The dormer was a window that stuck out of the roof like the building was looking up. A small room built into the slope of the roof with its own walls and its own window and its own piece of sky. The dormer turned the attic into a room. Without the dormer the attic was storage. With the dormer the attic was somebody's apartment. The dormer was the difference between a ceiling and a life.

The dormer window was the highest window on the block. You looked out the dormer and you saw rooftops and water towers and the backs of buildings that the street never saw. The dormer gave you the secret view. The view from the street was the building's public face. The view from the dormer was the building's diary. You saw the laundry lines and the pigeon coops and the tar beaches and the television antennas and the whole private life of the neighborhood that happened above the top floor.

The dormer leaked. Every dormer on every building in New York leaked eventually because a dormer is a hole in the roof with a window in it and the roof does not want a hole. The flashing around the dormer was copper or lead and the copper lasted fifty years and the lead lasted longer and both of them gave up eventually. A leaking dormer stained the ceiling and the stain was the dormer's way of telling you the roof was winning. The roofer patched the flashing and the dormer stopped leaking and the roof started planning its next move.

Artists lived in dormers. The light from a dormer window was north light and north light was the best light for painting because it did not change. The dormer was the cheapest room in the building because it was the hardest to get to and the hottest in summer and the coldest in winter. The artist took the dormer because the artist could not afford the parlor floor. The dormer made the art possible by making the rent affordable. The loft conversion made the art impossible by making the rent a career.

They sealed the dormers. Bricked them up or covered them with plywood when the building code changed and the attic was no longer a legal apartment. The dormer window that used to look at the sky now looks at the inside of a piece of plywood. The building stopped looking up. A building that does not look up is a building that has forgotten it has a roof. The dormer was the building's curiosity. The plywood is the building's resignation.

See also: Skylight, Tin Roof