There’s no shortage of weird stuff that goes on in this little hellhole I like to call home, but even a river of chopped-up chicken bits filling a street in New York City will stop me in my tracks.
The news spread after Sara Vilkomerson of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tweeted a video she’d taken in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn.
It appears that crates of raw chicken had somehow ended up all over the street. Passing New Yorkers, as New Yorkers are wont to do, drive right on by without so much as stopping. The noise the bones make as cars drive over them is enough to make anyone retch.
I had to see it for myself. So did Jalopnik video producer Erica Lourd.
Vilkomerson uploaded the video at 10:39 a.m.; we were at the scene by 11:18. To our massive disappointment (and mild admiration), the carnage had already been cleaned up, save for five or six bones that had been left behind. There’s no saying when Vilkomerson saw the scene and then uploaded it, but it can’t have been too long ago.
The air thick with flies, we bent in for a closer look.
What was strange about these bones was that they didn’t look like the drumsticks you’d get in a supermarket. There was hardly any meat on them, they were mostly bone and skin. And they were definitely raw.
The rest of the street looked as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The pavement was clear of gristle and blood. These were the only bones we were able to find. Save for the ones we photographed, and the lingering stench of ripe flesh that blanketed the scene like a foul fog, the street bones might not have even been real at all.
Then we had to leave, because the smell was disgusting and quite overpowering.
What were the bones for? Who spilled them on the street? And where did they all go???