In Peoria, no one would have noticed. In Manhattan, it was the Mystery of the Peculiar Petals.
What were those white fluffy things drifting softly down from the sky? By 2 p.m. Wednesday, hordes of Manhattan office workers crowding the streets at lunch hour were asking just that question.Surely it wasn't snow. (There was hardly a cloud in the sky.) Heavens, could it have been asbestos? (No, asbestos particles are too small to see.) Then could it have been ash? (Then where was the fire?)
"I knew it wasn't snow, but it sure looked like it from my 19th floor office window," said Alan Metrick, a partner in a public relations firm on Madison Avenue.
Bill Gloede, who works in the Viacom Building in Times Square, said he noticed the swirling fluff when he left his home in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J. "It was just one of those sort of things you look at and wonder, what is it?" he said. "I figured if it were nuclear fallout, I would have been warned somewhere along the line."
By 3 p.m., the New York City Department of Environmental Protection offices in central Queens fielded calls about the deluge from office workers from Herald Square to 49th Street, said Ian Michaels, a department spokesman.
Not coincidentally, the petals were also drifting down outside the department's windows.
That's when the department's inspectors were assigned to the case.
And by 5 p.m., the mystery was solved. (But first an important clue: it was a very windy day.)
The petals, it turned out, were the airborne seeds of dandelions and other weeds and came from Central Park, Flushing Meadow and other city parks. Not having the benefit of the subway system, the seeds made their way to midtown by Wednesday's fierce winds.
"It seems strange in the city, but these are seeds that are designed to be carried by the wind," Michaels said.