Windows on Our World

In an age before Windows, there were windows—windows on the only world we knew. My father, for one, had a catbird seat—a front-window roost—looking out on his world for decades. He enjoyed sipping his morning coffee there and—during his leisure time—beer or wine. The man witnessed a lot of changes through the years from his unique perch, which had been outfitted by him with a one-of-a-kind elbow rest made of stuffed old socks.

For the entire decade of the 1960 into the early 1970s, a sprawling “victory garden” was seen—directly across the street—from that window. In the depths of winter, I remember gazing out of it and spying a glowing fire in the foreground. That meant only one thing in those days: the man my father called “the Greek” was in the stark nothingness of the winter garden. All alone—with a fire to keep him warm—we kids knew him as “Papa.” I don’t exactly know why. He was very old but he wasn’t a papa to any one of us. But then he wasn’t Greek, either, I learned many years later. The Greek was Albanian.

Such monikers, by the way, were commonplace in the 1960s and 1970s. Recently, an individual who ought to know better—who grew up in the same Bronx neighborhood—chastised me for identifying a neighbor by his ethnicity. He said, “That’s so ‘70s!” Since I didn’t know this neighbor’s name—he never personally told me and speaks broken English on top of that—that’s how I distinguished him in conversation. Another neighbor of mine—a “progressive” in good standing—complained to me about a mutual neighbor’s penchant for over-using his leaf blower. He said, “The Asian guy across the street from me was driving me crazy with that thing!” When you don’t know somebody’s name—and he’s not about to tell you—what else can you do?

After that little digression into the crazy contemporary times in which we live, it’s back to the windows of our world. Once upon a time my father dubbed a beer-bellied, sluggish super in the building across the street—on the grounds of the old garden—“Humphrey.” I can’t say how he arrived at the name, but it seemed a good fit. From his catbird’s seat, he watched Humphrey in action—or inaction in this instance—for years. My father would also note the comings and goings of a guy who parked his car in the building’s garage. “There goes ‘Big Ass’,” he would say. The man did have an inordinately large one—in proportion to the rest of his body—as I recall. And finally there was this strange fellow that my father dubbed “P.O. Pete,” who worked the same hours in the same post office—but in a different division—as him. They would often ride home together on the subway after their four-to-midnight shifts. My father, however, preferred not to be in the company of P.O. Pete—who lived in that very building as seen from his window—because he was a certifiable screwball. P.O. Pete looked for trouble, including antagonizing errant youths in the wee small hours of the morning, which is something my father could stand to do without on the mean streets of the Bronx in the middle of the night. He did enjoy catching glimpses of P.O. Pete, though, while safely ensconced in his front-row seat with the window on his world.

And now for something completely different: a back window view with a rather different perspective of our world. It’s where mothers hung out their wet wash in a time when most families didn’t own driers. Our back windows looked out at concrete backyards, which are now used—exclusively—as parking lots. But back then they were our playgrounds. The back windows are what my dog “Ginger” peered out of when she very much wanted to be in the Great Outdoors—and playing—with the rest of us.

These extraordinary windows—both front and back—were upgraded through the years. The newer models, though, didn’t appear to have the staying power of their predecessors. In short order the most frequently used windows could only remain open with a piece of wood or some improvisation holding them up. This fact of life proved worrisome. I didn’t want my mother, Ginger, or me to be decapitated. Fortunately, that never happened. But this reality reinforced a familiar theme of the older generations. You know: “They don’t make things like they used to!” True, because there was nothing quite like the windows that would frost up on the inside in wintertime. Of course, there was nothing like looking out all of them in all seasons—the windows on our world—when there was actually something to see.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)