New Yorkers are famously caught up with their own shit, and it’s not exactly hard to understand why.
The endless stream of performance artists, rats, public urination, and honking delivery trucks means you pretty much have to put the blinders on, or get crushed by the existential angst of living in New York and becoming Travis Bickle.
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And if you think human corpses are excluded from the aforementioned list of “insane things routinely ignored by New Yorkers,” you are sadly mistaken. In fact, even a life-ending hit-and-run can be met with a shrug by pizza-eating witnesses.
This sad reality was reaffirmed early Friday morning, when people lined up to eat Cronuts at the Dominique Ansel Bakery on Spring Street—the SoHo bakery that launched the great Cronut craze of 2013—as a man lay dead on wooden sidewalk bench some 40 feet away from the store.
But in classic New York fashion, the human tragedy unfolding during the 6 AM line-up at Ansel’s bakery did not dissuade early risers from getting their hands on a doughnut-croissant hybrid. And while this begs the question of why people are still eating Cronuts in 2016, and at 6 AM, for that matter, the real issue here is why so many in line appeared “unfazed,” according to the New York Post.
“I find it more perplexing than anything. It’s viscerally shocking to see that, and by the time I got to the office I felt queasy and shaken and not in the mood for breakfast,” Pohlig, the author of that tweet, later told the Post.
“I didn’t see anyone leave the line,” Molly Young, an onlooker whose first name also happened to be “Molly,” told the Post. “It didn’t put a dent in anyone’s appetite.”
Dominique Ansel Bakery, for its part, suggested that the whole affair was blown out of proportion. “There was no line. A man came in and told us. It is an unfortunate situation. Nothing scandalous,” an unnamed employee of the bakery told the Post.
Even if that was the case, there is still something inherently New York about describing a corpse that was on a bench for ten hours as “nothing scandalous.”
