A Confession

It’s taken me till now to come to terms with what happened on our second day of demolition. It was the twelfth of September and, having only spent a half-day the previous day on the job, I was anxious to get something done. Leigh was helping. She was in charge of rescuing hardware from the closets door and interior. The glass door-knobs are worth $25 bucks each. The five inch brass hinges are $40 or so. And the brass hooks (a half dozen) are at least five bucks each. Of course everything is covered in layers of paint, but a little stripper can fix that.

I was in the kitchen at long last dismantling the 1928 kitchen cabinets. I had unhooked the sink over the weekend and had capped off the water lines. The shut off valves were old style. The same kind of thing as you would find on your spigot for your garden hose. The cold had shut off pretty well but the hot didn’t take for the longest time, kept leaking. To play it safe I had installed a short length of pipe with a cap on the apartment side of the shut-offs, so if they didn’t hold, there was no place for the water to go.

I knew I was going to have to shut off the water at the risers in the basement when I got to the point of changing the old shut off valves in our apartment for new ones. This is somewhat of a big deal because you have to get the super to do it and it shuts off all the water for your line of apartments. In other words, all the ‘D’ apartments are without water.

All I was doing, this second day of demo, was taking out the old cabinets. I wasn’t even taking the plaster off the walls yet. Now I’m a fairly careful worker and I’m a first class worrier. That’s why I was such a good stage manager. You’re paid to worry. “What could possibly go wrong here?” is the life-blood of stage management. I was trained by, hands down, the greatest worrier I have ever known—my mother. So I’m pretty certain that if I thought trouble was around the corner I would have taken some precautions.

I was nearly done removing the cabinets and I had a grip on a vertical piece that was closest to the old sink. There was a ‘U’ shaped notch in the back of it where the hot water pipe ran through. I pulled it away from the wall.

What happened next was the third worst thing possible. Unbeknownst to anyone, the hot water pipe was so corroded that it was unable to support its own weight. Water started spraying everywhere. I exclaimed various exclamatory exclamations and alerted Leigh to the trouble as I headed to find the super to shut off the water. My valiant wife, armed with only her savvy and her Ivey League education, held up buckets, and rags and pots and dustpans, trying desperately to stem the quarts and quarts of water gushing out of our plaster wall.

I made it to the basement, found the supers helper Antonio, barked, “Where’s Nelson?” only to be told in broken English that he was on “bacation”. I knew that when he was gone his brother in 2F took over. Up I went, desperate to get someone, anyone to shut off the water!!

Long story short, (ok, I know, it’s too late already) the water was turned off. There is some minor damage to the second floor neighbors living-room wall. Most of the water was coming straight down through the walls and into the basement. I remodeled my downstairs neighbors kitchen in 2002 and their bathroom a couple of years later so they know I’ll fix up their wall.

The good news is the building sent out a plumber to cut away the corroded part of the riser and he gave me a nice new shut-off. It was a bad moment. What are the two worse things you were asking yourself? Second is a gas leak and first is a fire.

Here’s what the riser looked like after we had cut it out. The little threaded section is where the pipe that went into our apartment connected to this thing inside the wall. The most disturbing thing is when I held this length of pipe up to the window and looked down through it, there was so much corrosion on the inside that what used to be maybe an inch interior was reduced to maybe a quarter inch. This is not for the faint of heart, but our drinking water is running past some stalagmite and stalactites of good ole’ fashion rust.