Lines, In the Bird’s Eye

My friend, let’s call her Chelsea, didn’t think twice about the ledges of her windows when she signed her lease. However, to a certain prospective tenant, Chelsea’s window ledges have quickly become some of the hottest real estate in New York City. Occupancy is up 200% from 0 tenants in March, to 2 tenants in April. Signs of spring, I guess.

The prized window real estate has been snatched up by two very different tenants: a family of morning doves and Lucas Gordon.

The doves found the window on their own. One imagines that they scouted a bunch of different ledges in the area, evaluating them for things like sunlight and wind exposure, proximity to Trader Joe’s - you know - things any good prospective tenant considers when selecting a place to start a family. Chelsea’s window must have been just right, because the doves moved right in, building their nest, laying their eggs, and paying $0/month in rent.

One window over, a very different arrangement was in the works. Unlike the doves, Lucas didn’t find the window himself. It was actually Chelsea who reached out to him, offering up her ledge space for a project of his that had just gone pretty viral on Twitter: damnlines.com. When I met Lucas, he was still a little stunned by the response.

“I just posted it once, and then it just spread like wildfire.”

“I remember sitting there on a Saturday thinking, I’ll post about it to see if I get any feedback. And I’m like, okay, what do I say? I couldn’t think of anything creative so I just wrote: Weekend project, period. NYC lines, period. And like, a screenshot.”

Next thing he knew, the post had gotten half a million views. The site streams live views of some of New York’s most popping lines (L’industrie Pizzeria, Salt Hank’s, Bánh Anh Em, to name a few) and estimates wait times so New Yorkers can make smarter line decisions.

Chelsea reached out to Lucas via the ‘contribute’ form on the website.

“I submitted my [form] to damnlines kind of as a joke.” She told him. “I literally didn’t think you were gonna reply. So it’s really cool to see that these things actually do happen!”

Most of the people who have opened up their ledges to Lucas are in their 20s. These are tech-savvy young people using an app to solve a problem exacerbated by trends on social media. But in the midst of this futuristic, zoomer generation story, there’s a charmingly analog little tidbit. The way Lucas first went about building his community of window hosts? Extremely offline. He wrote letters.

“When I first did this there were no leads, so I had to send letters in the mail,” Lucas told me. “It wasn’t easy to describe this concept over a letter, but people were more receptive than I expected. And then I went viral, and now they’re all inbound.”

“I’m just glad the setup of our apartment is conducive!” Chelsea laughed.

Like the morning doves, Lucas has some criteria for the ideal ledge space. To be damnlines-worthy, the window needs a clear, unobstructed view of one of the community’s most requested lines, determined by the ‘suggest’ tab on the site, where the community votes on which spots they want added next. As I write this, the top spot on the list is Caffè Panna. Unsurprising, given the videos of its mango sticky rice sundae I’ve seen all over Instagram lately. Now, whenever people find out about a new fun treat on social media, they can pop over to damnlines.com to scope the line in real time. Or at least add it to the list of requests.

As Lucas went to work setting up the camera in her window, Chelsea was already browsing the site. She was excited to see Bánh Anh Em on there, as she’d tried to go with some friends recently but had been discouraged by the look of the line upon arrival.

“This is awesome,” she said. “They don’t even open for another 40 minutes. 16 people in line. It’s crazy!”

I was surprised at the ease with which Lucas worked. At the time there were only a few other cameras up and running, and, as he reminded us several times, this is just his side passion project.

But Lucas had more experience than he had originally let on. The whole idea for damnlines.com had actually been inspired by a similar project he’d worked on in college. He told me, there had been four main bars on campus, which regularly had lines down the block.

“That’s where this idea came from,” Lucas shared. One year, he and his roommates happened to get an apartment right above one of the big bars that always had a line. One of them threw out the idea of putting a camera in the window and Lucas thought, why not?

“I’m like, that’s possible, let’s see what happens,” he remembered. “It was just one camera for that one bar on a website and it got sent around. Everyone at the school started using it.”

So he thought, might as well get the three other bars! Lucas learned years ago that bird’s eye line livestreams were a hit.

Today in NYC, though the response has been similarly enthusiastic, setting up the cameras is a little more complicated. It isn’t just a matter of asking a few friends. Unlike the morning doves, he doesn’t occupy the window space rent-free.

“If it’s gonna live beyond the next few summer months, I’ll need to find a way to sustain costs.”

“If it doesn’t work out, okay, cool, it’s been a cool project,” Lucas told me. He’s putting in the work, but he isn’t too precious about it. “We’ll see where it goes.”

I’m writing this a few weeks after our initial conversation, and the morning doves are gone now. The eggs have hatched and taken to the NYC skies.

Will the cameras last to next season? Maybe. Lucas is already figuring out how to keep things up and running, and the city seems more than willing to keep watching. But even if the cameras go dark, the window ledge won’t stay empty for long. Not in this city.

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