In Westbeth she’s known mostly as the Chimney Girl, so that's what I’ll call her. She was a child of the building, as was the tenant who first told me her story. Her parents were musicians. By the time she was twelve she was already showing signs of trouble, though those signs may not have been apparent—may not even have existed—until later. The past looks different when viewed in the glare of the future, which magnifies irregularities and small disfigurements while at the same time blinding you to everything else. Afterward you remember only the disfigurements, the issues. At the time, however, she was just a girl. In pictures she's quite pretty.
It was summer; a cousin came to visit. The cousin was older, already a young woman, but making up for the difference in their ages was the fact that the Chimney Girl was a New Yorker, which adds five years to any child’s age, and lived in a labyrinthine fortress of artists, some cool, some just weird. Still, she wanted to impress her cousin, and so one night she took her up thirteen stories to the roof. She showed her the city the way another child would show a visitor her room: the grid of glowing streets that to the south became a web of diagonal and zigzag strands; the ghostly high-rises thrusting toward the moon; the softly lapping river where late ferries glided between the banks. Perhaps feeling that wasn't enough, she pointed to the chimney that rose another two dozen feet overhead. There was a ladder attached to it. The tenant who told me this story remembered that the kids she’d grown up with used to mess around on it. The young girl climbed the ladder. I don’t know if the cousin climbed behind her or watched from below. At the top, the girl struck a pose, maybe heroic, maybe clownish. Then she pitched backward and disappeared soundlessly into the chimney’s gaping mouth.
The cousin froze.
An instant later she was brought back into her body. Maybe she took the elevator, maybe she leapt down the stairs three at a time. She pounded on the door to the apartment and told the girl’s father what had happened. He called 911. Some firemen arrived; Westbeth’s super led them down into the basement and then to a steel door that opened into the base of one of several chimneys. A lieutenant poked his fingers through a crack, and a small hand appeared on the other side. He jumped back. He hadn't expected to find someone alive: people were killed by falling three stories, and this girl had fallen more than thirteen. When the door was broken open, he saw eyes and a mouth floating in the sooty darkness. It might've been an image from a cartoon. You hear of people laughing in relief, even people who are used to opening doors and finding the dead behind them—maybe especially such people.
The blackened face spoke. “Am I dead?”
She had fallen 180 feet and landed in a mound of soot and ash, years, maybe decades of it, soot so deep she’d had to claw her way up to the surface. The soot had saved her. The lieutenant thought she’d fallen headfirst and landed on her back. At the hospital she was found to have a dislocated hip and multiple fractures. In the storyteller’s memory, the injuries were worse than that; she thought the girl had also suffered lung damage from inhaling ash. “I think she ended up having a pretty serious drug problem.
Whether that was a factor before or after I don’t know. She must’ve been on lots of painkillers. Her parents live in Westbeth. I don’t know where she lives. I don’t know what her deal is. After that the building got wise to some of these things. They clipped the ladders, they put up fences so that kids couldn’t crawl into places. There’ve been many generations of kids who've grown up in Westbeth.”
The story has become part of the folklore of the building, a cautionary tale for parents, a legend passed down to the next generation of Westbeth children, who hearing it may feel not just frightened but also secretly thrilled. Because, after all, the Chimney Girl lived.
*
Grace Bergere’s musician parents moved into Westbeth when she was eight. They divorced when she was eleven. After that, she shuttled back and forth between her mother’s apartment on the first floor and her father’s on the sixth.
Bergere is vague about dates. “I attribute my brain to a few things, one of which is the accident. I hit the ground at seventy-something miles per hour.”
As a young child, she used to visit a boy on the eighth floor who’d rigged an intricate network of plastic tubes in his room: you’d drop a marble in one end and hear it rattle through the system until it popped out someplace else. Sometimes they’d go out into one of the narrow hallways and brace their feet against one wall and their hands against the opposite one and inch their way up almost to the ceiling, then drop down onto a mattress they’d dragged there for that purpose.
Elsewhere she was unhappy, especially after she transferred to a new school: “I never did well in school, I was always a weird outcast. And I didn’t have many friends. And then when I got to IS 89 because PS 3 was a hippy school where we were fingerpainting and singing all day long, and now we’re at a math school . . . where I didn’t learn any math. I felt stupid and chubby and stinky. And I had acne, and nobody wanted to talk to me.”
She was twelve. Her cousin Lily visited from California. “It felt nice to have someone sort of my age to hang out with. I mean, she wasn’t really my age, but she feels like my peer, and I didn’t have any siblings. I don’t remember what led to us being on the roof except that I thought it would be interesting for Lily. And it was nighttime. It was dark.
“I did not have a cell phone, I did not have video games. The way that I knew how to play was using my body and climbing things. I’d been climbing things my whole life, you know. Like in Central Park we would climb the rocks, and trees, and buildings, and whatever. I’ve talked to a lot of people from New York, and that’s how they are. So anyway, I saw the ladder. And I didn’t know it was a chimney, either. I don’t think I would have done what I did if I’d known there was a hole at the top of it. And, by the way, I didn’t slip and fall. I was just mistaken about the nature of what I was doing. I hate to sound like an asshole, but I mean, I’m a juggler. Climbing a ladder and sitting on something is not challenging to me. And it wasn’t challenging to me when I was twelve.”
It’s here that Bergere’s story departs from the official version you can read in The New York Times, though you can see how it might drive a fact-checker crazy. It still sounds more truthful. No one was with her when she fell, and if she can’t entirely say what happened she can come closer to it than anybody else. “Okay, what happened was I climbed the ladder, and I put my hand out to sit on it. I thought it was asphalt, the blackness. And I put my whole weight onto nothing. It didn’t occur to me that there wouldn’t be anything there. It never occurred to me, you know, that there would be an industrial-size chimney in New York City in my building, which is an apartment building, because I’m twelve. In my mind, I thought it was a tower. I don’t know why there would be a tower, but I thought it was a tower.”
The hole was as wide as her outstretched arms. “I remember I put my hands out. I was falling, but I didn’t know that I was falling because it was so . . . I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. See, if I had known it was a chimney and I’d slipped and fell, I think I’d be dead. Because I was . . . I was so relaxed. It felt like I was falling through water. It felt like water because the pressure of the air hitting me felt like . . . like a . . . substance. I just remember it felt like I was touching something and something was cradling me. It was just the air pressure. And then I remember hitting the ground. And they calculate that I fell for a few seconds. You know, I mean, it's pretty high.”
It was 180 feet.
“And I think what happened was I made a full rotation. I don’t remember what part of my body hit first, but I think I went in headfirst, and then my hips kind of balanced me out. My feet and then my ass, and then my shoulders and then my head. If I was tense or flailing, I could have landed on my head. I remember when I hit the ground, I heard my neck break. Everything was white. And it was like, in my head there was just this crazy, loud, static sound. It felt pretty psychedelic—just the whiteness and the crazy fucking sound, and my whole body was kind of vibrating.
“And I wasn’t scared because I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I knew something really bad had happened, but I didn’t know what it was. And I wasn’t scared because it had already happened. There was a part of me that was like, steadfastly calm about it. Like I knew that whatever was happening was normal. I know that sounds like a lot of crazy, weird lies, but it really felt wholly okay with me because I wasn’t in pain. Like my brain had shut off my pain sensors . . . like I’d lost all sense of my body. It didn’t feel like I was in a body at all. I was like, ‘Damn, what the fuck is happening to me? This isn’t so bad, I guess.’
“It was completely black. And what I was saying before, which is kind of important, is that . . . and I know this sounds too much like a movie . . . but I really did think of my mother. That really was the main thing driving me, the desire to not pass out and die. If I had done nothing, I would have died because I had ashes shoved down into my mouth and chest, and I couldn’t breathe at all. And it turns out that one-and-a-half lungs had collapsed. So I had half of one lung working. And I remember I had to remove all the soot out of my throat. I couldn’t cough or anything, so I was using my hand to pull the shit out of my throat. And at this point my skin was burning. My whole skin was on fire, I think because of shock. But I didn’t feel any pain in my back yet; it turns out I broke my back in, I think, eight places. And my hip, I dislocated my hip. And my shoulder, too. And I had all kinds of fractures all over the place. And I ruptured my spleen. I don’t know what that does.
“So then I sat up, and that helped with breathing, and I leaned against the wall, because it was like a big chamber and then a little echo chamber, from what I remember. And there was a hole, and I could see the basement light through the hole. The wall had been cemented shut. If no one had been with me [on the roof], I would be dead. No one would have known where I was. So, I started putting my mouth up to the hole because the air down there was so fucking disgusting. I used my arm and I broke the hole bigger with my arm. And I put my hand out, and I was waving my hand around and trying to breathe.
“I think while I was still kind of on my back, my cousin went down to get my dad. She didn’t really know what happened because she just saw that I was climbing that thing, and then she turned away, and then I wasn’t there anymore. She didn’t know it was a chimney either. And as soon as she told my dad what happened, he knew what it meant. And he was really freaking out, obviously. And he got up on the ladder and waved his phone down at me. Because, you know, he thought I was dead. Everyone thought I was dead. He was the first person to know I wasn’t dead. He’s like, ‘Are you alive? Are you okay?’ I was like, ‘I’m okay. I broke my leg or something.’ The only thing I knew is that I couldn’t move my leg.
“He told me he called the fire department, so I wasn’t really that scared. I knew that I was okay. But apparently the firemen didn’t believe him at all . . . that I was okay. They thought he was hallucinating or something. And I remember when the firemen came, they told me to back up from the entrance, and they broke the door with a sledgehammer. The EMTs dragged me out, and I just wanted water immediately. And they won’t let you have water because if they have to do surgery, they don’t want you to vomit. They laid me out on the stretcher. Man, I don’t know how this happened, I think they were probably nervous. They didn’t know what to expect. But they started forcing my leg down, and my leg was broken. It was dislocated, it wasn’t in the socket, and they were pushing it down. I remember telling them, ‘I can’t put my leg down!’ They were like, ‘You have to!’ and I was like, ‘I can’t!’ A piece of my hip was broken.
“I remember they took me up, and I remember looking up at the ceiling in the lobby and looking around, and everyone was standing around and looking at me. Like people in the building. And then I was in the ambulance, and I remember the ambulance guy had to cut my clothes off me. And I didn’t want him to cut my clothes off me because I liked my pants. And he’s talking to me about Barney, Barney the dinosaur. And I was like, ‘How old do you think I am?’ I was immediately giving them shit. They took me to the hospital, and they had to put me through an MRI, and I had three or four piercings in my ear cartilage, and they had to take them out. I remember yelling at them about that.
“They took me to Bellevue, and then NYU. Up until this point, I was not in any pain. And then I remember, I must have finally passed out. I think they must have given me something. And then I remember I woke up and I was all alone in this room. And all of a sudden, I was in fucking agony. My whole body was just screaming. I was screaming. And I didn’t know why I was alone, either. I was just alone in this room. I think my parents were at the door, but I couldn’t see them. And I was just screaming.
“And then I was in the ICU for a while, at least a month. They never did any surgery on me, they just relocated my hip and put it in traction where they put the bar through your knee. It was like being held up in the air. And then they had me in a brace in bed, so it was just time. And they had me do these exercises, where I would blow into a tube.”
This was probably an incentive spirometer, meant to help her reflate and strengthen her lungs.
“And they had me on morphine. And that’s a whole other story. I remember, I loved the hospital. To this day I love the hospital. I love going to the hospital. I feel like I’m being taken care of when I go to the hospital. I have really positive body associations with the hospital and the doctors because they just had me on morphine. I would go to sleep with that [pump] just rigid in my grip. And I needed it, I really needed it. I was so fucked. The first time I went through withdrawal was in the hospital. They said that I was having a psychotic episode, because they transferred me [to a rehab facility] and they didn’t tell them that I was on morphine. So not only was my back shattered, and I was still in a brace, I had to wear a brace for a year after that. But I was in excruciating pain. And I was going through withdrawal. And I was twelve.”
Grace Bergere is thirty now. She’s a working musician whose first album was released by Casa Gogol Records in 2024. Her songs are suspended between the grim wisdom of their lyrics and the shimmering lushness of their harmonies and lent authority by the directness of her voice, which is devoid of melismata or any of the other techniques singers use to court the sympathy and admiration of their audience. It just states its case. As one of her songs puts it: “I did nothing wrong.”
