The balustrade was the railing on the front stoop. Stone or iron or wood with balusters spaced four inches apart. The balustrade was the building's handwriting. A brownstone with a stone balustrade said something about who lived there before you did. The balustrade was not decoration. The balustrade was a sentence the building wrote in 1870 and never took back.

The balusters were turned on a lathe. Each one a small column with a shape that somebody designed. A vase shape or a candlestick shape or a spiral. Every brownstone on the block had its own shape and every shape said this building is not that building. The baluster was the building's fingerprint. Thirty balusters on a stoop and every one turned by hand. The machine makes them identical. The lathe made them close enough.

Kids sat on the balustrade. You hooked your legs over the railing and leaned back and the stoop was a throne. The balustrade was the armrest of the neighborhood. You sat on it and watched the block and the block watched you and everybody was where they belonged. The balustrade held you up the way the stoop held up the building. A building without a balustrade is a face without eyebrows. You do not know what is missing but something is.

The balustrade crumbled. Brownstone is sandstone and sandstone is sand that forgot it was sand and the weather reminded it. The balusters cracked and the railing sagged and the super replaced the stone with iron pipe because iron pipe does not crumble but iron pipe does not say anything either. The stone baluster had a shape. The iron pipe has a diameter. A diameter is not a shape.

They removed the balustrade. Cut the balusters off at the base and hauled them to the dump and poured a concrete ramp for the stroller. The concrete ramp is useful. The stone balustrade was beautiful. Nobody asked whether the stoop could have both. The building lost its handwriting and got a surface. A surface is not a sentence.

See also: Bannister, The Stoop