Isn't fully upright

Usage examples of stoops.

Kids abandoned their games and clustered in silent twos or threes against the walls between stoops, itchily impatient to return to play but cowed by the spreading aura of anticipation.

Mother was tired of sitting there with people peering at us from windows and stoops all around.

People had come out onto the stoops on both sides of our building and across the street, where they sat, the men sucking at quart bottles of ale, the women observing and frankly evaluating our efforts and our possessions.

Quick-handed little girls played jacks on the wide top step of the stoops, or skipped and dipped over chalked hopscotch patterns that blossomed on the sidewalks each morning only to become foot-smudged palimpsests by nightfall.

People who lived on upper floors where the heat was the worst allowed their kids to sleep out on fire escapes in nests of sweat-sodden pillows and sofa cushions, while the parents sat out on their stoops late into the night, fanning themselves with pieces of cardboard, and complaining sleepily about the heat.

It was like her to surrender to a caprice and come play with us, and I was proud of her youth and vivacity, but I was intensely aware of the brittle stares of other mothers sitting on their stoops, women who could never have squeezed into the swimsuits they had worn as teenagers, and who thought that those who revealed their bodies by doing so were little better than hussies.

The entire street had by now found reason to sit out on their stoops, or to stand around on the sidewalk, just having a breath of nice cold air this fine brisk evening.

The Dutch-style row houses had been chopped into pieces and misused as rooming houses for men with hot plates and ashtrays and racing forms, or floor-through apartments, where sprawling families of cousins were crammed into each level, their yards and stoops teeming with uncountable children.

The stoops lean away from the street, the distance between row houses widens to a mute canyon.

Men on stoops wrinkled new bags open just to the lips of bottles, no farther.

Two nights later nobody cared, Aeroman or Errorman was a joke, a name passed along stoops before fading from memory.

The stoops are scrubbed, the streets swept of manure and leaves and dirt.

He stoops in under the clumsy filigree of the wrought iron archway, following the path that leads up beyond the duck pond, frozen over, and the chapel, boarded up.