Another obscure 1950s Brooklyn explosion

Continuing the theme of “things that go boom”, I came across this Times headline from January 13, 1957 – just a month after the huge blast at Industry City.

Week thirty-three: Brooklyn Heights

The lovely Karla Bruning, the host of On the Run and my partner for my televised running tour, made the thirty-third selection. And boy, am I looking forward to it.

Photo: my brother, Cory Williams

Running Brooklyn on your television

If you found me through my On the Run appearance, welcome! See “About” above for the intent of the blog; links to subscribe or to follow me on social media are to the right.

As I hinted in a previous post, I’m going to give one of my Running Brooklyn tours to a television audience. New York Road Runners’ On the Run filmed me sharing sights and sites from a mash-up of two of my favorite routes.

You can catch me this coming Sunday at 1:00 pm on ABC7 in New York. If you’re not in the metro area, or are at GoogaMooga or something, the show will be available online for eternity, I’m guessing.

Just how accessible is the New York City subway?

Last night I attended An Evening with New York Times Op-Docs at IFC Center in the West Village. IFC had curated nine videos that had been featured in the Times‘s opinion section in recent months. The pieces ranged from the serious (Branko – Return to Auschwitz) to the playful (the Gregory Brothers’ autotuned The War on Drugs is a Failure).

Somehow straddling both extremes was Jason DaSilva’s divine The Long Wait. Jason, a filmmaker in Williamsburg, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 25, and now uses a wheelchair most of the time. (The opening scene shows photos of him doing things I did as a wide-eyed post-grad in the big city.) He frames the film around a race from Williamsburg to a favorite coffee spot in Union Square.

The piece is funny and sweet and charming – just like Jason, whom I had the pleasure to meet after – but contains a hard truth: it’s tough for disabled persons to get around our city. Within the first minute, just by showing single steps in the entryways of local stores, he had my attention – and sympathy.

The great Brooklyn explosion of 1956

“Shortly after the fourth alarm, a terrific explosion occurred, shooting smoke and flame over 500 feet into the air. Thousands of windows were broken within a radius of a mile and serious structural damage occurred within a radius of a quarter mile. Buildings were shaken in the financial district of downtown New York two miles away and the noise of the blast was heard for 35 miles.”

– The New York Board of Fire Underwriters Bureau, 1957

The 35th Street inferno.

It was a routine job: cutting the metal columns of a pier to replace the cables on the cargo-handling equipment. It went horribly wrong.

The date was December 3, 1956. The time was 3:15 p.m. As the flame from an oxyacetylene torch met the cold steel of a column of the structure atop the pier, sparks flew in several directions – including toward a mountain of 26,365 pounds of ground foam rubber scrap packed in 500 burlap bags. The fuzz of the bags quickly ignited, engulfing the entire pile in flames.

No one knew that 37,000 pounds of a Class C Explosive called Cordeau Detonant Fuse lay nearby. Twenty-six minutes later, it announced its presence – to the tune of 10 dead, 247 injured, and $10,000,000 in property damage.

A fire-escape sunset at Industry City Distillery

As you might recall, my friend Max is one of the partners of Industry City Distillery. They’re building a vodka-production factory from scratch, and have had quite a bit of success thus far.

So when Industry City came out of the hat, he and I were both very excited. I had insider access to my next neighborhood, and Max had a friend coming to visit his in-the-middle-of-nowhere workspace.

One perk of his location is he gets a primo view of the sunset, which he usually takes in with a beer on the fire escape. I like all of these things. The timing was set.

Check out “Walking to Listen” on This American Life

My friend (and a cappella brother) Andrew did something amazing – and now his story has been recast by the expert hands at This American Life.

Andrew took a 4,000-mile walk from his childhood home in Pennsylvania to Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco in search for one thing: stories. Called Walking to Listen, his journey took him to roadside diners, cattle ranches, forgotten towns – and an afternoon with President George H.W. Bush.

I think this paragraph, written after spending time with the Hopi and Navajo in Arizona, sums up his experience perfectly: