The Girl in the Vault by Michael Ledwidge

Author:Michael Ledwidge [Ledwidge, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-15T15:37:17+00:00

37

At five on the dot, I got up from my desk and left the GBH office building and crossed Madison and went east on foot a block down 60th Street to Park Avenue.

I crossed over to the east side of the avenue and made a right and walked south. Below 59th, the apartment houses soon became office buildings with a growing pedestrian crush of just freed office workers exiting from them. Most of them, like myself, were also headed south and we marched together, an army of business-casual uniformed soldiers heading toward where the glass slab of the MetLife Building hovered above Grand Central Station like a shiny black headstone.

At the base of the MetLife Building and a block north of it at 46th Street, there was another older, smaller and much more ornate prewar structure called the Helmsley Building that had been built in the 1920s.

Researching the entirety of the area for the past weeks, I knew that its claim to fame was that the uptown and downtown lanes of Park Avenue went through this building under elaborate coffered arches that were described as car portals.

Beside these car portals were smaller pedestrian tunnels that went through to 45th Street, but as I crossed 46th Street with the rest of the commuting crowd, instead of heading into the east pedestrian tunnel, I did something quite unusual.

I headed to my right and walked into the east car portal instead.

It was like heading into a highway tunnel, and the horns of taxis coming straight at me blared loudly in the covered space as I hugged the left-hand wall and headed up its car-exhaust-scented asphalt slope.

This strange elevated roadway I climbed up onto was known as the Park Avenue Viaduct, I knew, and it had been built at the turn of the twentieth century as a way to have Park Avenue get around the newly built Grand Central Station.

As I came out the back of the Helmsley Building car portal and arrived at the viaduct’s East 45th Street overpass, I saw that it, too, looked like something from the Gilded Age. Beneath the old steel girder guardrail of it were green-painted metal panels inlaid with a shell design like something out of a prominent gentleman’s library.

I stopped along the row of them. As I glanced down and saw the windows of the post office on 45th, I realized I was at the spot on the overpass where I’d seen the postman drop the mailbag onto the 45th Street sidewalk that morning that seemed like a thousand years ago.

“Don’t jump, baby!” yelled some passing jackass in a work van as I hoisted myself up onto the Gilded Age overpass’s top guardrail. I ignored him. I looked over.

And there it was.

The grate on the surface of 45th Street where my sister had gotten her bag stuck was right there beneath the overpass.

It was a straight shot. It could be done, I thought, staring at it.

I smiled as I hopped down and hugged the wall again back down toward 46th Street.

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