Pile driving

Boom-pish, boom-pish.

That's the closest phonetic approximation I can make to the sounds of the pile driver coming through my window last Wednesday afternoon.

The sound was incessant, slightly demanding, tedious. It became the backdrop to my day: I couldn't read, write, nap, or continue a conversation once started (however stimulating) without feeling that presence in the background.

Somehow it wasn't all that annoying. Like a dull headache, without the pain.

For a while I tried to ignore the activity in the construction pit below. It wasn't really a novelty, after all. We have been surrounded by all kinds of construction projects since we moved into our mid-week studio apartment downtown, in the spring of 2005. We're constantly walking over, around and beneath construction. Every street within a three block radius has been torn up at one time or another in the past three years. So when we turn a corner we can expect at any time to be directed off the sidewalk and forced to walk down the middle of the street.

My poor suburban car bobbles over metal plates and into random potholes on a weekly basis. And for several days this spring we had to drive the wrong way down a one-way street to get to our garage for the night.

Some older office buildings nearby were gutted and turned into condos. We know because we heard, rather than saw, high-speed drills and jackhammers and trucks hauling debris out of buildings in the deepest hours of the night. I resorted to sleeping with ear plugs.

Oh, occasionally I'd glance into the newest open pit, fascinated by the maze of pipes and wires erupting from Manhattan dirt (yes, there is earth beneath all that asphalt!). The scientist in me thought it was kind of interesting, but mostly I just grumbled as I wobbled in my heels over the rough terrain, or worriedly pointed a caution to visiting relatives to watch their step as we made our way to dinner.

I heard about pile driving in the Battery Park City Broadsheet, a neighborhood newsletter they leave in the mailroom for tenants of our building. There were bitter recriminations from local residents as developers ignored their requests for stricter noise control. Pleas turned to demands and the builders were forced to restrict their activities to normal business hours. Hmmmm. Sounds like a nightmare, I thought. My next thought was: thank goodness we don't have an empty lot next door.

Then we did.
Last summer they took down an antique building behind us brick-by-brick and in full hazmat apparel. I shut the windows on those days.












Another building was torn apart, floor by floor.

By spring the debris had been hauled away and the ground smoothed, and ready for planting.

So when the inevitable boom-pishing began I was curious to see what all the racket was about. I watched the workmen move attentively around the gigantic crane-like machine that dragged I-beams straight up into its maw, then hammered them back down into Manhattan bedrock. They fed it circular disks (wood?) to reduce friction and sated its thirst with water from a hose.
Little orange Xs mark the many spots for I-beam insertion at the site. It's hard to see in the photo but there are many, many orange Xs.

And there's an I-beam and fifty boom-pishes for every one.