Allen asked: "Remember back in the 50's & 60's where people in apartment houses used to have those 3rd and 4th story clothes lines where they had to pull on the line to crank the clothes out of the building as they hung the clothes on them?
Has anyone ever used one of those? Methinks that you may have had a few adventurous moments with those!"
Hi Allen,
Are you talking about a clothesline that's attached to two pulleys so that you stand in one place and wheel your wet laundry away from the house and wheel it back again when it's dry? I not only remember those. I've used them and that's still the way that my 83 year old mother (who doesn't own a dryer) dries her laundry. My parents currently live in a two family house that they own. Their apartment is on the second floor. They have a back door and a long flight of stairs that takes them to the back yard. Their clothesline runs between their back door (second floor as I mentioned) to a pole at the end of their yard. I live in an apartment that forbids clotheslines. My parents live five blocks from me. I sometimes walk my wet laundry over to their house and hang it on their line. It's actually very convenient to stand on their back steps and hang the wash without having to walk along the line.
Until I was in high school, we lived in a 44 unit apartment building, five story apartment building, about 8 blocks from where my parents currently live. Everyone had a washer next to their kitchen sink. My family was one of the few families that had a portable dishwasher. Four families had dryers. (Two of them were gas dryers, that were next to the stove; two of them had electric dryers. Those familes paid to run a 220 line from the basement to their apartments. The 220 line ran in metal tubes along the side of the building. That was and still is up to code. You still see those metal tubes running to air conditioners in older buidings.) The familes that didn't have dryers (everyone else) had clotheslines that ran between their kitchen (or back bedroom in the case of the five apartments that had their kitchen in the front of the buidling) and a five story clothes line pole. There was one pole for every eight apartments. The pole that our line ran to was was shared by the two smaller apartment buildings that were behind us and the 10 family apartment buidling that was next to us, which meant that lines for 25 apartments were attached to that pole. Some families had more then one line, so it was a real challenge to climb the pole if your line broke. That only happened to my mother once. (We lived on the second floor.) My dad was at work so she paid the super to climb the pole and replace her line. (She went to the hardware store that was three blocks from our apartment to buy a new line.) After that she replaced the line periodically by sewing and taping a new rope to the old line and SLOWLY pulling in through the pulley on the pole.) My mother had a second line that ran between our kitchen window and our next door neighber's back bedroom window. I used both of them - including on the day that we moved. (Both lines came with us; the pulleys that were on the pole and our neighbors window were left behind.)
My grandmother's building had an interesting contraption. She lived in a ten family, five story building. The fire escape was accessed via her kitchen window and was shared by her next door neighbor. All ten apartments had a rotating umbrella style dryer that was attached to the wall next to the fire escape. My grandmother (and every single one of her neighbors) had to climb out on their fire escape to hang their wash on the line. My grandmother died when I was 7. The aunt and uncle who lived with her moved out of her apartment so I never got to use her line. I sometimes walk past that buidling. The lines are no longer in use. Most of them are long gone, but you can still see the poles that held them are still attached to the wall on either side of the fire escape. I sometimes wonder if the people who live in that buidling wonder what those pipes are for.
Mike
