Chickens In The City

CHICKENS IN THE CITY

         When I was a child, my parents kept chickens in the backyard of our house. We were living in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, NY at the time. Our stooped home was among several attached houses on the block. It was set upon a 20 X 100 foot plot of land. The chickens were kept in a screened coop that had ample room for them to scratch for their feed on the dirt floor. It also had an enclosed area where they would sleep and lay eggs in little cubicles. The whole structure had a roof atop to keep rain or snow from getting in.

         My mom would purchase tiny chicks a little at a time. She would keep them in a small crate or box in our dining room, because it was too cold in our basement. To keep them warm and comfortable, she would attach light bulbs to the sides, just high enough so that the bulbs would never come in contact with the tiny peeps. That’s what I called the chicks, because they constantly chirped all day, especially when someone would approach them. Many a time, I would go near them on purpose just to listen to them chirp. Their beaks would open in unison and they would bunch up to the side of the box nearest me. When they were large enough to be on their own, my mom would transport them to the coop, and then she would purchase another batch. At one time, we had at least 100 chickens running around in that coop. It was my father who fed them and kept their housing clean.

         Once in a while, I would accompany my dad or my mom in delivering the eggs to our neighbors. They were certainly plentiful in our household. If any of the chickens wound up on our supper table, my siblings and I were unaware of it.

         I could only remember one rooster at a time in that coop. We didn’t need an alarm clock, because the rooster would announce daylight with a scratchy “cock-a- doodle-do” every single morning. I used to wonder how my mother knew to purchase mostly hens. It was a wonderful time in our lives. We so enjoyed having chickens in the backyard for many years, until a hurricane came along and destroyed the coop wiping out a majority of the birds. I was then in my early teens, so it could have been that terrible storm of 1947-8. We rebuilt the chicken house on a much smaller scale, so that the surviving chickens could live the rest of their lives in comfort. The chickens were never replaced.