Arthur, age 49, grew up in Little Italy, where nearly every rooftop was capped by a pigeon coop. His dream is to buy a brownstone in the neighborhood; not for the space or the status, but to have his own roof where he could put a pigeon coop.

There was pigeons on my roof as long as I can remember. There was a pigeon coop on every other roof in our neighborhood ... in a five block radius, in Little Italy, there must've been about 5,000 pigeons.

As a kid, I would clean up the coop and carry up the feed to roof, cause it was a six-story walk-up. We had 500 birds on the roof, so I'd be carrying up 50-lb. bags of feed.

When we'd see a bird on our roof from a different coop, it was a whole sport to catch them and sell 'em back. When we got another guy's birds, he had an option of coming back and buying it (we had a dollar-a-catch back then), and if the guy thought it was worth another shot, then he got it back. If he didn't, we'd bring it down to the bird store and trade it for feed. If you'd go down to the bird store with 15 birds that you caught that day, that 15 birds would buy you a sack of seed.

There was a guy right around the corner, we used to call him Uncle, he used to catch our birds, and it was like a Soft-Catch, it was a Quarter-Catch. So we'd go up there and he'd have like five of my birds, and I'd give him a dollar and a quarter to get my birds back.

And then there were bad guys that had Catch-Kill. That was when they catch your bird, they just kill it on you on spite.

I actually put a coop back on my roof about 10 years ago, without the owner of the building knowing about it. He had made us take the coop down about 20 years ago, 'cause it was a violation.

But I put another little coop up there, that wasn't so conspicuous. I had racing homers. I put racing homers on the roof for one reason: when you let a racing homer out, it's not a bird like a flight bird, that hangs around the roof all day. When you let a racing homer out, they disappear. And when they come back, they don't hang around the roof, they go right in to the coop. So it was just a matter of convenience for me. I could get over on the landlord, and I still had my pigeons on the roof. But the landlord found out and I had to take it down.

You know what my dream is? To buy a brownstone and put a pigeon coop on the roof.