The clothesline was the flag of the neighborhood. Strung between fire escapes across the alley. Shirts and sheets and underwear drying in the wind above the street. Every clothesline told you who lived there. A baby's clothes meant a new family. A man's work shirt meant somebody was getting up at five in the morning. A woman's dress meant somebody was going out on Saturday night. The clothesline was the neighborhood's diary written in cotton and hung out for everyone to read.

My mother hung the laundry every Monday morning. Avenue D. Nineteen fifty-eight. She leaned out the window with a bag of clothespins and fought the wind and the pigeons and the line that always sagged in the middle. My mother was a composer. She did not know it. But the rhythm of the clothespin. The snap of the sheet. The creak of the pulley. That was music. My mother was performing for an audience of fire escapes and she never got a standing ovation but the laundry always came back dry.

The clothesline connected the buildings. That is the thing people forget. A rope from your window to the building across the alley. Your laundry touching the air that touched your neighbor's laundry. The clothesline was the internet before the internet. Information traveled on it. If your neighbor's clothesline was empty on Monday it meant something was wrong. If your neighbor's clothesline had a suit on it somebody died. The clothesline was a communication system and nobody had to log in.

They outlawed the clothesline. The city said it was unsightly. The city said it lowered property values. The city looked at a clothesline full of working people's clothes and said that is ugly. The city looked at a family's laundry drying in the sun and said that does not belong here. The city replaced the clothesline with a dryer in the basement that costs two dollars and twenty-five minutes and takes the sun out of your clothes. The dryer is efficient. The clothesline was beautiful. The city always picks efficient over beautiful.

I miss the clothesline. I miss looking up between the buildings and seeing sheets blowing in the wind like sails. The Lower East Side used to look like a harbor. Cloth sails between brick masts. The whole neighborhood billowing. Now you look up between the buildings and you see nothing. Just air conditioning units and satellite dishes and windows that do not open. The clothesline is gone and the sky between the buildings is empty and an empty sky is the saddest thing in New York.