Before air conditioning, I spent entire Yorkville summers with the lights out in our 517 East 83rd Street apartment.
Mom could page through a calendar in the winter and start sweating when June, July, August flipped by, but Dad loved the heat. He slept under a pipe in the Navy. Made for nice conversation.
One afternoon I said, “I’m going blind here!” I couldn’t read my comic book. Mom told me to go to the back window and use the sunlight. This was one of my first opportunities to get her to let me sit out on our fourth floor fire escape facing the backyard and 84th Street, and I brought most of my stuff out there to play with. Eventually, Rory came out to. I was afraid of heights and kept my butt glued to the stairs. Rory was not afraid—he’d torture me by climbing over the fire escape and hang with his body in mid-air 40 feet over the concrete. Then he’d twist the knife and say, ” Hey Tommy! Look, I’m gonna fall and Mom is gonna kill you.” I would freeze—he was right.
The roof was our real oasis from the heat. We had extension cords for the radio and black & white TV and hose extensions for water to fill a baby pool. Dad brought up a standing lamp once so he could see while he sketched at twilight. Mom wanted to kill him. She loved her lamps.
Here are summer photos of Yorkville roofs and skies now and then:
Me reading on the roof, 1961
Rory reading that same summer
Rory on the rooftop swing
The view from our Yorkville fire escape
Thomas Pryor has been featured on A Prairie Home Companion and This American Life, and his work has appeared in the New York Times. He curates City Stories: Stoops to Nuts, a storytelling show at the Cornelia Street Café on the second Tuesday of the month (next one July 10th). Check out his blog Yorkville: Stoops to Nuts.
