Pennies From Heaven

"An old lady on Main Street last night picked up a shoe. The shoe had a foot in it. We're gonna make you pay for that mess." - Orson Welles, Touch of Evil

When a disembodied leg lands nearby on the sidewalk, one of your first inclinations might be to glance skywards as though expecting rain and wonder "where's the rest?" In the case of the hapless lawyer who recently swandived off the Empire State Building, the rest in question was found on a 30th floor parapet. The building tapers, you see.

I thought I'd once read somewhere that the observation deck was suicide-proof, in the form of an outcropping ledge below that would "catch" suicide attempts. This may be false information, since a hasty web search returned no results. Either way, our leaping lawyer defied any such precautions by exiting via an office window on the 69th floor. It seems he was in conference with a client moments before. "Pardon me while I step out for a smoke…"

At least one tourist was spotted snapping a picture of the argyle-clad appendage. Another memento for the photo album, filed next to the Naked Cowboy.

Tourist spot bedamned, the Empire is one of my favorite architectural structures in New York. Standing below, from across the street on 34th, gazing up at the sheer size of the art deco obelisk can be daunting - the amount of knowledge, skill, and utter fearlessness that went into the thing. And knowing the speed at which it was constructed - a floor a day at times, within a mere eighteen months from start to finish, rising brazenly into the stratosphere during the depths of the Great Depression, with the intent on claiming the title of tallest building in the world, and with a freakin' zeppelin docking station of all things at the crown - is more than a little impressive. A testament to what humanity is capable of. And let's not forget Kong.

If you're going to pick a building to dive off, honestly, you could do worse. Still, I feel bad for the patrons of Cafe Europa who had their lunch unforeseeably disrupted.