Why Do You Cut Off Your Sleeves?

No sense in wasting a good detail:

All across the city, the watchers take up their posts, pillow or towel spread across windowsill, Bible or remote close at hand. The white-haired woman leaning on a golden cushion above Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The retired pizza maker on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in his undershirt and khakis. The tragic-looking woman with pulled-back hair over the Drama Cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and the long-sideburned deaf man two windows down.

And they sit there. And they look out at nothing; and at everything.

From the city sidewalk, there are few summer sights more archetypically urban than the face glimpsed in an open window, gazing silently out at the street. In a world where entertainment is delivered via modem and iPod, the very idea of someone drinking deep from the well of unmediated, nonvirtual reality exerts a strange pull. It also taps into our own voyeurism: to see someone inside a home, after all, is to witness a private moment.

The view from the other side of the window frame turns out to be no less engrossing. For the committed window gazer, there is no better place than the exact juncture of the public and private realms.

“Instead of going outside,” said Willie Taylor, 69, who holds court over his block in Harlem, “you sit at the window and you are outside. It’s better than being outside.”

The sociologist and window-gazer extraordinaire Jane Jacobs, in her 1961 polemical valentine “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” championed “the ballet of the good city sidewalk,” an intricate dance which, she wrote, “never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

. . .

On East 107th Street in East Harlem, a square-jawed woman in a sleeveless T-shirt answered a request for an interview with a cigarette butt flicked from the third floor.