Sense of Place

I think this is why I stop to read everything that has By Robert McFadden at the top. He puts me there so the straight news can follow. By the third graf I feel I know the place: A powerful explosion killed a construction worker and critically injured four others in a hardscrabble town in New Jersey yesterday as it leveled a nearly built home and an abandoned apartment building and sent a hurricane of fiery debris, splintered wood and shattered glass flying for blocks around.
The blast — apparently the fault of bumbling vagrants who broke in to the new house to steal pipes for scrap and severed a natural gas line — was yet another blow to the run-down East Ward of Irvington, N.J., an old…