Defier of Police and Storm, Tender of Residents\' Cats and Fish

Yana Paskova for The New York Times Residents of the Osborne in Manhattan toasted the building's resident manager, John Coyne, center, on Monday. Mr. Coyne had sneaked back into the building to watch over things after the area was evacuated when a crane boom broke nearby.

It was billed as a welcome-home party for an apartment house diagonally across West 57th Street from Carnegie Hall that was evacuated as Hurricane Sandy flailed the city and the boom on a construction crane a few doors away tw isted and crumpled and dangled over the street.

But the gathering on Monday evening in the apartment building's lobby was really a surprise thank-you party for the resident manager, John Coyne, who had borrowed a ladder, scaled a wall and sneaked back inside when the streets in the neighborhood were still closed off. From somewhere inside the building, Mr. Coyne sent residents reassuring e-mails saying that it had survived the storm and that their cats had been fed. And their goldfish. And their hermit crabs.

For nearly a week, he kept evacuees “informed” and “hopeful of a quick return,” said the film critic Jeffrey Lyons, who lives in the building, the Osborne, at 205 West 57th Street, at the corner of Seventh Avenue.

Davida Deutsch, another longtime resident, called him the “captain of our ship.” Another resident, the novelist Elinor Lipman, said Mr. Coyne “was our lifeline” once residents were ordered to le ave the building and scattered - staying with friends, staying in hotels, staying in private clubs â€" until their block was reopened late on the night of Nov. 4.

“John answered the big questions, John answered the little questions” by cellphone and e-mail, Ms. Lipman said. And, she said, “He writes very well. I noticed.”

He provided more than a just-the-facts report on life in a largely empty building. On Oct. 31, he sent an e-mail that said, “Beginning to feel a little bit like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining.' Happy Halloween, alone in the Osborne!”

Yana Paskova for The New York Times The Osborne and, at right, the crane that forc ed its evacuation.

Of course no one sang “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow” in “The Shining,” as the Osborne residents did to Mr. Coyne on Monday evening. And the composer and lyricist Maury Yaston did not write a song about the Hotel Overlook and the snowstorm in “The Shining,” as he did about the Osborne, the hurricane and Mr. Coyne.

“A lot of resident managers think, ‘This is where I work,'” Mr. Coyne told the crowd. “You're my family.”

The damaged crane was above the 74-story skyscraper going up at 157 West 57th Street - so close that people in the Osborne heard the noise as it broke apart on the afternoon of Oct. 29, hours before the storm finally steamed across the New York area. But the winds on its leading edge were already gusting to 80 miles an hour, and Mr. Yaston's wife, Julianne, said she heard “this hideous sound, a sound I had no template for.”

“What it sounded like - I don't even know the word - was s creeching, or ripping,” she said.

It was the sound of the crane coming loose. “If you know the opera ‘Salome,'” said Naomi Graffman, who has lived in the Osborne since 1962, “the way the double basses play as they're starting to cut off John the Baptist's head - it sounded like that.”

Ms. Yaston described seeing pieces of metal from the crane tumbling past her window and slamming into the ground. “You could feel it” when they hit, she said.

Mr. Yaston said it was not long before word came to clear the building. “A firewoman with an ax came in and said: ‘Everyone out right now. Do not spend time gathering your things,'” he recalled.

The next day, West 57th Street was cordoned off, and Mr. Coyne said the police were not allowing anyone south of 59th Street. But he went to visit a friend at 240 Central Park South. He walked through the building and out its back entrance onto 58th Street. Then he walked down the block to the build ing at the southwest corner of 58th Street and Seventh Avenue - the building that backs up to the Osborne.

Mr. Coyne asked if he could borrow a ladder.

Sure, the superintendent there said.

Mr. Coyne put the ladder against a wall between the Osborne and the other building and climbed it.

At the party, another resident, Alison Macheras, had a question for Mr. Coyne: “How many times in our lifetime is this going to happen?”

He said, “I wish it hadn't happened in this one.”