Rooftop Antennas & Clotheslines

Years ago, two things were ubiquitous on New York City rooftops…clothes lines and TV antennas.

Most people in Manhattan tried to get away with “rabbit ears” inside their apartments. But once you went Uptown or the boroughs, rooftops were loaded with antennas. You would see the flat brown antenna wires snaking down the outside of the building to the desired TV sets.

In those days, there was one set per household and sometimes not even that. Neighbors and relatives would be invited over to watch a program or two if they didn’t have a set. As a kid, I remember the “Lone Ranger” and “Gun Smoke” would be broadcast on the radio first and then a few weeks later it would air on TV. I believe William Conrad was Marshall Matt Dillon on the radio. He would later go on in the 1970s to have his own show, “Cannon.”

Cable came late to New York. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that it finally came to the Chelsea building that my wife and I were living in. My rabbit ears became a thing of the past. HBO was in its infancy then and it was great to have uncut movies without interruptions.

When we moved to Queens to buy our home, we were back to the antenna on the roof. Somehow after a couple of years, we were able to have HBO once more because of some device we had installed on the antenna. Finally, after a decade of living there, cable came to our Flushing neighborhood.

Clotheslines were always around. Some people were able to have a line strung from their apartment window to a neighboring building. In my youngest days, I remember my mother and grandmother with scrub boards using bars of brown Octagon soap in the bathtub or big kitchen sink scrubbing away. Then once thoroughly rinsed, they would hang the clothes out on the line from our apartment or climb up to the building roof to do the same.

Even in later years when laundromats (and in some apartment buildings a washing machine in the basement) were available, people would still hang clothes out on a line to dry. Whether it was because they preferred the “sweet smell of fresh air” in the middle of a sooty environment or a lack of the dimes needed to use the dryer, I don’t know. I always suspected the latter.

Even after I owned that first house, I did have a washer but not a dryer. Since the washer was in the furnace room that was good enough. In the summer, there was always a line in the backyard. It wasn’t until we moved to our second home that we had a dryer.

Rooftop antennas and clothes lines persisted even as I started managing property. By the 1970s, the NYFD took a dim view of clothes lines on roofs. They were afraid that if a fire occurred, the fire fighters would get caught up in the lines. It became a constant battle between tenants and the superintendent to remove rooftop clothes lines.

The same for antennas. They were usually anchored to parapet walls. The Building Department would issue violations to remove them since they considered them dangerous. Once you saw one of those metal monsters flying to the ground, you would understand the reason.

Cable and clothes dryers were slow to make their appearance in the Big Apple. A modern city of the rich and famous that had a blue-collar ethos at its core. That is pretty much gone now. Only a small few remember when most of Manhattan was a place that working people called home.