Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Phil Janovick is not your average window washer. The employee of St. Ann’s Blue Sky Window Cleaning is a romantic who takes photos of sunsets and birds while dangling from a seat so high above the ground you typically don’t notice him—until you look out your window and he scares you half to death.
• We use what’s called a wand and a squeegee. You scrub the soap on with the wand and then swing the squeegee to wipe. There’s a special trick to the squeegee—you make a letter-S shape.
• I remember when I was real young, starting out at age 24. One of the first buildings I ever did I thought I was gonna pee in my pants from the height, but now it’s routine. I’ve been doing it for 21 years.
• The highest building we do in St. Louis is Metropolitan Square—that’s 44 floors.
• When people ask me if I’m scared to be up so high, I say, “No, what I’m afraid of is spiders.” The bigger the building, the bigger the spiders. I’ve seen spiders so big you can watch their eyes moving.
• Ever since they came out with camera phones I take pictures everywhere—the Arch, clouds, even car accidents and muggings and homeless people in alleys. You can see it all. They don’t realize someone s hanging there above them.
• As soon as you cup your hands and look in a window you become a peeping tom—you can be arrested for it. That’s a no-no. Anything else that you notice by accident, you notice by accident.
• You do see people at their most vulnerable sometimes. But there’s always a notice for the people in the building. We warn people they can shut their blinds or curtains. Some people get mad when they see us, but we always give them notice.
• You see people sitting in their living rooms playing video games. You see that they need to clean their penthouses. Some people put a bathroom next to a 6-by-6-foot window, and I drop down, and there’s somebody sitting on the john, and you make eye contact, and you both freak out.
• There’s not a lot of money in it. It’s a dirty, filthy job. You have to like to do it. I love it.
• I look out at the views, and I think, “I wish all my friends and family could see this right now.” Because you see things that only last an instant. The biggest, blackest thunderstorms rolling in. A ray of sunshine piercing a cloud. The fog in the morning near the river. You can get a feeling like euphoria.
• I do enjoy the satisfaction of squeegeeing—we call it the “happy glass feeling.” There is something about the glimmer of shiny glass, the reflection, from dirty to clean.
• You’d never believe that what we use to clean the windows is water mixed with Dawn dishwashing liquid, but that’s the best. It has high ammonia content. That’s the industry standard, too.
• OSHA is on top of everything today. We wear harnesses. It’s basically the same thing that mountain climbers wear.
• If you’re on a 30-story building, the job can seem endless. It can be boring as hell.
• With these big mirrored buildings downtown, the pigeons see their reflections and get drawn in and splat! Their wings leave an imprint on the glass. And then there’s the peregrine falcons—they kill everything. You find dead rats in the rooftops and the window sills. Headless ducks. Falcons are amazing. We see a lot of headless birds because falcons killed them and ate their heads.
• We do jobs with two or three guys on what’s called a swing stage. It’s a 24- or 36-foot board, like you see in the movies. That’s the ultimate in boring.
• I would probably be scared to death to work a skyscraper in Chicago. We don’t have any real tall skyscrapers here—75, 80 floors up or more. I’d try it because I know how safe the job is, but I’d be scared.
• One time, I noticed medical students working on cadavers at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. I’m freaked out by them, and they look up and they’re freaked out by me.
• Some people who make $300,000 a year are in awe watching me do my $25,000-a-year job.
• I’ve climbed inside the school bus on the roof of the City Museum. You can have adventures on the rooftops.
• If you accidentally break a window, you always try to blame it on someone else. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. If you pull on your suction cup too hard, that can happen. You have to watch out for windows that are already cracked.
• The wind is more irritating than dangerous. If it’s too windy, when you scrub and squeegee, instead of the water running down the window, the water droplets fly back up. People don’t like that. But yes, the wind can also catch you off-guard and send you spinning away from the building, and then you smash back into it and half a gallon of water spills out of your bucket. But you’ll be okay.
• Some people actually get up and run away, like I’m a terrorist or they just saw Superman or something.
