Taking Flight

By April Koral

As he has done thousands of times before, Anthony Camera steps onto the aging Brooklyn rooftop and slowly surveys his airy domain. From the look in his eyes, it is clear that he is a man who is satisfied with the way things are.

By his own count, Camera keeps a thousand pigeons up there. As he walks about, hundreds of them strut around him. Others nestle together in cubbyholes or lazily flit about. Yes, the coop needs to be cleaned again, a few birds look under the weather and water fills pockets where the old roof sags. But overall, this aerie on top of a six-story building in Williamsburg is just where the 81-year-old Tribeca resident wants to be. “I relax up here,” Camera says. “I’m happy. Up here, nobody bothers me.” Camera has been tending pigeons –once a popular pastime of men in Italian neighborhoods–for 78 years. He has kept them on roofs near the Bowery and in the Village, and has had this Brooklyn roof for nearly three decades. Camera was introduced to the sport, as he calls it, by his father when he was six years old. There used to be a lot of guys like him, he says, thousands of them throughout the city. But raising pigeons is a dying sport. Many of his surviving fellow breeders have moved their flocks to roofs along the Brooklyn waterfront. “A lot of landlords don’t want to give the roofs no more,” says Camera, who lives in Tribeca’s Independence Plaza. “They say pigeons got diseases. I laugh when I hear that. If that were true, I’d be dead by now!” Camera is used to people maligning pigeons. His wife Rose, who died 10 years ago after 48 years of marriage, never visited his roof. (“She thought it was dirty,” Camera says.) Indeed, to those who speak poorly of the common city pigeon, Camera heartily agrees. “Street rats,” he calls them. “Scavengers,” he sneers. But don’t confuse vermin with his pigeons. “You see the difference? You see all the different colors?” He points to a cream-colored bird with tan stripes on its wings. “You see how nice his color is? See his nice beak, his eyes. I like the reds too, but that one’s my favorite.” The key to keeping pigeons healthy, Camera says, is plenty of clean, fresh water with a good dose of garlic in it. Every few days he adds a couple of cloves to the water. “It clears the lining into the stomach,” he says. “They sell medicines for that, but they’re too expensive.” Camera has also saved money over the years by taking partners, who pay half the expenses. “Feed costs $16 a bag,” he says. “That’s a lot of money. You can buy cheaper feed for $10 a bag, but that’s not the good stuff.” Camera used to be a Teamster, hauling paper for 41 years. In those days, he could only come up to the roof on Saturday mornings (“I told my wife, ‘I’ll be back by 1 o’clock and then I’m yours until tomorrow.’”) and after Church on Sundays. But since he retired, Camera usually visits his pigeons every day, driving to Brooklyn in his big, sleek ’93 Buick Roadmaster. Between feeding the pigeons, replacing their water, sweeping the roof, cleaning the cages and carrying away birds felled by a falcon or a rat, Camera says there’s so much work it’s like a job. But that’s okay. “It’s kept me out of trouble,” he says. “The only time I was ever in the station house was when my father got arrested for shooting craps in the street.” But this year, Camera fell twice on the roof, once breaking his hip. Now he walks with a cane and carefully takes one step at a time as he climbs the flight of stairs from the top floor to the roof. It’s also difficult for him to lift the heavy steel door of the freight elevator that he uses to get to the roof. Every once in a while, Camera picks up a stick with a cap attached to it and whirls it above his head. As if on cue, hundreds of birds lift off. The air hums as they swoop low over the roof. For sport, a pigeon man sends his birds aloft in hopes that they will hit other breeders’ flocks flying by, disorient them, and send them down to his roof. After catching another breeders’ “strays,” as they are called, Camera might keep them for a few days until the other breeder comes by (each bird has an identifying tag around his foot), or, if they go unclaimed, he might sell them to the local pet store for two dollars each. Although Camera is friends with many of the other breeders, and occasionally meets them for a beer or lunch, on the roof they’re “enemies.” Some of the veteran breeders, he says, have birds so smart he’s never manage to lure a single one. “There was always a lot of action up here,” explains Camera. “It was like teasing each other, trying to get their birds.” But now, Camera says ruefully, it’s mostly quiet. From his roof, high above any of the buildings around him, Camera is in a good position to catch strays. But even with his 360-degree view of the neighborhood, it’s hard to spot competition. “See over there,” he finally says pointing to a rooftop about a half mile away. “He’s got more than me. He once caught 15 strays of mine. But I’ve gotten some of his, too,” he adds with satisfaction. As much as Camera likes his pigeons, his father loved them even more. “My father used to say, ‘I want to die on the roof with a full stomach and with the birds.’ In 1974, he had breakfast, came up here and had a heart attack. A partner of mine also died on the roof. My mother used to say, ‘Stay off the roof. You’re next.’” But that would be as hard as one of those pigeons giving up its cozy coop. What keeps Camera coming back? It’s the hundreds of charges that depend on him for their feed and fresh water, of course. But it’s something else, too. Something that, even after almost 80 years, Camera can’t quite put his finger on. “It’s peaceful up here,” he says. “I think about life, about how I miss people. This roof, these birds, they just mean a lot to me.”