Dog Lands Safely After He's Blown Off Tower Terrace in Tribeca
“I call him my miracle dog,” Sarann Lindenauer said as she held her 4-year-old terrier Alfie, careful not to put pressure on his bruised chest and bandaged leg. “I’m just so thrilled he’s okay.”
A miracle indeed. Just a few bruises, a sore paw and a cut lip were all that Alfie suffered recently when a heavy wind apparently blew the dog off of Lindenauer’s 11th floor terrace in Tribeca's Independence Plaza and onto the roof of a townhouse in the complex, five stories below and some 30 feet to the east.
Lindenauer said Alfie usually avoids the terrace and only goes onto it briefly when it’s thundering or otherwise noisy outside. “Then he’ll bark and run back in," she said. "I’m thinking that wind just took him because he doesn’t jump.”
Had the wind not whipped Alfie towards the townhouse, he would have landed on the concrete plaza, three stories farther down.
Lindenauer said she knew something was amiss when she returned from grocery shopping on the stormy afternoon of May 3 and Alfie did not run to the door.
“I was walking around calling ‘Alfie, Alfie, Alfie.’ I looked under the bed, but he never hides.”
Her terrace at 80 North Moore Street overlooks an elevated plaza. Stepping to the terrace wall, she recalled the terrible sight of a dog thrown from the building to its death during a rage of domestic violence years ago. Now she feared that Alfie would be there.
“I didn’t want to see him but I looked,” she recalled.
What Lindenauer did not know was that her dog was already in the lobby of the building, bruised, slightly bleeding and soaking wet but otherwise just fine. A neighbor on the 7th floor, Jessica Gould, had rescued him from the roof where he had landed.
“I looked out of my window and I see this little dog running up and down the roof in the pouring rain and I started to panic,” Gould recalled. “I was terrified the dog was going to jump off the roof because he looked so panicked. He looked really desperate.”
After first calling building security, Gould discovered a door that led directly to the townhouse roof. She grabbed Alfie and took him downstairs where the doorman, Ron Russo, wrapped him in a blanket.
Learning that her dog was in the lobby, the relieved owner went downstairs to retrieve him.
“I was looking at him and there was no recognition on his part,” she said. “I think he was in shock.”
A vet determined that Alfie had no broken bones. Bruises on a leg and underside indicated that he probably landed on his stomach.
“At the vet, they called him Alfie the Aviator,” Lindenauer laughed.
Alfie has recovered, his owner said, though he may still be traumatized by his harrowing flight. A few days after the incident the wind blew hard again and Alfie became frightened.
“I couldn’t stop him from shaking,” Lindenauer said. “I closed the window so he couldn’t hear the wind and then he calmed down.”
Nor has the owner completely recovered. “I’m still in shock,” she said. “I can’t believe it happened.”
By Carl Glassman