Co-op's Window Guards Repurposed Into Tree Fences

Of all the gripes shareholders in my Lower Manhattan co-op lob at the board about the ever-increasing costs of complying with New York City’s ever-increasing regulations, I’ve never heard a complaint about window guards.

Depending on the co-op’s generational ebb and flow, most of our former warehouse building’s windows are covered in metal lattice. It doesn’t matter if guards are installed inside windows whose broken balances keep them from opening, or if their industrial look clashes with a shareholder’s carefully executed faux farmhouse interior. The required guards simply go in, and no one seems to mind.

When my children were toddlers and my apartment was still in its original loft phase, plumbing lines ran throughout under plywood platforms, raising the floor in some places by three feet. Because a child kneeling on the sofa or jumping on the bed was easily taller than the lower pane of our double-hung windows, we asked our super to install two guards on every window, one on top of the other. 

After the children grew into teens, my husband and I kept the guards up to discourage our dog and her canine friends from going after the pigeons who egged them on by pit-stopping on our windowsills. Later, in preparation for a gut renovation (including the removal of the wayward plumbing and platforms), the guards finally came down.

Given the hours of my life spent complying with the city rules on recycling, I was surprised to learn window guards couldn’t simply go out to the curb next to bagged aluminum containers and empty hair spray canisters. Our heavily regulated city has no plan for recycling child window guards. Or even to collect and redistribute them to other buildings.

But my super did. 

In the basement, he maintained a supply of shareholders’ discarded guards, artifacts from the co-op’s last baby boom. Over time, parents of older children moved out and new parents moved in. Each time, the super needed to go no farther than the basement to procure window guards for our latest young arrivals. And as with their predecessors, new shareholders who had invested heavily in renovating well-worn lofts into lovely homes were oblivious to the black, gray or white tic-tac-toe lattice filling the windows of their now well-appointed rooms.

Admittedly, during my time behind window guards, I hadn’t considered their aesthetics either. But maybe somebody else did. To investigate, I took a long walk, not treading carefully on the cobblestones to avoid tripping, but rather looking up in search of cosmetically modified window guards. A metal grid glazed into a green-and-navy tartan pattern was too much to hope for (though that would have been impressive). Just something other than the standard black, gray or white.

Finding none, I returned home with a skinned knee and the conclusion that window guards are as aesthetically inconsequential to New Yorkers as they are ubiquitous.

But not to my super.

His stack of used window guards had grown proportionately to the number of co-op babies who had morphed into teens. Conversely, and perhaps not so coincidentally, the city had recently replaced the old trees that lined our curb with spindly saplings. While providing safekeeping for the co-op’s teenagers was beyond the scope of child window guards, my super decided protecting our young trees was not. He would turn the child guards into tree fences.

Of course, it couldn’t be as simple as sticking our used window guards into the dirt of the tree beds. Rules must be obeyed. And the city has several. Tree fences must be between 18 and 24 inches high. But standard three-bar window guards are only 15 inches high. Stacking one on top of the other would make the fence six inches too tall. The solution was to find three-bar, 20-inch-high guards. And he did, 30 of them.

When my super was done installing the old window guards in the tree beds, he had created not only fences but a work of upcycled urban art. And while few original loft interiors remain inside our building, the industrial look of the fences is well matched to our 94-year-old warehouse.

As for jazzing up the repurposed window guards, if theories about color symbolism are correct and the standard-issue black, gray and white of our tree fences introduce us as elegant and sophisticated, I’m OK with that.