What I see when I look out the window

This is what I see when I look out of the windows of our apartment.

One of my friends from the Creative Machine list wrote to me about how she likes to hear about my life here in New York.

Part of our apartment faces Broadway. This is what you see when you look out of those windows.

Most of our apartment though, faces the back wall of the building next door. The building next door was built several years before ours, and used to be a classy place. For the past at least 30 years it has been an SRO, a single room occupancy hotel. Most of the residents were recently released from mental hospitals or jails. Needless to say, our windows that face out neighbors are all curtained--all of the time. I never wash those windows.

Recently, though, the SRO has been renovated for formerly homeless families. I hope that our new neighbors are quieter than the former tenants of the SRO. Our former neighbors were very much a part of our lives. We heard their music, their fights and what they watched on TV. One of our neighbors once threw a ketchup bottle out of his window. It broke our dining room window and splashed ketchup into our children's bedroom.