Breeding Pigeons on Rooftops, and Crossing Racial Lines
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Delroy Sampson breeds his own
birds and spends hours each day scraping away droppings, stocking
feeders, hosing down coops, filling water canisters and hauling bags of
feed to the roof.
By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: April 3, 2013
When New Yorkers consider the subculture of people who raise pigeons on
rooftops, many are likely to think of Terry Malloy, the longshoreman in
the 1954 film “On the Waterfront” played by Marlon Brando. He was a
classic rooftop breeder, rough-hewed, working-class and white ethnic to
his toes.
But that image has long needed some alteration because in the dwindling
world of rooftop fliers, as they are known, the men are as likely to be
working-class blacks or Hispanics. Many were introduced to the hobby by
Irish, Italian and other fliers of European descent, an unlikely
camaraderie that evolved in neighborhoods like Bushwick, Canarsie and
Ozone Park that were undergoing gradual racial shifts.
Ike Jones, an African-American who manages one of the last pigeon supply
stores for its Italian-Jewish owner, Joey Scott, said he learned much
of the craft when he was about 12. He then became a helper to George
Coppola, an Italian rooftop breeder in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
“I was amazed at his coop,” said Mr. Jones, now 65. “He had electricity
and running water, and I only had a box made of scrap wood. On Sunday
his wife would cook spaghetti and meatballs and I would eat with them
because I was always there.”
A new book, “The Global Pigeon,” by Colin Jerolmack, an assistant
professor of sociology at New York University who spent three years
hanging out with pigeon fliers, makes the point that pigeon breeding
brought Italian-Americans and other ethnic whites “into contact with
people of a different ethnic and age cohort with whom they were not
voluntarily associating before.”
“African-Americans in Bed-Stuy who mostly hang out with other
African-Americans, because they keep pigeons wind up being friends with
these 85-year-old white guys they would not usually associate with,” Dr.
Jerolmack said in an interview.
Take Delroy Sampson, a brawny 60-year-old electrician who calls himself
Panama after his country of birth. After 50 years of flying pigeons he
still quickens with excitement watching a flock wheel across a blue sky,
then spiral up like a whirlwind, split apart into two and merge once
again, as if they were a corps of ballerinas choreographed by George
Balanchine.
He does much of the choreographing, using a long stick with a Puerto
Rican flag — the Panamanian flag he had used fell apart — to scare them
into the sky, and sounding chirps and whistles to send them higher or
summon them back to the coop.
“They get up there in the clouds — like little dots,” Mr. Sampson said
while standing atop the three-family house he shares with his wife and
two children. “If you look at them, they actually do somersaults.”
“See that!” he added, spotting a somersault. “I love them.”
Mr. Sampson was first seized with a passion for pigeons as a 10-year-old
immigrant when he saw the Walt Disney movie “The Pigeon That Worked a
Miracle.” A few years later, he fell under the influence of Joe LaRocca,
the president of a pigeon racing club. After Mr. Sampson learned the
basics of raising pigeons, Mr. LaRocca and a colleague talked to his
mother about his new hobby.
“They gave her the lesser of two evils,” he said. “I could hang out on
the street and the street would claim me, or I could be hanging out on
the roof with an interest in pigeons.”
A half-century later, Mr. Sampson still breeds his own birds, which come
in myriad varieties and look different from feral pigeons that haunt
the city’s squares and parks. In shops, pigeons typically cost $5 to $40
apiece, though sires of champion racers can cost six figures.
Like most breeders, Mr. Sampson spends hours each day scraping away bird
droppings, hosing down coops, stocking feeders, filling water canisters
and hauling 50-pound bags of feed up a 10-foot ladder and through a
hatch to the roof. He uses a syringe to vaccinate each of his 300 birds
against diseases and keeps a large rooftop medicine chest stocked with
antibiotics, herbs, bath salts, treatments for lice and mites, and even
Vicks Formula 44 for colds.
“I relate to the birds as if they’re like me,” he said. “If I’m sick, they’re sick. If I’m cold, they’re cold.”
He spends so much time on the roof, he has built himself a shack,
outfitted with a heater, a television and a bunk bed for napping. Pigeon
flying is often turned into a competitive game, with rivals sending
their flocks into the sky to mix with other flocks, with the goal of
luring the other pigeons into their own coops. Some breeders also race
pigeons.
One thing all fliers lament is that younger people are not taking up the
hobby. In the 1950s, every other low-rise roof in certain neighborhoods
seemed to have a pigeon coop. But fewer people showed interest in the
sport, and landlords also cracked down because gentrifiers did not like
the pigeon mess. Dr. Jerolmack estimates there are no more than 300
pigeon fliers left in the city.
Pigeons on Broadway, a supply store under the elevated J line in
Bushwick, is among only a small number of pigeon shops left. Mr. Jones,
its manager, compares the atmosphere to a barbershop, where “men come to
get away from their wives and the pressures of the week.” The
camaraderie has often involved vulgar but good-natured taunting about
how many birds a flier caught from another’s flocks. The chatter also
allows for racial taunts, though some remarks bite too hard.
Mr. Sampson, who has 20 other rooftop fliers within a mile of his house, including the former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson,
recalled a hurtful moment in the otherwise accepted teasing when during
one racing competition someone said “the black guy can’t be beating the
white guy — he must be cheating.”
Aaron Marshall was first hooked as a 7-year-old in East Williamsburg
watching Italian, Irish and other white pigeon breeders on their roofs
and beguiled by the competition, with men boasting, “I caught five on
you and he caught five from me.” There and later in Ozone Park, he
learned many of his skills from a white man called Teddy the Greek and a
Dominican named Louie.
They taught him to keep new birds in the coop for four weeks and only
let them out when they are hungry so they will be trained to return. He
learned that pigeons may stray from a flock because they become
confused, feel threatened by a hawk, lose a mate or find the coop
overcrowded. He learned to get rid of birds that frequently pull away
from the flock, because such mavericks will lure birds to other flocks.
The pigeons, he said, taught him empathy.
“You experience what it is to have a living thing,” said Mr. Marshall,
who is now 56 and is a maintenance worker. “It shows you how good you
are at caring for it when it comes back. What good is it for a child to
have a violent video game compared to having a living, breathing, loving
animal that needs your compassion and care? If I hadn’t been on the
roof who knows what kind of trouble I would have gotten into.”
