The Making of an Urban Legend

A Drudgetastic story that will be repeated around the watercooler all across the country — the delivery guy who was stuck in the elevator for three days:

Ming Kuang Chen, a deliveryman for a Bronx restaurant called Happy Dragon, walked out Friday night at about 8:30 p.m. with a large order of curried shrimp with onion and a small shrimp fried rice, and never came back.

Worried co-workers found his bicycle chained up in front of the 38-story apartment building of Tracey Towers, at 40 West Mosholu Parkway near Jerome Avenue, and feared the worst: At least three deliverymen for Chinese restaurants have been killed in New York City in the last five years, for money or for food.

For three days, the police searched in and around the buildings for Mr. Chen, going door to door to the 871 apartments, sending bloodhounds and cadaver-detecting dogs into nearby Van Cortlandt Park and Woodlawn Cemetery, dropping with scuba gear into the cold waters of the Jerome Park Reservoir.

And all that time, it seems he was right in the middle of them – trapped in an express elevator, where he spent more than three days in a 4-foot by 6-and-a-half-foot cab without food or water before being rescued shortly after dawn yesterday. He had made his last delivery before becoming trapped.

“I kept yelling,” a weary Mr. Chen said through an interpreter after his rescue, briefly describing his roughly 81 hours of captivity.

The offending building:

The Post headline: “Deliverance.” The Daily News headline: “Sat in hell-evator for days.” I liked the Daily News headline more until I considered the implicit snobbiness of “Deliverance.” So the tabloid-to-tabloid headline battle ends in . . . a draw! On to the next bizarre story!