Update: Oreo, Dog Thrown Off Building, Was Euthanized
People Wait For Tomorrow's UWS Apple Store Opening
Emily and Sarah Kunstler, Filmmakers
Cheap Chicken Wing Deal Ruined by Gunslinging Teens
FIT Students Busted For Drug Dealing Get Probation
Yesterday morning there were reports of mercury leaking from a Greenwich Village apartment, which made us wonder if a really huge thermometer broke. The city isn't sure, as they are investigating the matter at 55 West 8th Street, but the Post reports that one theory is "many, many years ago, someone dumped the mercury into a building pipe." To turn the whole building into a thermometer? And mercury is really heavy! The DEP said there was only 15-20 (fluid) ounces of mercury found, but each ounce weighs a pound! While the building was found to be safe, Gothamist cannot imagine how freaky it would have been to see mercury dripping from a ceiling - that's something like a nightmare involving Terminator 2.
The mercury page at Wikipedia is very informative; for instance, we had no idea that mercury was used as a laxative (did the building have some, um, plumbing problems?).
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
How does one ounce weigh one pound?
I think it should be fluid ounces
last time i checke, west 18th street is not in greenwich village.
it's 55 west 8th street.
The T-1000 was not made from mercury, but rather a "mimetic polyalloy". So the only thing you'd have to worry about if you saw mercury dripping from the ceiling is poisioning, not Robert Patrick forming naked in your room and impaling you with a chosen sharpened appendage.
cf. dcist, mercury, cardozo high school
This is not as uncommon as you might think; I used to work for the Health Dept., and the top several floors of one of their buildings are not particularly safe as they are contaminated with radium.
How did it get there? Well, in the 1940s there was a lab (now demolished) on the roof, and they happily poured radium they'd finished using down the drain, the pipes for which remain on the top two floors which are now office space. No one's ever really cleaned it up, but there is a false ceiling or something shielding the radioactive pipes in question. Glad I didn't work in that building -- and I doubt all the people who do know are aware of its history.
I won't say exactly which building it is, but I'll say this -- it's not 125 Worth St, but another one very close by...