EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT
(UP ON THE ROOF)

A tenant peed in the heating ducts and poured aquarium gravel into the toilet.  Several other residents used the cheap hollow-core doors for karate practice.  The apartment building looked genteel, but it wasn’t.   Jamestown Village, on the West Side, was a post-war, modern apartment complex.

Many tenants lived beyond their means; they liked the swimming pool, the playground and A/C, but couldn’t really afford these amenities. There were a lot of evictions.

The complex was garden-style, low-rise buildings set around a pool.  All the buildings had mansard roofs like McDonald’s.  My father kept a sketch of Jamestown Village in our family room.

A high school wrestling coach, who was also a big-time real estate investor, bought the complex and converted it to condos in 1976.  That worked out well for the coach and my dad.  As my dad’s banker said, “You made your money, and  he made his.”

I worked on the Jamestown Village roof, replacing lids to vents.  The lids were called jap caps because they looked like coolie hats.

There was no better place than a roof top — at least a flat roof. You could see everybody, and nobody could see you.  That’s why cops in The Wire go on roofs so often.

But it wasn’t all fun and games on the roof.  There was some work too:

Lesson 1:  Modified bitumen membrane is the basic black roof, usually applied with a blow torch.

Lesson 2:  Thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) roofs look like white pool liner.  Your roof  is reflective.  Cleveland has more “heat” days than “cool” days, which means white roofs (TPOs) are great in Dallas, but not so great in Cleveland.

Lesson 3: Summer is the best time to put on a roof.  I had a roof installed in April and it rained constantly, and the job was a mess; we had leaks into the apartments below.

Lesson 4:  Consider vacationing on a roof.  There might be an old longue chair up there, left by a rebellious tenant who sneaked up for sunbathing and serious drinking.  People want to be on roofs badly.

There is usually an empty tar bucket for your guest to sit on.

Roof & Relaxation

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The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran an op-ed of mine yesterday.  Something about baseball cards.  Gotta write about baseball if you want to be in the big leagues: “Investment Home Run.”

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