Tar Beach was the rooftop in summer. You brought a towel and a radio and you lay on the black tar in July and the tar was so hot it burned through the towel and you did not care because the alternative was the apartment and the apartment was worse. The rooftop had a breeze. The apartment had a fan that moved hot air from one side of the room to the other. Tar Beach was free. The ocean cost a subway token.

Everybody was on Tar Beach. The old women from the third floor with their folding chairs and their magazines. The teenagers with their transistor radios playing different stations at different volumes until the whole rooftop was a symphony of competing frequencies. The fathers who came up after work with a beer and sat on the ledge and looked out at the skyline and did not talk. Tar Beach was the living room of the building. The only living room with no ceiling.

The rules of Tar Beach were simple. Do not play your radio louder than the woman with the folding chair. Do not throw anything off the roof. Do not go near the edge if you have been drinking. Do not steal anybody's spot. Your spot was your spot all summer and everybody knew it and if a stranger took your spot the whole roof told the stranger to move. Territory on Tar Beach was earned by seniority. The woman with the folding chair had been there since 1954 and her spot was her spot until she died.

I wrote songs on Tar Beach. I sat on the roof of my building on East Seventh Street with my guitar and I played for the pigeons and the water towers and the sky and the sound went out over the rooftops and sometimes somebody on the next building would yell play something else and sometimes somebody would yell play it again and that was my first audience. A man on the next roof who could hear my guitar through the heat and the traffic and the distance. Tar Beach was my first stage.

Air conditioning killed Tar Beach. The window units went in and the people went inside and the rooftops emptied. The tar is still there. The water towers are still there. The view is still there. But the towels are gone and the radios are gone and the old women with the folding chairs are gone. Tar Beach is a real estate feature now. Rooftop access. They charge extra for it. The view that used to be free now costs two hundred dollars a month added to the rent. The sun has not changed. The tar has not changed. The price of looking at the sky is the only thing that changed.