We’ve been having major issues with our radiators here at my new/temporary office, so the managing company called a radiator specialist to come in last Friday. I was out for the day, which I now regret, because it sounds like this guy was quite a trip. When my coworker asked him when the radiators would be fixed, he replied, “Well, when you look up in the sky, you can’t always see stars. That’s just like radiators.” Apparently he’s coming back tomorrow or the next day to “draw pictures” of the radiators and figure out how to convert them to steam. On a whim, my coworker decided to Google him, and it seems that his inaugural “New York City Boiler Tour” was the subject of a 2003 Talk of the Town. Here, a bit more about the man I like to call the Boiler Whisperer:
When he was done, the tour group set out to look at some boilers. There was a quick stop at a building on Avenue C, to watch a boiler-related film, “Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst is Your Waffen,” starring Carmelita Tropicana, a superintendent/performance artist. That was followed by a lunch break at Katz’s Delicatessen, on Houston Street, where a woman in a fur coat said to the group, “What? Are you bird-watching?” Someone told her what they were up to. “Boilers!” she said. “Oh, that’s not very exciting.” In the afternoon, Henry sneaked his people into the basement of an old church, where they saw the history of boilers encapsulated: turn-of-the-century coal to eighties super-efficient natural-gas-fired pulse combustion, then back to oil. On the way out, an engineer from Massachusetts said, “I feel excitingly illicit.”
Full article available here.
Only in New York, folks!
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