The residential stock here is attached and semi-attached two- and three-family brick houses, most of them extended, raised or converted at some point, and many of them holding far more rooms than the original plan allowed for. That shows up in the glazing as volume: a single house commonly needs fifteen or twenty openings rather than six, across front, rear and side elevations that were built at three different dates. We survey those houses opening by opening and quote them as a programme, which lets us order one run of glass in matching finishes and work through the house in a sequence that leaves the family with sealed rooms every night. Front porches enclosed into living space and basement-level entrances with their own glazed doors are both common, and both tend to be the openings that have been patched most often.

The other half of the work here is institutional. Borough Park has a density of schools, yeshivas, shuls and community buildings that no other part of Brooklyn matches, and that work carries requirements residential glazing does not: safety glazing to code in classrooms and corridors, impact and security glazing at ground level, large assembly-room openings and, above all, a schedule set by someone else’s term dates. We do school glazing during holidays and quiet weeks, not around a timetable. Across both halves of the neighbourhood the fixed constraint is the religious calendar: no work that could run past sunset on a Friday, nothing on Saturday, and the autumn holiday period closes large parts of the schedule for weeks at a time. We plan around it from the first conversation, which in practice means booking earlier than clients expect and being honest when a date is not realistic. On 13th Avenue the problem is simply the street — no parking, constant double-parked deliveries and heavy footfall — so display glass gets walked in and set before the shops open.