Aquilino Cabral, Lincoln Square BID’s Vice President of Operations
He was walking out of the subway near Columbus Circle, fidgeting with the wedding ring on his finger, when it slipped free, bounced once, and dropped straight through the iron slats of a sidewalk grate into the darkness more than ten feet below. He called the MTA. He called the fire department. He called the police. Each one told him some version of the same thing: we can’t help you, but we’ll be in touch.
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Out of options, the man — an associate at Deutsche Bank, whose offices sit right in Columbus Circle — tried one more number he’d tracked down online: the Lincoln Square Business Improvement District. Someone in the office picked up one recent Friday morning, and at first the team pointed him toward the fire department, figuring the ring had landed in a catch basin. But after hanging up, Ralph Memoli, Executive Vice President of Lincoln Square BID, couldn’t quite let it go. “Let me go out there and look,” he recalled thinking.The man knew exactly which grate it was. On the block around 58th Street and Eighth Avenue, where roughly a dozen grates line the sidewalk, he walked the team straight to the right one. At first they couldn’t spot anything. Then, glinting in the muck somewhere between 10 and 12 feet down, there it was.
What followed was equal parts engineering and improvisation. The crew first tried prying open the grate itself, eyeing a maintenance ladder inside. When that didn’t work, Vice President of Operations Aquilino Cabral tied a metal bolt to a length of fishing line as a weight and started lowering it down. The early attempts came up empty — a paper clip rigged to snag the band didn’t catch either. The breakthrough came when a team member suggested a roll of heavy-duty double-sided tape. They sent the weighted, tape-tipped line back down, landed it square on top of the ring, and began the slowest part of the whole operation.
“The biggest concern was, it was very tight when it came to just bringing it above the grate,” Cabral said. “I was afraid it was going to go down again.” The team inched it up, hands cupped beneath the slats in case it slipped, until the ring cleared the grate for good.
They called the man back, and he rushed over. Married, and by every account ecstatic — Memoli joked that his wife might have killed him otherwise — he had his ring back the same morning it disappeared.
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“It was real teamwork,” Memoli said. And while a subway-grate ring rescue isn’t exactly in the job description, reuniting people with lost belongings is closer to routine than you’d think: the BID’s crews recover wallets, credit cards, and phones on the street nearly every week, and once fished a stray earbud out from under a Citibin trash container. The team’s video of the rescue, shared on the BID’s Instagram, has since drawn roughly 10,000 views.The group keeps the neighborhood “clean, safe, and beautiful,” as Ralph put it — and, every so often, a little more whole.
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