Empire City — The water tower at 400 Lasker Avenue has been climbed sixty-eight times since the first of August, and its owner has responded by building a second one.
The new tower stands forty feet from the original, is eleven feet taller, and has a ladder.
It holds no water. It has never held water. It was erected in eleven days by a contractor who was told only that it should look worth climbing.
“I have no objection to the Dragonfly,” said the owner, Idris Fenneman-Crowe, who has held the property since 1988. “I have never met him and I wish him well. My objection is to the ladder. My objection has always been to the ladder.”
The Decoy Is More Popular
Since the second tower opened on the twenty-second of September, forty-one of the forty-four recorded climbs have been of the decoy.
Mr. Fenneman-Crowe described this as “the first thing to go right this year.”
Nobody has photographed anything from either tower. This newspaper asked whether the decoy's additional eleven feet had improved the view and was told that it had, considerably, and that what could now be seen more clearly was the harbor.
The Policy
The property's insurer has issued an endorsement naming the readers of this newspaper as a class.
The Times has read the document. It runs to two pages and refers throughout to “persons attending the premises in response to a published offer,” a phrase this newspaper has been advised not to characterise further.
Asked whether he had considered simply removing the ladder from the original tower, Mr. Fenneman-Crowe said he had removed it in June.
“They brought their own,” he said. “Two of them brought a better one than mine. I now have three ladders and a tower nobody wants.”
The Times renews its request that readers stay off both structures, notes that the original tower remains not tall enough, and observes that the second one is taller but is also not tall enough.