According to Buzzfeed, the East Village explosion was a terrible tragedy that could have been prevented if it were not for the gas leak old bricks. Reporter Nicolás Medina Mora argues that the “destruction…highlighted the lingering pitfalls of an aging stock of buildings that is ill-equipped to withstand any sort of significant trauma.” Considering the matter is still under investigation and Buzzfeed didn’t speak to a single engineer, that’s quite a claim. Their source for this theory? Luc Sante, a poet. His expert testimony:
“I was surprised when I heard about the explosion, but I shouldn’t have been,” Luc Sante, an essayist best known for Low Life, a sprawling history of the Lower East Side, told BuzzFeed News. “With the exception of brownstones, which were built as single-family dwellings for the well-to-do, most older buildings in New York have something deeply wrong with them. This could have happened anywhere in the East Village.”
…Or anywhere in the city, as Bowery Boogie pointed out in a rebuttal, because newsflash: gas explosions tend to destroy buildings. I’d like to counter with some expert testimony of my own:
The third little pig met a man with a load of bricks, and said, “Please, man, give me those bricks to build a house with.” So the man gave him the bricks, and he built his house with them.
So the wolf came, as he did to the other little pigs, and said, “Little pig, little pig, let me come in.”
“No, no, by the hair of my chiny chin chin.”
“Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in.”
Well, he huffed, and he puffed, and he huffed and he puffed, and he puffed and huffed; but he could not get the house down. When he found that he could not, with all his huffing and puffing, blow the house down, he said, “Little pig, I know where there is a nice field of turnips.”
See? Bricks strong.
(Original photo: FDNY)
