What Are Those Rusted Metal Ladders in Brooklyn Backyards?

I was taking a walk down my residential street recently when a flash of weathered iron caught my eye. Poking up above a neighbor's inner backyard was a tall, rusted metal ladder. It stood upright, narrow and tall, reaching straight toward the sky.

I stopped in my tracks to look at it. To anyone else passing by, it probably looked like a piece of industrial scrap left behind by a careless contractor. But I recognized it immediately.

Growing up, we had the same rusted tower planted in our backyard. It stood two feet away from the exterior wall of the house like an unmovable monument. Through decades of changing seasons and vicious winds, it never leaned an inch. My parents never made any attempt to dismantle it or repaint it, even as thick flakes of orange rust gathered along its frame. Back then, whenever I looked out from our second-floor window, I would scan the neighboring lots. None of the other yards on our street had one. Down the entire block, as far as the eye could see, our house was the only one that still had this strange metal spire standing guard.

For years, I had no idea why it was there. It was not until I started digging around Reddit one night that the mystery was finally solved. Those "ladders" were never meant for communication lines. They were clothes poles, historical relics from an era when Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens tenements relied on outdoor lines to dry their laundry.

Decades ago, these iron poles formed the backbone of daily domestic life in New York City. The setup was clever. A tenant would climb the built-in rungs of the ladder to attach a clothesline reel at the very top. From there, they ran a line across the open yard, anchoring it back to a support reel mounted outside their own window.

Two Brooklyn clothes poles/ladders stand out in this Brooklyn backyard.

On laundry days, the backyard came alive with vibrant colors and freshly washed linen. A resident would lean over the windowsill, pin damp shirts, trousers, and bedsheets to the rope, and pull the line forward. Pulley wheels squeaked against the brick as freshly washed laundry drifted out into the open air to dry in the wind. Once the sun went down, the tenant simply reeled the dry clothes back inside.

This routine was once universal for the waves of European immigrants and working-class Americans who packed into city tenements. Line drying was an essential daily chore, not a vintage novelty. According to the Museum of the City of New York, it only began to evolve into a convenience service after commercial laundries started offering washing and delivery for the masses.

Soon after, technology transformed domestic labor entirely. Electric dryers became standard in commercial facilities during the 1930s, and by the late 1940s and early 1950s, manufacturers were selling them directly to consumers. As city dwellers began carrying their laundry bags to corner laundromats or running machines at home, the need for backyard clothes poles vanished.

These towering structures also hid a darker history. According to a New York Times article, many of the poles were allegedly manufactured by a company called Poles McCarthy. They were heavy, solid iron, but decades of rain, wind, snow, and neglect can take a terrible toll. From the 1920s to the 1960s, decaying poles occasionally snapped at the base and collapsed, killing and injuring small children and adults in backyards across Queens and Brooklyn.

Today, these rusted relics are few and far between. As housing gentrification accelerates across Brooklyn and Queens, older properties are renovated, and yards are cleared out. Scrappers and metal haulers in beat-up commercial vans cut the poles down, and new property owners discard them without ever understanding what they were. Fewer and fewer people recognize their original utility except the curious. The poles are slowly disappearing, but for now, a few stubborn towers remain, anchoring the city to its past.

Source(s):

1. Kelly. (2009, June 3). Brooklyn at work: Removing a clothesline pole. Pardon Me For Asking. https://pardonmeforasking.blogspot.com/2009/06/brooklyn-at-work-removing-clothesline.html
2. Havens-Bowen, A. (2019, December 19). What is that ladder to nowhere in my backyard? Brick Underground. https://www.brickunderground.com/live/clothesline-ladder-backyard-brooklyn-queens-nyc
3. Goldstein, E. (2003, June 29). Neighborhood report: City lore — neighborhood mystery; Relics from the web of backyard life. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/nyregion/neighborhood-report-city-lore-neighborhood-mystery-relics-web-backyard-life.html
4. Falling clothes pole kills child. (1930, August 25). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1930/08/25/archives/falling-clothes-pole-kills-child.html
5. Clothes pole kills child; It breaks and falls on boy, 3, when he swings on line. (1949, August 9). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1949/08/09/archives/clothes-pole-kills-child-it-breaks-and-falls-on-boy-3-when-he.html
6. Museum of the City of New York. (2012, August 7). A fine line: The art of the clothesline. MCNY Blog. https://blog.mcny.org/2012/08/07/a-fine-line-the-art-of-the-clothesline/