A Body in a Manhole, and Other Grisly Finds

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/nyregion/body-manhole-witches.html

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It’s Wednesday.

Weather: Heavy rainfall could start in the morning, with thundershowers and flash flooding later in the day, and increasing winds through the night. The high may be in the mid- to upper 60s.

Alternate-side parking: In effect until Monday (Shemini Atzeret).

Before most people had woken up to start their day yesterday, Verizon employees in Manhattan had made a startling discovery. Underneath a manhole cover — which can weigh up to 300 pounds — the workers found a decomposing body.

The body was found on Eighth Avenue by Columbus Circle — a surprisingly public place for such a tragic discovery.

One report said that a homeless man had stumbled into the open manhole two weeks ago, and that workers — not noticing a person was there — covered up the hole, leaving the man inside.

As those details were emerging yesterday, another body was found: in the water near Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn.

On Monday, a Queens landlord found a body in a heap of debris at the apartment of a tenant who had been evicted.

And last month, the body of a man wrapped in a carpet was found outside a Starbucks in Harlem.

[A body was found under a manhole cover, baffling the police.]

There are eight million people living cheek-by-jowl here. Sometimes, in a city that never sleeps, a person’s final resting place isn’t where you’d expect.

“I hate to say this, but it’s part of what makes New York exhilarating,” said George Arzt, who owns a public relations firm and was a crime reporter in New York in the late ’60s. “You never know what is going to happen in this city.”

Mr. Arzt added: “There used to be people who committed suicide in the municipal building bathrooms. They would jump out the window.”

It’s been many years since Mr. Arzt was sent to those scenes. What he finds astonishing now is not the bodies falling from above but the bodies rising from below.

“A person is missing for six months and all of a sudden the ice melts and they float to the surface,” he said. “I found it incredibly haunting.”

Some of the so-called floaters had drowned. Some jumped. Others were never meant to be found.

A Manhattan gemologist who disappeared after carrying half a million dollars’ worth of diamonds, according to a 1988 wire story in The Times, was found four months later in the Hudson River, wrapped in plastic garbage bags and bound by the neck, hands and feet.

In 2016, a man washed ashore after his feet were encased in concrete, The Times reported.

John Ahern, who oversaw the Manhattan Grit Chamber, which helps treat the city’s sewage, spoke with some familiarity about finding bodies below ground in an interview with my colleague Corey Kilgannon in 2006.

Some of the people are homeless, he said. They “go into the manholes to look for jewelry and money, and then they get overcome with gas, go unconscious and die down there.”

Want more news? Check out our full coverage.

The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.

Andrew Yang, the last New Yorker in the Democratic presidential primary, has roots in the Hudson Valley. [LoHud]

An Inwood bar let women in for free and charged men a $20 cover. Now, a man from Queens is suing for $50,000. [New York Post]

A former White House chef to President Barack Obama opened a French bistro on the Upper East Side. [Eater]

Learn about racist banking in “Redlining and its Repercussions” at the Brooklyn Historical Society. 7 p.m. [$15]

Attend talks on building family-friendly cities at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. 6 p.m. [$10]

Listen to Ensemble Signal perform the music of Steve Reich at Brookfield Place in Manhattan. 7:30 p.m. [Free]

— Julia Carmel

Events are subject to change, so double-check before heading out. For more events, see the going-out guides from The Times’s culture pages.

The Times’s Laura M. Holson reports:

Pam Grossman, who has been described as “the Terry Gross of witches,” lives on a quiet street in Park Slope.

Since 2017, she’s hosted “The Witch Wave” podcast. In June, she published “Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power.” And in October, she was an organizer of the Occult Humanities Conference hosted by New York University.

“My life is pretty ordinary,” Ms. Grossman said one recent Monday as her cat, Remy, rubbed his whiskers against her hip.

Ms. Grossman said witches are having a resurgence among feminists who want authority over their own lives. But they continue to be persecuted in places like Papua New Guinea, where angry mobs have recently accused vulnerable people, often women, of sorcery.

The witch is “the perfect symbol for anyone who wants to subvert the status quo and who wants to proclaim they belong to themselves,” Ms. Grossman said.

“With every wave of feminism, there is a renewed interest in the witch,” she said.

Ms. Grossman added, “If calling oneself a witch is like calling oneself a nasty woman, and it emboldens someone to stand up for themselves or the most vulnerable in this world, then more power to them.”

It’s Wednesday — look for a rainbow.

Dear Diary:

I was on Roosevelt Island on a second date. We had walked south after having a picnic.

We sat on an elevated wall in the shade of some trees just as a large group walked north below us. They were all wearing white shirts, each one with a large letter on the chest.

A W and two L’s walked by, and we began to wonder what it meant. Was it some kind of protest? A prank?

Finally, I saw a question mark bringing up the rear.

“What do you all spell?” I yelled.

“We wrote ‘Will you marry me?’ to help our friend propose!” the question mark said.

“Did she say yes?” my date and I asked.

“She did!” the question mark replied.

We congratulated him and laughed nervously, uncertain where our conversation would go next.

— Rachel Sternlicht

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