Maybe it was the ever longer shadow of 9/11—so easy to ignore until it falls darkly across you—that made New Yorkers freak out as much as they did during the second week of this past July. The proximate cause was the bending of two columns on the twenty-second floor of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company’s former headquarters (1960, by Emery Roth & Sons) on East Forty-Second Street, which the developer MetroLoft is converting into some 1,600 rental units (including the nontrivial portion of relatively affordable apartments required by newish city policies encouraging this innovative practice). It may not only have been an abundance of caution that prompted the mayor to close for days all those streets and evacuate all those buildings from Grand Central to the United Nations—establishing a dramatically named “frozen zone” as if in anticipation of a new ground zero. Maybe hype was added to alarm because there is more than one writer in our global capital of media who wishes that they had penned the legendary 1995 Joseph Morgenstern New Yorker magazine story about how a…
