{"id":201,"date":"2005-04-06T08:46:57","date_gmt":"2005-04-06T16:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2005\/04\/the_making_of_an_urban_legend.html"},"modified":"2005-04-06T08:46:57","modified_gmt":"2005-04-06T16:46:57","slug":"the_making_of_a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/04\/the_making_of_a.html","title":{"rendered":"The Making of an Urban Legend"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Drudgetastic<\/a> story that will be repeated around the watercooler all across the country — the delivery guy who was stuck in the elevator for three days<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Ming Kuang Chen, a deliveryman for a Bronx restaurant called Happy Dragon, walked out Friday night at about 8:30 p.m. with a large order of curried shrimp with onion and a small shrimp fried rice, and never came back.<\/p>\n

Worried co-workers found his bicycle chained up in front of the 38-story apartment building of Tracey Towers, at 40 West Mosholu Parkway near Jerome Avenue, and feared the worst: At least three deliverymen for Chinese restaurants have been killed in New York City in the last five years, for money or for food.<\/p>\n

For three days, the police searched in and around the buildings for Mr. Chen, going door to door to the 871 apartments, sending bloodhounds and cadaver-detecting dogs into nearby Van Cortlandt Park and Woodlawn Cemetery, dropping with scuba gear into the cold waters of the Jerome Park Reservoir.<\/p>\n

And all that time, it seems he was right in the middle of them – trapped in an express elevator, where he spent more than three days in a 4-foot by 6-and-a-half-foot cab without food or water before being rescued shortly after dawn yesterday. He had made his last delivery before becoming trapped.<\/p>\n

“I kept yelling,” a weary Mr. Chen said through an interpreter after his rescue, briefly describing his roughly 81 hours of captivity.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The offending building:<\/p>\n

\"Tracey<\/p>\n

The Post headline: “Deliverance.”<\/a> The Daily News headline: “Sat in hell-evator for days.”<\/a> I liked the Daily News headline more until I considered the implicit snobbiness of “Deliverance.” So the tabloid-to-tabloid headline battle ends in . . . a draw! On to the next bizarre story!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Drudgetastic story that will be repeated around the watercooler all across the country — the delivery guy who was stuck in the elevator for three days: Ming Kuang Chen, a deliveryman for a Bronx restaurant called Happy Dragon, walked out Friday night at about 8:30 p.m. with a large order of curried shrimp with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,27,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culturalanthropological","category-just_horrible","category-the_bronx"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}