Rooftop chase ends on a Chelsea water tower
Three blocks, two fire escapes and one very surprised building superintendent. Police are still trying to work out who was chasing whom.
A rooftop chase that began on a fire escape on West 18th Street ended 20 minutes later on top of a water tower on West 21st, where a man in a red and blue costume and a man in a grey hoodie sat for several minutes, apparently out of breath, before one of them left in the usual way and the other was helped down by the Fire Department.
Nobody has said which one was chasing which.
The man in the hoodie, 34, was taken to the 10th Precinct and released without charge on Sunday morning. Police said he was "cooperative, tired and not in possession of anything interesting." The man in the costume was not available for comment, and in the Bugle's experience never is.
Four rooftops, one super
The chase crossed at least four buildings. On the third, a six-storey walk-up on West 20th Street, it crossed the path of the building's superintendent, Luis Ortega, who had gone up to check on a leak.
"I had a wrench in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and two guys go past me like I'm not there," Ortega said. "One of them says 'sorry' and keeps going. Which one? The polite one. You figure it out."
“One of them says 'sorry' and keeps going. Which one? The polite one.”
Luis Ortega, building superintendent
Ortega said the leak turned out to be nothing. The web across his roof hatch, he said, was something, and he would like to know who to bill.
The water tower
The chase ended when both men reached the top of the wooden tank on West 21st Street and found there was nowhere else to go. A neighbour across the street, who asked not to be named because "the guy in the costume knows where I live now," said the two sat on the tank's edge for "a good five minutes, like they were waiting for a bus."
Firefighters from Engine 3 arrived at 5:35 a.m. By the time their ladder reached the tank, only the hoodie remained. The man wearing it said he had been "out for a walk."
The bill
The building's owner told the Bugle that a water tower is "not designed to have people sitting on it," and that an inspection would cost around $1,800. He has written to City Hall. City Hall has written back to say it is reviewing a number of similar claims, which is a sentence this newspaper has now printed 31 times this year.