Pushing A Cart Across The Bronx1
I’ve got a new “series” idea: writing about interesting experiences (inty expys for short) that have happened to me, generally at work.2
And I don’t mean just a, “huh, that was kinda cool”.
I mean a solid, slightly in awe, “well, that was an interesting experience…”.
Anyways! Here we go:
So one day, me and my company were tasked with building an elevator base in a building in the Bronx. No biggie! Just load a few beams on the truck, drop ’em off at the site, and bolt them in.
Now, if this wasn’t in the Bronx, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. We’ve done this plenty of times, we’ve got it practically down to a science.3 Generally we’d use whatever heavy machinery was on hand at the jobsite to unload the beams, or we’d chuck it off the truck, load it onto a cart, and roll it to its intended location.
The challenge was that we normally work in upstate NY, sometimes upstate NJ4. On those jobsites, you can pretty much just pull up wherever and get to work. In the city, however, it’s very different. The road the building was on is a very busy road, with four lanes of traffic constantly going. They had the outer lane on the building side blocked off, with space for pallets, trucks, and machinery to get up to the building without being on the sidewalk.
We pulled up our truck loaded with the beams into that lane, and dragged each beam off of the truck, onto a cart we brought. Then we had to roll the beam onto the sidewalk, up a ramp into the building, and into position. For the smaller beams, that worked fine (with a little assistance from a skid steer). But then there were two heavier beams (I believe between 600 and 1,000 lbs). The first one went on the cart okay, but on its way up the sidewalk, one of the wheels obliterated itself. The skid steer pushing it didn’t care, and we got the beam inside onto steel pipes we were using as rollers. The problem was, now we needed a cart for the second beam.
In the bus5, we had what is called a roust-a-bout, which is a man-operated crane. The crane can lift 1,000 lbs, and it can come off of its base, a large four-wheeled thing. So we decided to take that base and use it as our cart for the last beam. The only issue was that it was in the bus, which was parked on the other side of the street, half a block up. Me and my co-worker pulled it out of the bus, and then looked at the busy street barring us from the jobsite.
Now this is the exciting part. The base/cart is low to the ground, so you gotta get almost on all fours to push it. The casters are not the smoothest, and require some encouragement to go the way you want them to.6 And traffic wasn’t stopping for us. There was a flagger7, but he didn’t look like he was going to stop them for us. So we get down, hands on the cart, and as soon as a gap opened in traffic, pushed and ran that cart across the street.
It is nerve-racking8 to cross a street in the Bronx. It is much worse when you can’t even see the traffic because your head is 2 feet above the ground. But we pushed it, and we got it across the street.
On the wrong end of the building.
We still had to go the length of the building, until we reached the curb cut in the sidewalk we were using before. We couldn’t get in the closed-off lane, because there was a crane truck there. Nor could we go on the sidewalk, because it was blocked off. The only option was to push it in the traffic lane, and hope nobody hit us.
At this point the flagger realized what we were doing, and tried to stop traffic, but whatever he did didn’t work, because there were still cars going by us. But we bent down and pushed that cart regardless, eyes at the level of the tires rolling by. I held my breath every time we got close to a car, hoping that the cart would keep going straight, and hoping the drivers would see us.
In the end, we made it safely, loaded the beam on, and got it into the building. When we were done, the other guys brought the cart back, and I didn’t see them do it. I was glad, though, because crossing a busy street like that is not something you want to do too much.
I just sat and thought about how ridiculous it must have seemed, and what it would’ve been like to be a driver and come across two guys pushing this cart across the street, barely watching for traffic.
It was definitely an interesting experience, and I’ll leave it at that.
Wondering why I was concerned about those four swiveling casters? You clearly haven’t read this post.
Love NYC roads? I’ll bet you can relate to this comic.
Comment below on any interesting experiences you may have had!