The bulkhead was the door in the ground. Two angled metal doors set into the sidewalk or the yard that opened to a stairway leading down to the basement. The bulkhead was the building back door. The front door was for people. The bulkhead was for coal and firewood and furniture that would not fit through the hallway and the plumber who did not want to track mud through the parlor. The bulkhead was the honest entrance. The front door lied about what happened inside. The bulkhead showed you.

The bulkhead doors were heavy. Cast iron or steel on a frame set into concrete. You grabbed the handle and you pulled and the door swung up and open and stayed open on its own weight because the hinge was counterbalanced. The counterbalance was a genius of physics applied to a hole in the ground. The door weighed sixty pounds and opened with one hand because somebody understood leverage. The modern bulkhead has a gas strut. The gas strut does what the counterbalance did but the gas strut fails in ten years. The counterbalance failed in never.

The stairway was steep. The bulkhead stairs went down at forty-five degrees because the basement was only eight feet below grade and the opening was only four feet wide and the math required steep. You carried the coal bucket down the steep stairs in the dark and you did not fall because you knew the stairs by feel. Twelve steps. Each step eight inches deep. The coal man knew every bulkhead on the block the way a mailman knows every mailbox. The coal man knowledge was in his feet. The feet remembered what the head forgot.

The bulkhead leaked. Every bulkhead leaked. The doors met at a seam and the seam was a horizontal surface and rain sits on horizontal surfaces and finds the gap. The homeowner caulked the seam and the caulk held for one winter and then the ice heaved the concrete and the concrete cracked the caulk and the water found the crack. The water always finds the crack. The bulkhead was a promise that the water would break. The homeowner job was to keep renewing the promise. Every spring. New caulk. New promise. The relationship between the homeowner and the bulkhead was a marriage. You kept showing up.

They fill in bulkheads now. Pour concrete over the opening and the building loses its back door. The basement becomes a room you can only reach from inside. The coal is gone and the firewood is gone and the furniture goes in through the front door in pieces and gets assembled in the living room and can never leave the living room whole. The bulkhead was the exit strategy. The bulkhead was how things got out. Seal the bulkhead and everything that goes in stays in. A building with no bulkhead is a building that cannot change its mind.

See also: Crawlspace, Cellar Stairs