The apartment block opposite mine in New York is having its balconies refurbished, and every day men in a three-sided window-washing cart are hoisted up the side of the building to work on it. I see them now outside the 18th floor, struggling to anchor the rig to the wall with only a thin plastic mesh between them and oblivion.
Yesterday’s footage of two men dangling in a broken cart outside the 68th floor of the new World Trade Center was a reminder of how dangerous a job this still is. According to Adam Higginbotham in the New Yorker last year, most of the window washers are South American. It’s a close-knit community, passing down family lines, like fire-fighting. The first window-washing scaffold was introduced only in 1952. Before that, men would simply stand on a ledge and hang on by their finger tips.
In the early 1930s, when the Empire State Building went up, it was considered the most dangerous job in the city. Every year an average of one in two hundred window cleaners in New York was killed. It is safer now, of course, but few of us can look at those guys on the outside of buildings without our stomachs curling over. Friends who work in skyscrapers talk of jumping out of their skins when faces appear at the window.
Last Friday Joel, one of the maintenance men in my building, came up to check the smoke alarms. We stood by the window and looked across at the cart; instead of being raised and lowered with mechanical smoothness, it moved in shuddering increments, first one side, then the other. Joel told me his brother-in-law had been a window washer, killed when he fell from the fourth floor. “Landed on his head. Had to have a closed coffin.”
At 4.30pm the cart haltingly descends and the men inside bow their heads, thankful for another safe landing perhaps, and unaware of the spectators who anxiously watch them down every day.
Mommy madness
Every Wednesday night I go to an “expectant mommy” group on the Upper East Side, which is not as bad as it sounds. It’s fairly bad. You still have to endure other women’s questions about whether they should have an episiotomy or lobby their doctors for “natural tearing”. But the woman who runs the group tries to counter some of what, in Manhattan, is a baby and parenting industry gone mad. Last week she told us to de-subscribe from all the email lists one gets signed up for at the start of a pregnancy, since being over-informed had contributed to unhelpful states of hysteria – “You people are psychos”. I missed half the class this week to go to The Biggest Baby Shower Ever, a trade show in which 1,500 pregnant women steered around each other like bumper cars. Every stand was decorated with free cupcakes, which is either charming and whimsical or irritating and infantilising. Either way it was overwhelming. There were cord-blood banking services and photographers offering naked, Demi Moore-style photo shoots and nothing that came without 300 choices. I stuffed a cake in my mouth and ran.
Home delivery extremes
Two days earlier, cupcakes arrived at my door. I remember first coming to New York and being shocked that you could ring the shop on the corner and for no extra charge, have them send you a single can of Coke, at 3am if need be. “This is America,” a friend said when I made a face. I’m not so smug now. The man handed over my 50 tiny cakes (they weren’t all for me; it was a birthday), and I relinquished my resolve never to have delivered what I could get off my arse to pick up myself. Getting off my arse is harder than it was, but still: to be brought so low, and by cupcakes. The same Americanfriend claimed it as a victory. “I’m proud of you,” she said.
@emmabrockes
