It was all over the news, “burst steam pipe, rush hour on 42nd Street and Lexington Ave.” A terrible thing to happen, the worst hour of the day and one of the busiest sections of the city. This morning I decided to jump on the express bus and see how close I could get to where the incident occured.
Well, I didn’t get very close at all. As you might expect the area had been blocked off and there was no way that I could even get a glimps of what it looked like. Actually the pictures in the newspaper were pretty detailed and really quite awful. I wasn’t looking for that kind of thing. I just wanted to get a closer look, see for myself the melted street and the trucks fallen into the huge crater that the steam pipe had produced.
I walked quite a few blocks trying to see just how much of an area had been blocked off. New York City has been very hot and muggy the last couple of weeks and today was a typical NY summer day. So, I did not have the energy to travel the entire peramiter of the roped off area. But the areas that I did cover gave me the impression that the contained area probably was at least 3 to 5 blocks in all directions from where the incident occured. I say 3 to 5 because some of these blocks are longer than others.
But traffic on Madison Ave. and on a few other streets were a mess and going cross town in some areas was impossible and absolutely not allowed in the area that had been blocked off.
There were female cops guarding the street outside of Grand Central Station, leaning on the metal street dividers answering questions and giving directions to confused and disgruntaled communters. No one lost their tempers, but I heard one of the officers say several times to various travelers, “Well, no, you cannot go any farther on 42nd St.” 
What struck me as interesting was that though almost all of the police officers wore face masks, the average person walking the street going to work or meeting a friend for lunch crossed over from one side of the street to the next street as though nothing had happened. And no one but the police and one or two pedestrians wore face masks.
The average person who needed to be in this area had been inconvenienced because they had to take a different street than they usually did, but people were talking on their cell phones, delivering flowers, catching some sunshine on their lunch hours. Strange as it seemed except for the roped off area nothing apeared altered. 
The New Yorker is really quite resiliant. And this roped off area could have just as well have been the beginning of a little street carnival because nothing looked out of the ordinary. No panic. No hysterics. And a few people, like myself, could now stand in the middle of what would have been on a normal day one of the busiest streets in the world, and we took pictures. One person even stopped and would not cross in front of my poised camera fearful of messing up my shot.
I could see that there was a bit of confusion and some of the weary summer travelers pulling large wheeled suitcases had to walk a few more blocks than they had thought they would, but even they seemed to take this situation in stride.
