Famous Ankles

I was wandering home from Church and saw a sight I’ve never seen before.  Take a look.

Take a somewhat closer look.

A nice high-intensity flame is being put to the sidewalk.  It took me a while to figure it out.

No, he’s not the world’s least successful arsonist.  At first, I thought he was the ultimate gum removal guy, but he was working on the edge of the sidewalk, not a normal gum-placement spot.  Nor is he testing for possible sidewalk flamability.  Hey, in NYC we have had dogs electrocuted while walking on the streets (faulty underground wiring), so you can never know.

Here’s the key:

If you look to the right and to the left of the torch, you’ll see different edges.  Apparently this is the finishing process for the curb.  At this point in the sidewalk (at a corner) the city has installed a nice granite instead of the usual concrete.  I don’t know if this edge is being refurbished or whether it is new and the guy is just doing the last of the polishing.  I noticed that there was a white substance all over the rest of the granite portion of the sidewalk which would indicate that he’d been a busy guy all morning.  Maybe this is a just a periodic cleaning process, and the guy had already done all of the gum on the top.  Hey, there’s way too many gum remains on the sidewalks (they almost always show up as dark spots on the sidewalk).

Just an interesting, but extremely minor event.

-H

This entry was posted on November 1, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Manhattan, Mid-town, Wanderings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.