Adrenalinized! eMusic Evacuates

We had a little excitement here at eMusic yesterday. Well, besides the usual excitement of providing great music and outstanding editorial content to our wonderful subscribers. Yesterday at 5:56 PM we all heard a loud boom outside, which everybody thought was thunder — there’d been a raging thunderstorm that morning — but then there was this loud, continuous rumbling sound that rattled the windows, like a 747 was revving up just down the street. Everybody was looking out their window, trying to see what was happening. The people in the offices across the street were also trying to look down the street. “This is not good,” I said to Joe. It seemed like maybe a large building was collapsing — that’s the first thing that crossed my mind, because it sounded just like when the World Trade Center came down. Then the fire marshall came over the PA and told everyone to evacuate the building.

And then we all just ran like hell down 17 flights of stairs and west on 41st Street for a couple of blocks. There were just hundreds and hundreds of people grimly running away down the street, from who knows what. A woman was standing in the middle of this gushing river of people crying and talking to someone on her cellphone. I made it to the steps of the 42nd Street Library and watched the canyon of 41st Street almost completely fill with what appeared to be black smoke. It was shooting easily 30, 40 stories in the air and the rumbling didn’t stop for about half an hour. I talked to some business guys (the very same guys in this photo) in white shirts spattered with nasty light brown mud and they seemed to think a building was going to come down. Of course, New York has been hit twice before, and it was scary as hell — had we been hit yet again? What else was going to happen?

I kept trying to call people to see if they could switch on CNN and see what was happening, but it was impossible to get through. It’s very telling whom one calls in circumstances like these; it’s your friends and family, of course, but the really responsible ones, the people you’d trust, well, in an emergency. Of course, everyone was wondering whether it was a terrorist attack but eventually, somehow, just from the vibe from the police and other little clues, I think people gradually got the sense that at least it wasn’t an attack. Still, I found it ghoulish that so many people had their cellphone and digital cameras out, recording it like it was some sort of tourist attraction, instead of the sight of possibly hundreds or thousands of people meeting their deaths.

Once the smoke and that horrible roar subsided, I walked further west, toward the F train — and very soon,the city looked absolutely normal; just a few blocks away, everybody was absolutely oblivious to the pandemonium and fear.
I got home and switched on CNN while downing a beer as fast as I possibly could in an attempt to neutralize all the adrenalin still coursing through my veins. It was just a steampipe explosion, and precisely one block away from eMusic HQ. No foul play. One person died and several people were seriously injured, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as tens of thousands of people crammed into a very small area of Manhattan had feared.

I think the image I will never forget is watching hundreds of people running west on 41st Street and in the middle of it all, this Fed Ex guy just methodically loading his truck.

I love New York.