The rope pulley was bolted to the beam above the top-floor window. A wheel and a hook and a rope and you could haul anything off the street and through the window that would not fit up the stairs. A couch. A piano. A stove. The rope pulley was the building's elevator for things that did not know they were going up.

You moved into a tenement and the rope pulley moved your furniture. Two guys on the street tied the couch to the rope and two guys on the top floor pulled it up and the couch swung on the rope five stories above Avenue B like a pendulum with cushions. Everybody on the block watched. Moving day was a spectator sport. The rope pulley turned a chore into a show.

The rope pulley required trust. You stood on the street and you tied a knot and the knot had to hold because if it did not hold the piano was coming down and the piano did not care who was standing underneath. The rope pulley taught you that a knot was a promise. A good knot held. A bad knot dropped a piano on Rivington Street and nobody forgot.

My uncle pulled a bathtub up four floors with a rope pulley in 1958. A cast-iron tub that weighed three hundred pounds on a rope that was supposed to hold five hundred. The math was right and the rope held and the tub came through the window and the bathroom got a bathtub. You could not carry a cast-iron tub up four flights of tenement stairs. The stairs were too narrow and the tub was too heavy and the rope pulley was the only way. The building solved the problem before the problem existed.

The rope pulley is gone. The hook is still there on some buildings. A rusted iron hook above a bricked-up window. Nobody remembers what it was for. The furniture goes up in the elevator now or it does not go up at all. The rope pulley understood that gravity was not a problem. Gravity was a partner. You just had to know the other direction.

See also: Clothesline, Dumbwaiter