Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at window guards in apartments — which were not always taken for granted. We’ll also find out about an underwater pipeline that will eventually deliver natural gas for parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.
Several months after New York City survived its brush with bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, the city’s health department issued what was widely considered a first-in-the-nation rule: Window guards had to be installed in every apartment where a child under age 10 was living.
The rule drew immediate opposition from landlords’ groups, including one that predicted that “two years from now,” the window guard rule “will have been forgotten.”
It wasn’t.
The current health commissioner, Dr. Alister Martin, said by email that “hundreds of New Yorkers are alive because of window guards” and the rule mandating them, which was announced 50 years ago this week.
Last year, there were four reported falls of children from New York buildings, none of them fatal. The toll could have been even lower: Two of the falls were in apartments where window guards had been installed, but not correctly.
Contrast those figures with tallies from the past. In the first nine months of 1979, the health department said, there were 47 falls with 12 deaths, compared with 101 falls and 18 deaths in the same period in 1978. In 1983, 97 children fell from windows, and 25 died.
Still, accidents with children who climb through open windows occur. A 5-year-old boy fell three floors from a building in the Morrisania section of the Bronx last week. But the health department said that the accident had involved a window that opened onto the fire escape the child fell from, and window guards are not required on windows leading to fire escapes.
A tragedy that led to a famous song
Over the years, there have been some high-profile accidents. In 1994, Eric Clapton’s 4½-year-old son, Conor, died in a 49-story fall from a Manhattan condominium. Conor, wearing pajamas and slippers, apparently ran past a housekeeper who had opened a window in a room she was cleaning in the apartment, where Conor had been staying with his mother. Clapton, with the lyricist Will Jennings, later wrote the heart-wrenching song “Tears in Heaven” about the accident and his grief.
The regulation requires owners of buildings with three or more apartments to install window guards or devices that keep the windows from opening more than 4½ inches in apartments with children under 10. Owners can charge a one-time fee of no more than $10 per window in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized apartments, but not if the window guards were installed for a previous tenant.
Window guards eventually became as routine in apartments as seatbelts and airbags in cars. “It’s easy to take something so simple for granted,” Martin said, calling window guards “just one example of the quiet, often invisible, ways that public health keeps us safe.”
But in 1976, the window guard rule touched off a fight between the city bureaucracy and the real estate industry. Health officials believed that government had a responsibility to protect people. They maintained that objections reflected indifference by landlords to anything except profits in a time when expenses were soaring, particularly for oil to heat buildings. The Arab oil embargo that began in late 1973 had almost quadrupled the price of a barrel of oil. When the window guard rule was announced, “there were certainly owners who said it was ‘one more damn thing I have to do,’” said Barry Hersh, a clinical professor at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.
‘They’re present all over New York’
Fifty years later, “they’re present all over New York,” said Andrea Shapiro, the director of advocacy and programs for the Metropolitan Council on Housing. In many buildings, owners “just put up the window guards and never take them down.” The result is that “at this point, a lot of windows already have them.”
“Kids are kids — we know that’s why landlords don’t like to rent to families,” she said. “Window guards, we don’t hear that as a reason.”
But the city continues to promote the importance of window guards, especially as people open their windows on warm days. The Health Department says that if a building owner refuses to install them, tenants can call 311. The city says that there were 2,663 complaints about window guards between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025, and that the Department of Housing Preservation and Development issued more than 7,000 violations, in part because it found window guard violations in apartments it inspected because of complaints about other problems.
Weather
Look out for another sunny day with temperatures climbing up to 86. Tonight will be mostly cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms and a low around 67.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I’ve been itching to get back out here.” — Bee Hall, who caught a few small fish in Prospect Park Lake in Brooklyn as the weather warmed up.
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Groundbreaking in Brooklyn for gas pipeline
Three Trump administration officials attended a groundbreaking ceremony for a new underwater gas pipeline that will deliver natural gas from Pennsylvania to the New York area, running for 23 miles under Raritan Bay and New York Harbor.
The pipeline will connect to a local distribution network at a former World War II naval air station. National Grid, which supplies gas to about two million customers in the city and on Long Island, will manage the distribution.
The pipeline had been rejected three times in the last seven years because of environmental concerns, but it resurfaced last year, soon after Gov. Kathy Hochul met with President Trump and helped persuade him to back away from plans to shut down an offshore wind project. In the fall, the pipeline was approved by the State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Hochul has been facing higher energy demands as well as federal pressure to promote oil and gas projects. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, referred to Trump’s agenda for fast-tracking fossil fuel projects, especially in the Northeast. Zeldin mentioned an Oval Office meeting early last year, when Trump “specifically” asked about the pipeline.
“He wanted it built instantly,” said Zeldin, who was accompanied at the groundbreaking by Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, and Chris Wright, the energy secretary.
METROPOLITAN diary
Pass it on
Dear Diary:
As a comparative literature major at the University of Iowa in the early 2000s, I bought a copy of Don DeLillo’s “Mao II” to read for pleasure.
I never got around to reading it at the time, so the book returned to Brooklyn with me after graduation. It followed me through several moves in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Finally, leaving Park Slope for Midwood, I decided I was never going to read it, so I put it out on the sidewalk in front of the house where I lived at the time. It was snatched up within hours.
A couple of years ago my family and I moved to a New Jersey town with a lot of other Brooklyn transplants. Walking home from the train one night, I passed a free library box and saw a copy of “Mao II.”
I grabbed it, thinking I would finally have time to read it during my daily commute.
As I flipped through the pages that evening, a bookmark dropped to the floor: a ticket receipt for a performance at the University of Iowa — with my name on it.
— Graham W. Goetz
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Tara Terranova and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Window Guards Started Saving Lives 50 Years Ago appeared first on New York Times.
