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by Val L. Ellicott
My Manhattan apartment used to offer something resembling a view.
It wasn't anything that could be described as panoramic, certainly,
but it did include a piece of sky a few blocks to the east that until
recently was unobstructed.
People like me who have to eat, sleep and work in the same room
place tremendous importance on what they can see from their apartment
windows. The world outside becomes an extension of living space, a
protection against claustrophobia.
That piece of sky was one of the first things I noticed when I
moved into the apartment at 88th Street and Broadway. it hung, blue
and inviting, between two buildings located somewhere near 91st
Street and Central Park West, a narrow, distant gap in the brick and
concrete thicket outside my window.
The only activity I ever saw through that gap was an occasional
plane nosing its way up from La Guardia Airport. But that didn't matter.
Like any piece of uncluttered air in this much-too-cluttered city,
this one was significant not because of what it made visible but
because of the possibilities it suggested. It gave me the sensation
of being connected to the world beyond the depressing collage of
soot-stained apartment buildings crowded around me.
That small opening hypnotized me with the notion that a precisely
aimed cannon could launch me straight through it, shooting me over to
the East Side, high above the East River and on toward infinity.
Somewhere out there, I used to think, are all the people who will
never know that I strain spaghetti through paper towels out my
window, something the people living in the buildings across from mine
have seen me do at least a hundred times.
I have a view of their lives, too. I see them playing with their
kids, watering their plants, eating dinner. We've become so familiar
with each other's daily rituals that I've begun to think of them as
roommates one building removed.
This wasn't my idea of paradise -- I'm used to a lot of open space
-- but it seemed tolerable enough until one morning a few months ago
when a man I had never met or seen before approached me on Broadway,
explained that he was "a neighbor" with a view of my
apartment and asked me to have a drink with him that night.
Suddenly I realized how little privacy I had and how much more I
wanted. I started thinking of that bit of sky not as a gap in the
crowd of buildings around me but as a gap in the crowd of people
around me. I tried keeping my blinds closed as a response
to my sudden bout of ochlophobia but after a few weeks I started
missing my semblance of a view, and raised the blinds.
That's when I realized a building was going up at the corner. Each
week the concrete framework grew a few floors taller until eventually
it completely covered the solitary crack in the Columbus Avenue
skyline that admitted blue and a hint of the unknown into the all-too-familiar
cityscape visible from my window.
I felt like Fortunato in Edgar Allen Poe's story, "The Cask
of Amontillado," watching the final brick in his tomb being
shoved into place. I wanted to throw my head back and scream as I
imagine Fortunato must have screamed, mixing despair and outrage into
a howl that would echo forever off the building that had ruined my
view. I would have, too, excepted that I was worried someone in the
building across from mine might call the police.
The view I have now is of a gray wall of towering buildings. I
feel caged, and I'm more aware than ever of the drabness of my
surroundings. It occurs to me that the roof of the Claremont Riding
Academy would look much better with some carpeting, and the frieze on
the laundromat on 88th Street could use a fresh coat of paint. But I
doubt that these changes would make much difference. It take a piece
of sky to really make a view.
*top
Val Ellicott is a Pulitzer Fellow
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