Word: sidewalk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...over a few beers, the virtues of living in New York City. I told her that I prefer my little home-town in West Virginia, where you can leave your keys in your car, and where no one would think of walking past a starving man on the sidewalk. "Yes," she said, looking at me impatiently, "but what can you do on weekends...
...street and urged a friend not to drive to night school until after the rush hour. Minutes later, Reynolds felt "a ripple." Then a neighbor screamed a warning. He ran out of his shop to find "the whole goddam ground lifting up." He grabbed a telephone pole as the sidewalk buckled beneath his feet, and looked up at a horrifying sight. A mile-long section of the freeway's upper deck began to heave, then collapsed onto the lower roadway, flattening cars as if they were beer cans. "It just slid. It didn't fall. It just slid," said Reynolds...
...mere generosity: the comestibles would have spoiled without refrigeration. At the Mandarin Oriental, a manager explained, "We're doing our best to give our guests first-class comfort, even while bedding them down in the lobby." The expense-account Seven Hills of San Francisco Restaurant served a free sidewalk lunch to anyone who passed by. ) Bankers in three-piece suits munched chicken wings beside bearded homeless...
...tried to inspect their ruined houses were barred by police. After a shouting match with Mayor Art Agnos, a compromise allowed residents with escorts to enter their homes briefly to collect whatever they could before the buildings were torn down. "Our poor little lives are right here on the sidewalk," said Patrice Gehrke, loading a pickup with furniture and ferns. Diane Whitacre hoisted a drawing board on her shoulder so she could get on with her free-lance work. "The most important thing to me was the stuff I need to make a living," she observed. "Life does...
Even as the earth rocked and rolled, California's army of seismologists rallied into action. In Berkeley, University of California graduate student Anthony Lomax felt the sidewalk shiver and watched telephone poles sway, then rushed to his seismographic station. "The instruments were off-scale!" he marveled. Within minutes the scientists on duty had pinpointed the epicenter of the quake in the rugged Santa Cruz mountains some 50 miles away. The spot was no surprise: it lay on the San Andreas fault, a great gash in the earth that extends nearly the length of the California coast. Even before the quake...