Apartment Building With View of Crash Became Media Central

When a USAir Boeing 737 and a SkyWest commuter plane collided in a wall of flame Friday night, horrified residents of Park West Apartments in Westchester watched the tragedy unfold less than half a mile from their balconies.

But the real impact of that night was yet to hit them.

Within an hour, the 444-unit complex was besieged by dozens of reporters, photographers and camera crews, all clamoring for interviews with eyewitnesses and jockeying for vantage points from the four-story building’s apartments and roof.

By a fluke of positioning, the southern end of the new luxury complex was the only place from which the crash site could be photographed clearly.

“I moved here so I could watch airplanes, that’s true, but I had no idea I would end up in the middle of something like this,” said Glen Bergstrom, a 25-year-old aviation buff who lives on Park West’s third floor.

“All of a sudden we were this hot media item,” he said. “I was on ABC and CBS and NBC and CNN. We did these lives shots with Ted Koppel on “Nightline.” I had kids asking for my autograph. . . . We were just overwhelmed.”

Bergstrom’s girlfriend, 25-year-old Gretchen Imig, and her sister, Maile, 23, treated the crowd of journalists as guests, offering coffee, water and even a chicken dinner to the throng that set up shop in Bergstrom’s apartment.

“I came downstairs from the roof and my dinner was being served--to someone else,” Bergstrom said. “I didn’t mind. I couldn’t have eaten it anyway.”

On Monday, after enduring nearly three days of constant media attention, bemused Park West residents said that the inundation by reporters was more educational than irritating.

“It’s just life in Los Angeles, I guess,” said Bob Kopp, 57, a businessman who rents his Park West apartment as a part-time home away from his Idaho residence. “It certainly was interesting watching the guys do what they do. It’s just something I’d never seen before.”

The bustle television crews and the glare of cameras helped ease the shock of seeing the crash, Kopp said.

Gazing across a dirt construction area toward the accident scene Monday, Kopp said he would rather not have had a front row seat.

“If I lived on the other end of the building, I wouldn’t want to see it, but when it’s right here in front of you, it’s hard not to look,” he said.

Like other residents, Kopp opened his apartment to several photographers as the night wore on.

“Most of them were just really nice guys that I didn’t mind having around, but one guy tried to offer me money,” Kopp said. “He said, ‘I’ll make you a rich man’ and that just irritated the hell out of me. . . . I lied to him and told him I already was a rich man. He didn’t get in.”

Kopp, whose apartment is alongside the building’s southern stairwell to the roof, said he got little sleep Friday night as a parade of journalists trooped up and down.

Sympathetic building managers opened the building’s roof to as many as 40 journalists that night, even buying the shivering crowd pizzas when it became apparent that the crash would require an all-night vigil.

Later in the weekend, however, managers decided to shut off access to the roof because of safety concerns.

“We could tell that the residents didn’t feel it was an intrusion because many of them were inviting the media onto their balconies, but we just didn’t want to open ourselves up to any more liability on the roof,” said Bobbie Putnam, assistant resident manager for the complex.

On Sunday, two of the building’s maintenance workers brought a telescope into a vacant unit facing the crash site and let in a handful of photographers and reporters.

Peering through the telescope and a pair of binoculars, the pair kept up a running narrative of cleanup operations for other journalists down on the street.

“We knew you guys had a job to do,” Putnam explained. “We wanted to be attentive to the needs of our residents . . . and the gravity of the situation was so difficult, that talking with the media seemed to help people deal with it.”