Sixteen Months Later, An Abstract Thing Of Beauty

After initially indicating that owners would be responsible for towing costs, the insurer of the Washington Heights development where a retaining wall collapsed onto the West Side Highway announces that it will ante up for towing, too:

It was with no small sense of wonder that Frank Nadal returned to the scene of the disaster, a huge mound of dirt and debris where a 75-foot retaining wall gave way on May 12, 2005, burying part of Riverside Drive and several parked cars. By yesterday, the cars were unearthed.

“I looked, and they said, ‘It’s right in front of you,'” said Mr. Nadal, the superintendent of the Castle Village apartments near 183rd Street in Manhattan, where the wall collapsed.

“I said, ‘Where is the car?'” Mr. Nadal said. “You couldn’t recognize the thing. It was flat as a pancake.”

For anyone expecting better, it was surely a letdown. After nearly 16 months of waiting, what emerged yesterday was a sorry heap of scrap metal that bore a greater resemblance to abstract art than to automotive technology.

“You can barely tell it was a car,” said John Everett, owner of Cybert Tire and Car Care at 11th Avenue and 51st Street in Manhattan, who was shown a photograph of the wreckage.

For the owners — who had the bad luck to find parking spaces that were legal but in the wrong place at the wrong time — the sight yesterday behind the barricades of a closed northbound entrance to Riverside Drive just north of the George Washington Bridge may have added insult to injury.

For most of the time since the avalanche, the owners had been left in the dark about their responsibility and the extent of their loss. Since auto insurance normally does not cover landslides, several of the car owners filed claims with the Greater New York Mutual Insurance Company, which insures Castle Village.

Greater New York Mutual said it would honor the claims, but it also told the owners that once their cars were dug up, they should be ready to pay towing costs, even if there was little to salvage.

The issue became nettlesome for everyone. The insurance company said the cars had to be dug out and towed so the owners could prove their vehicles were the ones that had been buried, but the owners were aghast at the prospect of even greater costs.

Yesterday, Greater New York Mutual said it would pay the towing costs. Thomas D. Hughes, senior vice president and general counsel for the company, said it was not about to split hairs with the car owners over what was salvageable.

Backstory: Retaining Wall to Henry Hudson Parkway: Drop Dead, Rvr Vus.