A Beach in the Sky

A Beach in the Sky

Summer is usually hot. Living in the Bronx in the 1950s, we had no air conditioners during that time. Basically, our house had a lot of window fans to try and keep us cool. Needless to say, they didn’t work that well on hot days in the summer. 

Sometimes, we would go to tar beach to try and cool down a bit. For those of you that did not grow up in the city, tar beach was the flat roof of our apartment building. Our apartment was 11 stories high and overlooked parts of the Bronx and New York, where I grew up. You could see for miles. Though an 11-story apartment building doesn’t sound very high by New York City standards, it was higher than most things around us.

If sidewalks were hot when you walked on them in summer, tar beach was hotter. After all, the surface that we were walking on was black tar.

Needless to say, we went up there to cool down due to the fact that the air was somewhat cooler up there.

We would bring our lounge chairs up and place them in an open space where we could sit down or lie down, let whatever cool breeze might waft over us, and try to whisk away some of the heat. Besides, the view was great.  It was even better when there was a concert across the street at Gaelic Park. 

Sometimes, however, luck was not with us. You see, to get onto tar beach, you had to climb a set of stairs from the 11th floor and open a heavy door. Once on the roof, you had to make sure that you put something down to block the door from closing completely. If it closed completely, which it did automatically, the door locked itself from the inside, meaning you were stuck on the roof. 

Should that happen, which it occasionally did, you had to scream for help, wait for someone else to come onto the roof, or you could attempt to climb down the fire escapes that connected the roof to a floor where someone might let you in. Remember, there were no cell phones in those days. 

We never had to climb down the fire escapes, even though it was an option. Usually, someone else came, either to use the roof themselves or someone realized we were not back and came up looking for us. 

Tar beach became a place for family and friends to enjoy the heat of summer, bringing things to drink and share while we tried to enjoy the life of growing up in the city. 

Summer wasn’t the only time we went there, but summer seemed to be the best time of the year to go since we didn’t have a car and had no close beaches to go to, it was the best view of where we lived in the neighborhood, and the outdoor stadium concerts at Gaelic Park were free.