Water Towers
On the way to elementary school, I look up. I ask my mother why there are castles on the top of the apartment buildings across Sixth Avenue. She tells me, they aren’t castles, but water towers. I acknowledge this but refuse to dismiss the possibility of dragons and princesses until elementary school is well behind me.
If you could see them this would make more sense. All you have to do is go to New York, plane is preferable as you can land in the city without the hassle of parking, but car is acceptable if you’re in a bind. Once you’re there, stand on the corner of Ninth Street and Sixth Avenue, on the northeast corner of the street. You should be right outside the Citerella’s, but if that’s gone by the time you get there, just look for the library across the street. A great, humble red-brick building with a clocktower and a garden. My mother tells me it used to be a women’s prison and I believe her. If you’re in the right spot, you should be right across from it, and if that’s not there— well, then the towers will probably be gone too, and I’m afraid you might’ve wasted the trip. But if it is there, the library or the Citerella’s, or both, all you have to do is follow the sky as far down as it reaches and find the towers on towers. There should be three, but there may be more, I don’t know what they’ve been building. But you look at them, one, two, three, you look at them, and tell me you’re certain there are no dragons in New York.
My father designed buildings like the ones under those towers. He said that his family came over on what must’ve been the last boat of immigrants from Athens to New York. He says his father woke him up just in time to watch the boat pass the Statue of Liberty. He says it was dawn. He says the mist was so thick you couldn’t just smell it, you could taste it. So thick that even when they left the deck, he could lick it off the collar of his coat. He says that was the day he learned about skyscrapers. He says he watched New York scratch up the sky with all the regard of a kitten on a record. He says way down at sea level, he looked up at the New York sky and he knew he had to tear it to pieces too, he says, he says.
So he started in a basement and worked his way up. First floor, second floor. But the thing about New York is that up isn’t always up and down isn’t always down because up is more expensive and thus comes with a downgrade. Feet double in price when you go from down to up and the feet that walk the space find themselves nestled closer together the closer they get to the sky. When I was born, we were on the ninth floor in a studio, but when my younger brother came along, we were suddenly on the seventh floor, with two bedrooms and enough space for toddlers to forget they’re living above the world. It took us fifteen years to go from seventh to fourth (an upgrade) and then another two years to go from fourth to tenth (a downgrade). I’ve fit myself into suitcases and fit suitcases into elevators and fit brothers into bedrooms and fit fits into bathrooms because it was the only place to cry in private and all the while I was fitting into New York like all the hundreds of other people happy to be cramped for clout.
So the uptown and downtown downtrodden do the up-down dance, climbing the market with ladders and ropes, and dreading the up-and-comers who come with daddy’s money to move the down apartments up in price. And the New Yorkers are left always looking for the next place, the next room, in a rat race even the rats do not indulge. Like puppies or foster kids, always looking for their forever home. Somewhere with windows that see blue sky instead of brick walls. Somewhere where you can get up without the downgrade.
And the water towers, don’t forget the water towers. They are unimportant, yes— a symptom of a child’s imagination run wild. They are not castles. They do not house princesses or wizards or dragons. But they are such a beautiful fantasy for a child. Because they sit even higher than the penthouses my parents dream of. They are a fantasy atop a fantasy, reached for before one even knows why.
