After years of taking the same route, have you ever been startled to look up and see something striking for the first time?
I’ve driven or walked past this almost daily for the past 20 years but simply hadn’t noted the one detail. The 9-11 in the address.
Firefighters across the Northeast feel deeply about their fallen brothers in the World Trade Center attacks, especially those afflicted later by the toxic consequences. Dover’s professionals are no exception, as the mural painted across the back of the Central Station parking lot proclaims.
When I gazed up and saw that hyphen in 9-11, I thought they had inserted it in the street address – 911 – perhaps as a sign of continuing support.
Then my eyes caught the address next door – 7 – and I realized the station sits at 9 and 11 Broadway, where it’s been for more than a century. How coincidental, then, that its address would line up with a much later significance.
I lived in an apartment for fourteen years before I realized that the dining room had an AC vent.
Did you ever need it?
It was part of the central system. For me, the discovery stood out because our HVAC system was marginal, and I was evaluating the system regularly for optimization.