City Desk: After the Fall

National Review, June 30, 2003 by Richard Brookhiser

In the last week of May there were two falls in my neighborhood, within four blocks and four days of each other. A 32-year-old woman fell out of a fourth-floor window, and a 29-year-old woman was hit on the head by a stool that fell out of a sixth-floor window. The second woman survived; the first woman is dead.

Late Saturday night -- so late, it was past five in the morning the following Sunday -- the 32-year-old and her boyfriend began arguing in her apartment on 17th St. between Fifth Avenue and Union Square. The block is a stretch of old buildings, put to mixed commercial and residential use. The boyfriend spins techno at "the trendy Suede club" (New York Post) on W. 23rd St. Not my trend; I've never heard of it. But 4 million people can do something in this city without the other 4 million knowing. The woman danced at the VIP Club on W. 20th St. At the VIP club very important people watch dancers strip. The argument was overheard by neighbors, whose apartments abut the back courtyard; it reportedly went on for 20 minutes. Then, a neighbor heard a crash "and I see a blonde flying down" (the Post again). The woman struck an air- conditioning compressor, and was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital in the Village. On Sunday she was in critical condition; on Monday she was brain dead.

The stricken woman's sister told the Post that she enjoyed working out. That I learned independently, for the trainer she worked out with also trains me. Our gym is on E. 17th St., next door to the building where the fallen woman lived. He trained her, and her colleagues from the VIP Club, in a private workout space, first thing in the morning, after they had finished their shift for the night. (To better please the club's patrons? Probably not. After a night of work it must be a relief to work out for one's self.) My trainer, normally a genial man, becomes quiet when he is serious. He did recall that one holiday morning he brought the dancers into the gym, thinking it would be nearly empty. It was nearly empty, and the gym draws a serious crowd, but their presence was distracting nevertheless.

Tuesday morning the woman's family took her off life support. A few hours later the techno-spinner was arraigned for manslaughter. The prosecutor said that he had given the police several different versions of what had happened during the final argument Sunday morning, telling them at last that he had pushed his girlfriend "and then she disappeared." But counsel for the defense told the court that the woman disappeared because she had been high on cocaine. "The decedent, who was highly intoxicated by all accounts, stepped by a window . . . and fell out." All this appeared in the papers Wednesday. "There are a lot of coke-heads in the world," I told my trainer that morning. He completed my thought: "but they don't all fall out windows."

An hour later, after my session ended, I was walking past the local high school. Named for Washington Irving, it is a hulking building, lightened by whimsical lobby decorations dating from a time when people remembered who Washington Irving was. Now the school was surrounded on three sides by yellow crime-scene tape. The kids who roll in and out during the daytime like surf were absent. Police cars blocked the streets. Beyond the investigatory pale, local TV stations had parked vans with pop-up transmitter poles.

Once again I was next door to disaster; my apartment building and the high school share the same block. From my doorman, and from fellow tenants, I learned the story. A woman walking along 17th St., on the sidewalk below the northern flank of the school, had been hit on the head with a chair. Where had it come from? A classroom. Who had thrown it? Kids. Who was she? Someone shopping for groceries; pregnant. How was she? In the hospital. I had lunch at a place with sidewalk tables (in the circumstances, perhaps a venturesome thing). I hailed a passerby, a sturdy Italian man, who owns neighborhood fitness studios. Strong men, when in distress, show mannerisms derived presumably from childhood figures of mercy, their mothers or grandmothers. My trainer, for example, grows still; this passerby touched my forearm.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the papers cleaned up the details. The woman was 29, a Mexican immigrant with one five-year-old and another child on the way. She lives in the Bronx, and makes a living passing out promotional leaflets. She was given ten sutures at Bellevue, which called her condition serious but stable. The missile was in truth a three-foot-tall stool, with four metal legs and a round wooden seat. Two 15-year-old freshman boys were charged with assault.

This being New York, a dispute arose between the Department of Education and the teachers union. The Schools Chancellor said a teacher would face a disciplinary hearing for failing to lock the empty classroom that the 15-year-olds filled, then emptied of one stool. The president of the United Federation of Teachers said that blaming the teacher for the deed was "outrageous." There was also a dispute between officialdom and vox populi. The Police Commissioner said reassuringly, in the New York Times's paraphrase, that "the number of major crimes at the school has declined." But a teacher, speaking out of school, said the public would be "astounded" at what went on in school. The recovering woman expressed conflicts of her own. She thought the students were "just playing." Yet if her children had been hit, "I wouldn't forgive them" (wasn't one, almost?).