Even when the city is impoverished, real estate in New York is at a premium simply because living stacked one on top of the other in apartments with the feel of a cozy shoebox lends itself visionary appropriation of one’s greater environment. The lack of public spaces, courtyards, and plazas have driven New Yorkers to new heights of creativity, perhaps none quite as ingenious as “tar beach,” building rooftops reimagined as semi-private playgrounds.
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The ultimate escape — without leaving home — tar beach offers city dwellers the space to feel like they are king of the world as they survey the jagged landscape from new heights, their views unimpeded by buildings blotting out the sun. The indelible sensation of being transported to a veritable mountaintop does marvelous things to one’s mind, opening a magical portal into a world where anything is possible. For over a century, it has been common practice for residents to don their finest threads, ascend to the top of a six-floor walk up, and make vernacular portraits.
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“Do people still go up to the roof? And if they do, what do they see? Because we saw heaven,” Martin Scorsese writes in the introduction to Tar Beach: Life on Rooftops of Little Italy 1920-1975 (Damiani). Magnum Photos member Susan Meiselas collaborated with Virginia Bynum and Angel Marinaccio, natives of Manhattan’s famed Little Italy to create a family photo album-style volume filled with photographs taken on neighborhood rooftops between the 1920s and early 1970s.
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