08: I call the City who calls the FDNY who agree there is a gas leak still and they call Con Ed who finally shut off the gas.
2/5/08: The problem is fixed. My gas is turned back on.

So it took Con Ed over THREE MONTHS to shut off the gas to my building. It took my landlord a month to fix the problem.

The Expanded Version

10/7/07: Called Con Ed about the smell of gas. Con Ed comes ands says it’s not gas, maybe a dead animal in the walls.
11/16: Called landlord.
11/23: Sent letter to landlord.
11/30: Sent another letter to landlord.
12/6: Called HPD to complain. HPD later sends an Acknowledgement of Complaint with the wrong room and says it’s a sewer issue even though I said it smells like gas.
12/11: Employee of landlord stops by, checks a spot, does nothing but says he will be back tomorrow to work on it.
12/12: No one comes back.
12/13: Called landlord.
12/14: Called landlord.
12/20: Called landlord. It’s been over a month and they have done nothing.
12/25: Voice mail from the City.
12/26: Called City back and left voice mail.
12/26: Called landlord.
12/29: Asked Con Ed to come back. Con Ed found a gas leak. Turned gas off for my apartment. Called landlord.
12/31: I’m still smelling gas! Called Con Ed. Con Ed came but was reading zero now. No gas leak, they say. Called landlord.
1/2/08: Called landlord and asked when the plumber would be coming.
1/4: Landlord’s guys move cabinet to prepare for plumber who is coming today he says, but no plumber arrives.
1/5: Called landlord, no plumber.
1/7: Called landlord, no plumber. The gas smell persists.
1/7: Called the EPA about the smell.
1/7: Called landlord. The gas smell persists.
1/8: Called the City to complain and they called the FDNY who took readings of their own and found that there is still a leak. They called Con Ed. Con Ed is back and they agree now that there is still a gas leak. They verified that since my gas is turned off from the basement there is another leak elsewhere in the building. Gas turned off for the whole building.
1/9: A plumber starts working in the basement.
1/12: Still no gas and no word about when it will be back.
1/15: Everyone has their gas back except me. Called landlord.
1/16: HPD says I have to call 311 and open a new complaint about the gas leak and can offer no explanation why. It hasn’t been fixed. But I call again and am given complaint #4095996.
1/16: Con Ed said all the problems have been fixed but mine. Plumber has to fix the turn off valve to my apartment.
1/16: Called landlord.
1/17: Sent a certified letter and this timeline to my landlord, the City and Con Ed.
1/18: HPD said an inspector would come between 9 and 1, no one showd.
1/19: HPD calls and asks if any of my complaints have been fixed. No.
1/28: I send another certified letter to the landlord.
1/29: Landlord’s office calls and asks me if everything is okay. (???) I say no. The plumber says he’s sending someone right over. No one shows up.
1/31: Called landlord. Also left a message for HPD.
2/4: Con Ed calls and says they haven’t heard from the landlord that the repairs have been made. Called landlord.
2/5: Con Ed installs meter and turns the gas back on.

I sent a letter to the City and Con Ed after the gas was finally turned off for the whole building (but before the gas leak was fixed) that began with the following:

“I am writing because due to the inaction on the part of my landlord and then by the City of New York, and incorrect readings by Con Edison, a potentially dangerous situation in my apartment and my building went unaddressed for months and I was forced to live in intolerable conditions. From October 7 to January 8 gas was pumping into my apartment. As of this writing the problem is still not fixed.”

No one from Con Ed ever responded. I can’t remember if the City ever got back to me.

Passed by a beautiful, quirky building on 16th Street. It looks like it’s completely under construction/renovation, but I googled it and saw I could rent a two bedroom in there for $4,295 a month. It’s just impossible to be a poor person these days.

Ironically, this place was originally built to help poor people, and women in particular! A group of wealthy women got together in the 19th century to help indigent women of their time. Instead of giving out money they had this place built to teach them needlecraft. They called it The New York House and School of Industry. Imagine going back to tell the women struggling to find a way to get by that people would pay $4,295 a month to live right where they were working, and in a small section of where they were working?

You can get more history about the building here. And also shots of the entire thing. I couldn’t get the shots I wanted, but here are a couple of details.

The door. Blue, blue, love this blue.

And above the door. Lately I seem to be focusing on the small details that never seem to be included anymore.

It’s a rare moment and I got it on film. Well, pixels. Finney lets Bleeck sleep near him as long as there’s a barrier of some sort between them, like Finney is in a basket. But when we are all on the couch, there are prescribed spots that do not change, which usually involves them being on opposite sides of the couch with me in-between. I’m the barrier.

But last night they curled up within inches of each other. In that moment, Putin felt a twinge of doubt and reached for the phone to call his troops back, religious extremists all over the world looked at each other and thought, ‘alright, I don’t agree with you but why did I think I had to kill you again,’ and American right wing extremists gasped and said, “Good lord, we’re not just damaging our country, we’re damaging the future. Did you read the latest about global warming??” Then Bleeck leaned over and tried to bite Finney, Finney jumped off the couch, and the spell was broken.

I was walking home along East 19th Street, between 3rd Avenue and Irving Place, in the lovely Gramercy Park area, and I noticed that building after building was filled with such great detail and embellishments. I’ve since learned this block is known for its beauty. And that Samuel J. Tilden had an escape tunnel built from his home at 15 Gramercy Park (South) to East 19th Street!

I took all of these on this one block.

I looked up this house, #139, and learned that it was on the market for 13 MILLION dollars (and sold). If you google it you’ll find pictures of the inside. It’s fabulous, of course. Beautiful fireplaces, staircases, sigh, sigh, sigh.

Of course there were lots of gargoyles and lions. This is just one of many.

A converted carriage house. It looks like they’re having work done inside. Anyway, damn. I wish I was better at the money-earning side of life! If you look up Gramercy Park and read the Wikipedia page, I mean talk about how the other half lived (and how many still live, although fewer to that degree). In comparison, I walked by all this on my way home from the NYU Dental School because I can’t afford a private dentist. I have to use dental school students.

That said, I am almost done and I’m going to be posting in praise of them shortly. The work and care I got at the NYU Dental School was phenomenal. I hope I’ll be able to go to those wonderful students from now on. I wish the ones who helped me weren’t graduating!

A week or so ago someone tweeted a New Yorker article written by Alex Ross called The Interstellar Contract. Alex Ross writes about music and the title had the word interstellar in it. Who could resist?

In it Ross wrote about a piece by composer Laurie Spiegel called Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds. “Using the GROOVE system (Generated Real-time Output Operations on Voltage-controlled Equipment), at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Spiegel converted orbital data into musical material, choosing the six planets known to Kepler …”

I wish I had known about this piece when I was writing Imperfect Harmony! Because I wrote about astronomer Mark Whittle, who did something similar. “Using maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and computer programs that can map the path of those waves, astronomy professor Dr. Mark Whittle was able to analyze the historical record of that early expansion, and what he found was a sequence of notes.” To hear the result go to this web page, look over on the left and click on “The First 100 Million Years,” scroll down, and then choose either audio only or run movie.

Spiegel was first! (Although what she did is different, but still! The music of the cosmos!) Ross’s article has a link to an excerpt from Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds and I implore you to go listen. However, the LP The Expanding Universe, which contains the entire piece and others, has also been reissued, so you can follow that link and listen to the whole thing, and buy it!. (More about The Expanding Universe in the New Yorker.) The Ross article is so worth reading though, and Spiegel’s comments are poignant and moving. And I love the Beethoven piece at the end.

It turns out Spiegel and I met way back when I was first starting Echo. But we became reacquainted a couple of years ago when I rescued a few pigeons and was contemplating writing a book about bird rescue. Spiegel is heavily involved with animal rights and bird and other wild animal rescue. She showed me a site she was working on about ferals and I’m going to email her to ask her if I can link to it here (it was a work in progress at the time) but here is her main site. She also told me about an large installation she’d done around the time she started the feral site. “It was 3 wall-sized projection screens showing sequences of over 3000 photos of pigeons I had taken and 8 channels of audio of the sounds of the birds.” I wish I could have seen and heard that! Sounds breathtaking.

I took this picture on my way back from one of my favorite places in New York, the Municipal Archives. I love the old and new architecture contrast.