Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.
Tags:
The other night I came home from work and looked out my kitchen windows at a new kind of darkness that was far darker than the night sky. Up to that moment, I could see from my fourth floor window all of central Park Slope, the apex of which was the steeple of the Old First Reformed Church on Carroll Street, where I went to nursery school. For the six years I’d lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Gowanus, I had done the dishes, chopped vegetables and served guests wine across my kitchen island while looking up through that window at the church’s steeple, visible between the new high-rises on Fourth Avenue.
When I encountered that horribly flat dark, I ran to my roof to investigate. I was sickened by what I saw. But I was not shocked. I had known that sooner or later, this night would come. Some developers had bought the parking lot two buildings east of mine. I had shaken hands with them at a community board meeting, where they had promised to build only two stories and a mezzanine — about 35 feet high.
But then they added a floor. My sweet view of the neighborhood where I grew up, a view that I always knew was only borrowed, that I had no legal right to keep, was gone forever. The view from our kitchen window is now hostile and anonymous. We look at a cinder-block wall with a strip of sky above it just big enough to remind us of what we lost.
Chi Birmingham My wife and son and I live on the third and fourth floors of a building that I bought with partners a decade ago from a man who used it as a factory, making machine airplane parts. When I bought it, the building was dark, semi-industrial and wonderfully quiet. There were cinder blocks in all the windows. I imagined what might be seen when they were broken up, and I yelled out in victory after my contractor gave me a crowbar and I pulled some of those cinder blocks out of the window frames and poked my head through where my new windows would go. Light and views and air rushed in from every direction.
I remember feeling so good after moving in, as if I had a secret. The secret was not that I had worked hard for what I had, but that I had been rewarded far in excess of my careful planning. Mine was the tallest building on the street, which afforded me views from every room. Though it was a hundred years old and made of bricks and four-inch-thick beams, it felt fragile to me, surrounded by nothing on all four sides. Even my building’s lot line windows — those windows that open onto airshafts in more developed neighborhoods — looked out onto backyards, most with gardens and barbecues, a few others littered with decaying cars.
Mine are urban views — some might call them ugly. They’re really just vestiges of an earlier time when we didn’t all build as densely as we possibly could. But they were part of what made me fall deeply in love with my building. When construction was finished and I moved in, I didn’t know that when the roof leaked I would feel the kind of crippling sadness I had, until then, imagined would overwhelm me only when someone I loved was ill. Now, after living for some years in a place that I love and understand, I can conceive of what people who live in the country mean when they talk about their land being a part of them. My building has become a part of me.
Until recently I didn’t stop to ask, what happens when you stop moving? Now I know. Everything moves around you.
A wonderful family bought a cabinetmaker’s 10,000-square-foot shop to the east of me, in what might have been an even greater deal than mine. On their roof, which had been rotting for years, railings and picnic tables and plants went up, and a sauna. But when they were done, I could still see over the sauna to Manhattan. And I felt lucky again.
A year later, next door to the west, a new two-family house stole a view from one of my bathrooms, and the dull gray cinder blocks went up inches away from lot-line windows that had previously let light stream into a closet and a hallway. Those little room views of mine were so sweet and weird they were almost obnoxious, in that I never felt I deserved them, and so I accepted their loss without tears, and smiled at my new neighbors.
A year after that I remained stoic about the new glow from the north of another cinder-block box — a Super 8 motel. Then, last winter, the Jewish Press building two blocks to the south, a rumpled beige giant on Third Avenue, was purchased. Within weeks it was clad on all sides in bright blue metal. Now, from my living room, I look at a huge Storage Deluxe sign that is lit up like a highway billboard all through the night. A visitor said it looked a bit like an Ed Ruscha picture, framed nearly perfectly by all of one window. But I’ve never loved Ed Ruscha.
A reprieve came with the economic downturn. It felt as if the money coursing through the city had bled straight back down into the ground, and new construction ceased. I watched workers climb down from half finished projects, lock them up, and drive away. The Toll Brothers pulled out of a foolish deal for a parcel of land on the Gowanus Canal because of its Superfund status, which saved those of us who live here (not forever — never forever) from more awful 12-story buildings that seemed determined to erase the low buildings that define our neighborhood.
So, miraculously, the views along the Gowanus remain intact, for now. I can still see the F train as it rumbles in and out of the Carroll Street stop, a mile away. I can see church steeples in Carroll Gardens and shipping cranes in the Red Hook piers.
But I know all that will go. On the Internet, on community watchdog sites, I watch the plans go up for all kinds of awful buildings. I go to community board meetings in local schools and catch myself wringing my hands. Cinder blocks are being unloaded again. Every bit of land has been discovered. The parking lots and the few remaining low-slung factory buildings where candles are made and iron is bent for railings all have price tags attached. The Lightstone Group is trying to do just what the Toll Brothers realized was too foolish to try — put up a huge apartment building in a flood zone that is also a Superfund zone. Do they know that the Gowanus sends sewage into the basements of the residents already living here whenever there’s even an inch of rain? They know. They don’t care.
My sadness is not really about views. It comes from my choice to live in one place long enough to plant roots, to grow, and to care. Now I understand what I did not realize when I got lucky and was able to move here. The fact that I have stayed does not mean that I have struck some bargain with the city. Instead, the city grows around me.
I don’t deserve sympathy. When I moved in, I wanted to build an enormous bulkhead on my roof, with many windows. People just like me came to my community board hearing, and they voted against my desire. My request was later denied by the Board of Standards and Appeals. I wasn’t angry at my neighbors; I was glad they got their say. Besides, many of them had been here far longer than I had — and I respected that.
In my more optimistic moments, I wonder if my newest neighbors will do the same, and let me paint their dull gray lot line wall a bright yellow.
Townies welcomes submissions at townies@nytimes.com.
Ben Schrank is the author of the forthcoming novel “Love Is a Canoe.”
