The iron gate was the first thing you heard when you got home. It squealed when you opened it and it clanged when you closed it and everybody on the block knew who was coming and who was going by the sound of their gate. Every gate had a different voice. Mrs. Ruiz on the second floor had a gate that moaned. The Hendersons had one that screamed. My gate on East Fifth Street whispered. A little squeak. A little click. The whole building was a symphony of iron gates and if you knew the building you could name the tenant by the sound.

The ironworkers made those gates by hand. Scrollwork and flowers and leaves twisted out of iron bar by a man with a forge in a shop on the Bowery. Every gate was different because every ironworker had a different hand. Some gates were plain. Three bars and a lock. Some gates had vines crawling up the sides and birds sitting on top and you could not believe somebody made that out of metal. The iron gate was public art before anybody called it that. It was security that happened to be beautiful.

The gate on the ground floor was the serious one. That gate had a padlock and a deadbolt and sometimes a chain and it was there because the ground floor window was the one the burglars used. You locked the gate every night and you unlocked it every morning and the rhythm of that was the rhythm of the city. Lock. Unlock. Lock. Unlock. Safe. Unsafe. Home. Street. The gate was the border between your life and everybody else's life and it was three feet wide and made of iron and it worked.

I knew a man on Rivington Street who made gates for forty years. His name was Hector and his shop was in a basement and the sparks from his welding torch lit up the sidewalk grate above his head. People walked over Hector every day and did not know he was down there making the gates that kept them safe. Hector could look at a building and tell you what kind of gate it needed. Not by the measurement. By the feeling. He said every building has a face and the gate is the expression. A brownstone needs scrollwork. A tenement needs bars. A bodega needs a roll-down. Hector read buildings like books.

The iron gates are disappearing. The new buildings have glass doors and electronic locks and cameras and intercoms and you buzz in from your phone. Nobody hears the squeal anymore. Nobody knows who is coming home by the sound of the gate. The new lock is silent. The new door is invisible. The new security system does not have a voice. The iron gate had a voice. It said somebody is home. It said somebody just left. It said this is where I live and this is the sound my life makes when I open the door.

See also: Fire Escape, Brownstone