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Tower of 19 Schuyler Place
By: Josie D.

"There were three of them…. My uncles had been building them for the past forty-five years…. all of the towers were taller than any of the two-story houses…. they were made of steel…. They were built of a network of ribs and struts….

From each of the rungs…. dangled thousands of chips of glass and shards of porcelain and the inner working of old clocks. Some of the pendants were short and hugged the horizontal ribs, while others dangled on long threads of copper. In some places, a single wire held two drops of glass, one under the other; in other places, there were three--dangling consecutively, one beneath the other. Some of the pendants were evenly spaced in groups of three or four. Some were bunched together like the sixteenth notes on a musical staff followed by a single large porcelain bob--a whole note rest….

The towers were painted. Not solemnly but astonishingly. Astoundingly. There were carnival shades of mauve and violet, ochre and rose, bright pink and orange sherbet, and all the colors were stop-and-go, mottled in to a camouflage pattern. Lavender pink met lime green in the middle of a rung, or cerulean blue climbed only halfway up a vertical axis until it met aquamarine.

On top of the tallest tower, fixed in place, were four clock faces, none of which were alike. Atop the other two towers was a single clock face on a swivel that rotated in the wind. The clock faces had no hands."

~From The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place

By E.L Kongisburg