"Hold back a bit on the water," I yelled down to him. "I can re-temper the mix as I need it."

Cy had an unusual way of bending, with his knees locked and torso straight so he avoided flexing his battered knee joints. An old football injury, and an earlier career as a cop chasing punks through the parks at night, put the final touches on his knee cartilage.The stretching ritual that he performed in the middle of the sidewalk each day consisted of a series of gyrations that were hard to ignore. Forever loyal to each other, we had worked together for many years, and although we had a contentious relationship, whatever disagreements occurred during the day were forgotten when we drove away from the job site.                 

The buildings in Boston's South End were erected in the mid-1800s.The stone that was used to face the wooden structures came from the quarries in eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut. Brownstone, named for its consistent color, is a soft sedimentary stone of the Triassic era that was plentiful and easily cut. Originally home to the wealthiest Bostonians, the "row house" of European design housed many of the early immigrants in tenement-like neighborhoods that joined buildings together in entire city blocks. The brownstone used in the district is a red-brown stone called "Portland," named after its source in Portland, Connecticut. Each brownstone-clad building had a defining motif revealed in the carvings on lintels, columns and roof brackets.Where a brick face was applied, the brownstone was limited to the lower section and lintels.

Today the larger concentration of brownstone neighborhoods in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Boston are designated "Historic Districts" and are controlled by city government commissions. The area  we worked in represented the outermost perimeter of the district and site of the most recent "boom to bust" cycle.The changing face of the neighborhood was caused by the surge in property values, which exerted pressure on aging, disconnected, and underfunded family groups. 

Two blocks up a major roadway served as the dividing line that the most respectable and law abiding civilians would not cross. What lay ahead was a neighborhood in transition awaiting a brave new investment strategy or creative urban plan to jump start the area. Gone are the colorful nightspots like the High Hat and Louis Lounge. There had been "Skippy White's" record store and "Baby Tiger's" boxing gym. Nearby was Clinton's Market where you could buy your traditional southern favorites of collard greens, chitlins and ham-hocks. The intersecting boulevard divided the so-called "hood", a name which came to define the old familiar neighborhood and the strain that development imposed on its people. The neighborhood, lacking commerce, with buildings in disrepair, became home to the city's poorest inhabitants,  statistically more affected by crime. As the availability of housing shrinks, and rents creep higher, the occupants  get squeezed out by developers renovating for a wealthier group of people. It was in this setting, rippling with the excesses of urban life, that we worked and came in contact with a daily barrage of characters that shaped our world.                       

Cy, my ground man, was keeping a lookout for the meter maids and police officers who roamed the street ticketing illegally parked cars, including cars without an approved resident decal, or contractors without company names printed on all sides of their vehicles.

I heard Cy calling out, "Hey Blatey!"- a name he had just invented for me as he often did and was explainable only through his personalized brand of logic.

As I looked down I saw one female officer or "meter maid" and one male parking officer. Noticing that the woman was scribbling numbers onto her parking violators' notepad,  I immediately withdrew the boom of the work basket and was back on the ground hovering over them. Since it was not his vehicle, Cy stayed away. The meter maid  continued to ignore me until I asked her what the problem was.

"I can't see your business sign on the rear of the truck," she blithely replied.

I was  astonished by her answer, considering  that the truck lettering was concealed as it usually was by the opened tailgate. The extended  flat surface served as our work station and gave us ready access to all the supplies that were stored in back.

I moved in front of both of them and lifted the back tailgate with my shoulder, sending buckets and tools flying in all directions.

"How's that?" I asked. "Can you see them now?"

 "You don't have to cop an attitude!" She replied in an unrefined, whining tone.

And with that she flipped over the cover to her violations book and continued down the road to catch up with her embarrassed associate  who was already half a block away.

Cy emerged from the sidelines. "Yeh Blatey," he sighed, summarizing the event, "It's the full weight of the government bearing down on the people.It just ain't right".

Being on the street came with its privileges; we became more demonstrative, indifferent to the proper laws of conduct, passing gas, singing aloud if we chose to or uncovering an absurd interpretation of the traffic laws by a clueless civil servant. It was a small example of what we were capable of. Any display of resistance that we could perform on the street was all that we needed  to retain some kind of hope that change was possible.

A large yellow truck equipped with two large circular brushes mounted near the rear wheels readied at the beginning of the road for the weekly designated odd numbered day of  street sweeping. Several parking officers exited a white van and descended on the few cars that ignored the signs indicating" street sweeping on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of every month, except holidays.

 The ticketing and towing process was performed with expert timing and precision. As soon as the police officer placed the bright red violation notice under the wiper blade of the targeted vehicle, a truck backed up to the rear bumper, retracted the towing rig and after a few quick connections towed the car away. After the block was cleared of the offending vehicles, the sweeper truck surged forward, glancing off the curb, snagging cups, cans, leaves and condoms before continuing on to the next towing expedition.

Not a minute had passed before a bewildered Pakistani girl appeared wandering around the area. Unusually composed for having been violated by the ruthless city tactics, she listened as Cy offered a few clues to her cars new location. After she got the information that would lead to her impounded vehicle, she pulled out her cell phone and paced back and forth while Cy made his way back to the job site. Depending upon the length of time it took her to find the car, it might cost hundreds of dollars and hours of wasted time and frustration .

I returned to  the work platform as Cy disappeared inside one of the vacant condo units  to relieve himself of the coffee he had drunk during breakfast. The last remaining unsold unit was a spacious ground floor apartment with a stairway leading down to a subterranean kitchen overlooking the parking lot in the back alley.

Returning to the street, Cy yelled to me, "Hey Blatey! Did you smell that in there? I think we have a problem!"

The unmistakable odor of a decaying rodent pervaded the apartment. Somehow a  rat found its way into a cavity and died after ingesting the poisons that were set out before the walls were closed up. The pungent mix of ammonia and animal feces was strong enough to sting your eyes. 

"I wonder if anyone is on top of this problem"? Cy continued.

"Go into the office and tell them to  call an exterminator," I shouted back.

Back at the work site I sized up the extent of the next repair. The brownstone lintel is a large structural stone that spans the top of the window frame. The original lintels were grand displays of artistic achievement-carved borders, suggesting a crown moulding detail and  coat of arms with centralized pendant and mirroring scrollwork cascading around a clump of grapes, each one a showpiece in its own right. You would now be hard pressed to find a fraction of the original detail still intact. Residents without the knowledge of proper restoration techniques and the historical significance of the architecture allowed the character of these buildings to fade. Sometime during a previous repair the owner instructed a repairman to chop off the detail then flatten out the surface with a coat of cement rather than replacing or re-carving iot. Several large masonry suppliers have come up with products that suit this purpose. Special mixes comprised of light pigmented sand with a secret binder that mimics almost perfectly the structure of the older stone. Now a skilled installer can rebuild details and return the beauty of the stone elements to the original form.

      Cy was making exaggerated coughing sounds on the ground signaling that something of interest was happening below. This time it was  a woman dressed in a low cut tee-shirt strutting toward our work area. From a distance she seemed unusually pretty for a street walker, but her slight limp and turned in toes added more clues to her vocation. As she came closer, we noticed that the dark lipstick and eye shadow she wore splayed well beyond its boundaries. The nearer she got, the more  exaggerated her movements  became, as she began honing in on Cy who continued to concentrate on his mixing duties without losing sight of her from the corner of his eye. After making a quick assessment of Cy's intentions she proudly cocked her head away then continued on with her neighborhood John patrol.

From my sky-top view I could see nearly an entire block in each direction. An airline attendant with a blue cap pushed open her front door, bounced her suitcase down the entire run of stair treads and loaded into a waiting taxi. A fast moving  throng of medical employees emerged  from around the corner, wearing the standard loose fitting hospital garb that offered no clue to rank or status. They chattered cheerily as they walked  along the brick sidewalk and roadway, some straddling the curb to avoid the light poles and fire hydrants they passed. They were on their way back to the city's busiest hospital and emergency room that catered to a horrific assortment of injuries, from drug overdoses to gunshot wounds. Across the park on the other side of the block a young woman wearing white sneakers and spandex guided a carriage with her newborn backwards down the stairs. Carefully pushing against the weight of the handle, she descended until she completed her morning introduction and giving a reassuring peek into the opening of the carriage, she was off, initiating her exercise routine, pushing the carriage with a short bouncing step.

I returned to the job of restoring the lintel detail while the circus atmosphere in the street continued. A truck pulled up in front of the work station where we had placed our brown and white buckets, small grinding machines, trowels, chisels, and a wide assortment of custom made knives that we use in shaping the different details in the stone. A tall guy around 40-years-old wearing a safari hat stepped out of the truck cab. 

"Hey! How's it going? I'm the Rat Man."

Cy turned to listen as the man took center stage.

"Yeh, you've  probably seen me on House Doctor. Well I'm hear to deal with Rattus Norwegicus."

 "Who?"  Cy chuckled, in a way that both engaged the newcomer and promoted our healthy skepticism.

"The Norwegian Rat!" the man replied, completing the punch line to his opening phrase."They have burrows and passages everywhere. We need to find the point of entry and close off the hole. Did you know that there is one rat for every human being in the world?" 

I heard his pronouncements from my perch as Cy followed him around the building, uncovering ground penetrations to a forgotten coal chute and an abandoned pipe chase.

"You know that two rats can produce 15,000 descendants in one year?" the Ratman continued.

"What? No way! Cy replied combatively, but he was eager for him to continue his rant. Cy listened as the Rat Man elaborated, Hmm, well, you see if two rats can have up to 12 offspring in 24 days and then if each has another litter … " and so on he continued until he proved the computations. After watching the scene for some time I attempted to extricate Cy from the Rat Man so they each could continue the job they had been paid to perform.

"Cy!, I need another mix!" I yelled down to him. "Come on; I need help here!"

Cy was loquacious and easily distracted, and I reflected on the nickname he had been given by his comrades while serving in the army. "Talky" they called him, and talk he did. Click to continue