The tenement roof was the only place you could see the sky. Five floors of hallway and stairs and apartments and cooking smells and arguments and then the roof and the sky opened up like somebody took the lid off the building. The roof was the escape hatch. When the apartment got too small you went up. When the argument got too loud you went up. When the summer heat turned your bedroom into a furnace you went up and you slept on the tar and you looked at the stars. The tenement roof was the cheapest vacation in New York.

Every roof had a water tower and a chimney and a clothesline and somebody's lawn chair. The lawn chair was the claim. If a lawn chair was on the roof the roof belonged to that chair and the chair belonged to the person who carried it up five flights of stairs. Nobody touched the chair. Nobody moved it. The chair was the flag. You sat in your chair on the roof and you looked at the other roofs and on every other roof was another chair and another person and nobody waved and nobody talked and everybody was alone together under the same sky. That was the city.

I played guitar on a roof on East Seventh Street in 1969. The tar was soft in July and my shoes stuck to it. The sound carried across the rooftops and I could hear it bounce off the building on Eighth Street and come back a half second later. The roof was the best echo in the city. Better than the subway. Better than the tunnel. The roof gave you your own music back with a little delay and a little distance and it sounded like somebody across the street was playing the same song. The first duet I ever had was with a building.

The pigeons owned the roof. The coops were in the corners and the birds circled overhead and came back to the coop and the man who kept them stood there with his flag and guided them home. The pigeon keeper was the king of the roof. His country was sixty feet by twenty feet and his subjects could fly. The pigeon keepers knew each other by their birds. You could steal pigeons by sending your birds to fly with their birds and lead them back to your coop. The rooftops of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side were a pigeon war zone and the battles were fought entirely in the air.

The roofs have fences now. Locked doors. No access signs. The insurance company said the roof is a liability. The landlord said nobody goes up there. The tenant said but where do I go when the apartment is too small and the summer is too hot and I need to see the sky. The landlord said buy an air conditioner. The sky is not the landlord's problem. The sky is nobody's business. The tenement roof was the last free room in the building. They locked it. They locked the sky.

See also: Tar Beach, Pigeon Coop