The gable was the triangle at the top of the wall where the roof peaked. Two slopes of roof meeting at a ridge and the wall below them forming a triangle that faced the street. The gable was the building's forehead. You looked at the gable and the gable looked back and between the two of you there was an understanding. The building had a shape and the shape had a point and the point was the top.

The gable had a window. A round window or an arched window or a louvered vent set into the triangle where the attic met the sky. The gable window let the hot air out in summer and the light in all year and the bats in if the screen was torn. The gable window was the attic's eye. The building looked at the street through the front windows and looked at the sky through the gable window and the gable window was always the more interesting view.

They decorated the gable. Gingerbread trim on Victorian houses. Carved brackets and pendants and finials that turned the triangle into a picture frame. The Victorians could not look at a flat surface without carving something on it. The gable was their canvas. They carved scrolls and flowers and faces into the bargeboard and the bargeboard hung from the gable like a necklace. The gable said I am the top of this house and the carving said and I am worth the climb.

The gable leaked where the roof met the wall. Every gable on every house leaked eventually because a triangle of wall meeting two slopes of roof is three joints and three joints is three chances for water. The flashing at the gable was copper or lead and the roofer bent it by hand and tucked it under the shingles and the flashing kept the water out for twenty years. Twenty years of dry attic for one afternoon of a man on a roof with a hammer.

They build flat roofs now. The flat roof has no gable because the flat roof has no peak. A building with a flat roof is a building without a forehead. The skyline used to be a row of triangles and now the skyline is a row of rectangles and the rectangles have nothing to say about the sky. The gable pointed up. The flat roof points nowhere. A building that points nowhere is a building that has stopped asking questions.

See also: Dormer, Finial