The pigeon coop was on the rooftop and the man who kept it went up there every morning before dawn and every evening before dark and he stood on the tar roof in January in his undershirt and he waved a flag on a pole and the pigeons flew in a circle over the neighborhood and came back. That was the sport. You raised the birds. You trained the birds. You waved the flag. The birds came home. The whole city was the field and the rooftop was home plate.

Pigeon keeping was a working man's hobby. The cab drivers kept pigeons. The plumbers kept pigeons. The guys who worked the docks kept pigeons. You did not need money. You needed a roof and some wire and some wood and the patience to train a bird that does not understand English to fly in a circle and come back to you. The pigeon coop was a man's private country on top of a building he did not own. The landlord never went up there. Nobody went up there except the pigeons and the man.

The competition was this. You flew your birds at the same time as the man on the next building and if his pigeons joined your flock and landed on your roof you kept them. That was the game. You were stealing pigeons with better pigeons. The man on the next roof was doing the same thing. Whole friendships ended over a lost bird. Whole friendships started when a man returned one he did not have to. The rooftops of Brooklyn were a diplomatic theater performed entirely with birds.

I watched a man on a rooftop on the Bowery fly his pigeons every evening for a year. I never spoke to him. I watched from the fire escape across the street. The pigeons went up and the pigeons came back and the man stood there with his flag and his undershirt and his coffee and he looked like the calmest man in the city. Thirty birds in the air and every one of them coming home. That is trust. The man trusted the birds and the birds trusted the man and the city was background noise to both of them.

The coops are mostly gone. The rooftops are terraces now. Outdoor furniture and string lights and a man with a cocktail who paid three thousand dollars a month for the view. The view used to have pigeons in it. The view used to have a man with a flag and thirty birds making circles over the tenements. Now the view has the skyline and the skyline has glass towers and the glass towers do not allow pigeon coops. The birds are still here. They are just nobody's birds anymore. They belong to the street now. Which is fine. The street always took care of its own.