The View from Here: Sunday's Explosion on Governors Island

Yesterday, Carroll Gardens resident and retired foreign correspondant Richard Pyle wrote to Patch to share his impressions of an explosion that took place earlier in the day on Governors Island. The following text is Pyle's account in his own words. 

A friend mentioned yesterday that the tallest building on Governors Island was to be demolished by controlled implosion today.

This should not have been news to us, given my long self-assumed role as a watchdog on events in the ever-changing NY harbor scene, but it explained why the 11-story former US Coast Guard apartment complex on the island's west shore— empty and abandoned since the maritime agency left a decade ago—had recently been partially draped in black construction netting.

Having complacently assumed this planned blast would occur at a reasonable hour, when I awoke to the tell-tale sound of a hovering helicopter at 7:30 a.m., I did a quick check on the Internet and found it was scheduled for 7:36! With just enough time to grab a cup of coffee I made it to the roofdeck and grabbed binoculars on the way out the door.

So I was looking straight out to the west, past the cranes of the Red Hook container port on Buttermilk Channel, when the building—about half a mile away as the pigeon-chomping peregrine falcons fly—suddenly erupted in a series of loud booms and a huge cloud of gray smoke, from end to end and down the middle. All gone, in less than 20 seconds. 

I can't help but speculate on the effect this may have had on the crew members of a cargo ship that had just arrived at the container port—especially any of them off duty and snoring in their bunks.

Just why there was only one helicopter above the site, rather than the usual cluster of TV choppers, I can't explain. This was, after all, news—the city's first controlled explosion since the demolition of two old storage tanks in Brooklyn in July 2001. (That, of course, was just two months before the city's last unplanned demolition.)

The decrepit building that once housed Coast Guard families was among the last physical vestiges of the agency's long tenure before Congress voted it off the island, for budgetary reasons, in the 1990s. That decision had left in limbo the future of the 172-acre island, except for the well-protected northern end with its historic military buildings and the city's only 9-hole golf course with a Manhattan zipcode.  

While more money cutbacks forced the cancellation of this year's Fleet Week last month, the harbor has never had a shortage of things to observe—or to miss, as I nearly did with the old Coast Guard building. 

Last year, while scanning to the south and west with binoculars, I suddenly spotted, through the haze, a huge wind turbine slowly turning on the New Jersey side of the harbor. I could swear it hadn't been there the day before. 

Having watched the floor-by-floor construction of the new No. 1 World Trade Center skyscraper over the past two years, I saw the final installation a month ago of the 408-foot antenna tower that may, or may not, qualify the building, at 1,776 feet, as the tallest in the USA.

Many of the important steps in that building's construction have been described on its website, but not all. Just last week, I happened to spot the taller of the two giant cranes on the 1WTC rooftop—the one that had raised the antenna—being dismantled in large pieces and lowered to the ground by the smaller crane. A significant event in its own right, if you care about this sort of thing.

(Perhaps I will soon learn the answer to the Great Mystery of skyscraper construction—when only one giant crane is left standing on a skyscraper, how the hell do they get that one down?)

Before 9/11—which Brenda and I witnessed from our roofdeck before I went to the scene to cover the story—we could see the tourists on the observation deck of the South Tower, two miles away. I don't know if that will be possible with the new skyscraper, which has an enclosed space for high-altitude rubbernecking. 

But even apart from devastating calamity, the skyline has dramatically changed in the past two decades, in lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn and New Jersey. 

And not always for the better. While the Bloomberg administration's endless quest for new real estate tax base has not led, as we once feared, to a wall of high-rise apartment buildings along the South Brooklyn-Red Hook waterfront and Governors Island, our once expansive view of the harbor has been gradually diminished by other new rooftop clutter and construction, closer at hand.

Another setback for the harbor-watching good guys was Macy's inexcusable decision a few years ago to move its Fourth of July fireworks show from the South Street seaport, where it could be seen from Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens, to a midtown Hudson River site where it is now enjoyed mainly by people sitting on lawn chairs in New Jersey.

Thus today's demolition of the old Coast Guard building on Governors Island is for us, and others, an important step in the other direction. With the smoke cleared, we suddenly can see a broad slice of open water that we'd never seen before in two decades of living in this neighborhood.

According to the Daily News, the city plans to lay out a softball field on the vacant ground, as part of a new 30-acre park. Unless officials somehow decide instead to turn that shoreline space into a fake hill constructed of landfill—as was once rumored—it may remain permanently within our visual range.      

–Richard Pyle, Clinton St.