Much could be said and written about the rooftops of New York City, and much has. In film, rooftops have often taken top billing, so to speak. In “The Producers,” the Mel Brooks 1967 musical comedy starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, the Hitler-wannabe for their sure-to-lose-money production keeps pigeons on the roof of his apartment his super (who insists she is a “concierge”) calls “rotten, stinking, dirty birds.”

In the 1954 classic “On the Waterfront,” Marlon Brando, as protagonist Terry Moran, has his own rooftop pigeon coop. As the mob seeks to insure his loyalty by threats and intimidation, ultimately killing his pigeons, the rooftop comes to symbolize his last line of resistance to their terroristic tactics that ultimately fail to silence him.

From the Brooklyn waterfront to Spanish Harlem, rooftops provide a stage for the music and choreography of “West Side Story” (1961), as the Jets and and Sharks prance and dance. If, as Shakespeare claimed, all the world’s a stage, so are rooftops.

Poet Robert Frost wrote “good fences make good neighbors” in a 1914 poem “Mending the Wall.” That same sentiment might also apply to adjoining rooftops in New York City. Some action movies show villains and heroes leaping from one rooftop to another, in flight or pursuit. But I’m thinking of stationary figures exchanging greetings, gossip, even food from one rooftop to another adjacent.

And then there is the view. What brings this all to mind is a supper with Middle Eastern takeout we recently enjoyed on the rooftop of our son’s apartment in Astoria, Queens. As the sun set in the west, we watched the light dimming on the Jersey shore and then the lights began to twinkle and shine brightly across the East River on the Manhattan skyline.

Thomas Jefferson, in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” once observed that the view of the converging Potomac and Shenandoah rivers from high above Harpers Ferry was “worth a voyage across the Atlantic.” In 2026, one needn’t go that far. A rooftop in Astoria, Queens, New York City, New York, will do just fine.