Leader, in the vocabulary Richard Joseph Spinelli uses, is the older New York name for a downspout, the vertical pipe that carries water from the gutter to the ground or the drain, and the word is one of the plainer signs that he writes from inside the city’s older housing. He puts leaders and gutters on an October schedule: clear them on a dry day, check the area drains and the slope of the ground where each outside stair comes down, and expect the same person to be standing over those drains in a heavy rain roughly two months later.
Small parts carrying a large argument
The fullest use comes in the storm response essay, which mentions the pair three times. There the houses are described as the work of builders who expected water and gave them ample downspouts, so most failures turn out to be a blockage rather than a flaw in the plan. From that he draws a cost claim: when the trouble is a blockage, the remedy is attention, not money. A clogged leader, he writes, is the cheapest way to break the rule that water must keep moving away from a building, and clearing one takes about twenty minutes. The federal flood insurance program1 lists clearing gutters and downspouts among its first steps for owners. His other seasonal routines, this autumn walk among them, are gathered under preparing before the season.
The earlier use, in the maintenance radius essay, is smaller and makes a different point. A gutter that has begun to fail shows up in a short list of things noticed by accident while walking between properties, beside a dark stoop light and a back door that will not latch. In that essay the gutter is evidence for proximity, the claim developed on the page about the sidewalk noticing first. In the storm essay it becomes evidence for preparation. One component serves two arguments, and together they explain why he treats the October route and the storm route as the same walk.
Why the humble version matters in New York
The citywide record explains why a drain cleared in autumn earns space in an essay. THE CITY’s account of the September 2023 deluge2 described the wettest city day since Ida, with 150 schools and many homes flooded, and the Bronx Times recorded3 2.5 inches in Fordham by 9:30 that morning, and found that residents who had cleared drains and staged sandbags ahead of time came through best while larger fixes lagged. The public response works at another scale entirely: Civil Engineering magazine’s report on the cloudburst program4 counted more than 11,000 green infrastructure sites and a first pilot built to hold about 300,000 gallons. Meanwhile the water history of a single building stays mostly private; City Limits found no easy way to learn a home’s flood record5 because sellers of small buildings were not required to share a flood history and insurers keep claims confidential. Scheduled upkeep as a general practice has its main article at richardjspinelli.com, under preventive maintenance.
What clearing cannot do
Spinelli does not oversell the habit. The storm essay concedes that buildings this close share one sky, so a single storm reaches all of them together, and it describes pumps, fans and spare stock that sit unused most of the year. A clear leader moves water off one wall. It does nothing about a sewer backing up or a downpour heavier than the pipes under the street were designed to carry, and that is the boundary his October routine operates within. The boundary is moving, too: the Water Environment Federation’s coverage of New York’s Rainfall Ready plan6 noted that planners expect a storm rated as a 100 year event in 2015 to be up to three times likelier by 2050.
