Flight 1549

It started when I read in the paper that you could basically walk up and see the US Airways Flight 1549 plane while it was moored against the seawall at Battery Park City:

Among the shocking images that this city can produce, it was certainly one of the strangest: the white left wing of an airplane jutting from the river like the dorsal fin of a shark.

It was clearly something to look at, and many did on Friday as, despite the bitter winds, a steady stream of the curious wandered by. They were as wide-eyed as they were various: dog-walkers, ironworkers, mothers pushing strollers, tourists bearing backpacks, professional camera crews and the inevitable joggers, most of whom seemed content to bounce a moment in their spandex before continuing on their way.

“We just wanted to come down and, you know, see it,” said Raney Kilgore, 41, a homemaker who arrived from Denver on Thursday night for a vacation. “You don’t usually get to be an eyewitness to something like this.”

“Something like this,” by Friday afternoon, had the look and feel of an enormous crime scene, with yellow police tape cordoning off River Terrace in Battery Park City and more than a dozen fire engines parked with lights flashing up and down the block.

That ubiquitous modern response to public events — the taking of cellphone pictures — was occurring nearly everywhere one looked. The police allowed people to approach the barricades briefly but then shooed them on their way.

So of course I wanted to see the plane that was part of one of the biggest “Whoa, Dude!” moments in history. On Saturday however, preparations were well underway to hoist the thing into the air and you couldn’t get near the edge of the water. A crowd was out — some people waiting there, they said, four hours already — so I figured I’d wait to see if it would come up. It didn’t come up in the almost two hours I waited there, but here are pictures of some very large cranes, in case anyone is a big crane enthusiast.

(A side note: This is why we started the Big Map Blog + RSS Feed — to apprise you of all the new content, and not just the “greatest hits” stuff that I link from the homepage. In this case, I wouldn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up by luring them in from the homepage with a provocative Flight 1549 link, but in case you’re a huge big crane enthusiast, well then who are we to decide how important the pictures are to you?)

So without further ado, some pictures of big cranes: