by Jane Jacobs
Growers devote a good deal of time to breeding new varieties and are able to protect their creations with patents. They also attempt to produce flowers out of season. Last year, several growers competed with early chrysanthemums from California by fooling their plants into thinking autumn had come. Every day, for a few hours, they shut out the sun with heavy black canopies. It worked!
The whole flower business is based on supply and demand, with no set prices, and the supply must start far, far ahead of the demand. Occasionally, among all the hundreds of varieties, it is impossible to find a fairly commonplace flower, and a florist may hunt in vain for a dozen white roses or yellow snapdragon.
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*1 It’s hard not to see these careful depictions of everyday commerce as Jacobs’s primal scene, the original inspiration for much later work. The comings and goings of the sellers throughout the day foreshadow the famous “intricate sidewalk ballet” outside her front door on Hudson Street from Death and Life (50–54), while the relationships between florists, restaurants, actors, basket makers, and others are an early version of what, in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she would call “symbiotic nests of suppliers and producers” (119).
*2 Unfortunately, the Hindenburg was itself not long for the world. Just a few months after this piece appeared, on May 6, 1937, the airship caught fire as it came in to its port at Lakeland, New Jersey, killing thirty-six people and bringing the era of passenger travel by zeppelin to an abrupt end.
Caution, Men Working
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CUE, MAY 18, 1940
The lights of New York are the city’s jewels, but her buttons and hooks and eyes are the squares and circles of metal that dot asphalt and sidewalks. Nobody knows how many manhole and service box covers there are in the city. Nobody even knows how many varieties there are. Companies long out of business or swallowed in mergers still have initials and devices on the lowly iron waffles.
Probably the oldest of the covers on the streets are those of the Croton Water Company, now part of the city water supply, whose system ran down Amsterdam Avenue from 173rd Street to the reservoir at 93rd. The covers, with their elaborate iron center pattern—two stars, and “Croton Water” in block letters—date from Civil War days. One of the few series of covers to bear dates also runs along Amsterdam Avenue: a design of interrupted spokes carrying the legend, “DPW Sewers 1874.”
The covers never are stolen, never disappear, and rarely break. Slowly they do wear smooth or begin to rattle in their sockets. Probably not more than a few hundred, all told, are replaced in Manhattan each year, but as the city grows and the underground “spaghetti”—the name used for the maze of pipes and cables by those who design and install them—becomes more complicated, new covers with new and varying designs and letters are added to the accumulation of nearly a century. During President Hoover’s administration, a National Conference for Standardization of Manholes was held, but nothing came of it.The lights of New York are the city’s jewels, but her buttons and hooks and eyes are the squares and circles of metal that dot asphalt and sidewalks.
Despite the almost hopeless variety, the city naturalist, keeping an eye on the letters of the covers, can tell whether he is following the course of one of the great underground rivers, whether he is on the trail of a main stream of electricity, or gas, or one of the tributaries, whether brine to chill the produce markets or steam to heat the skyscrapers is running under his feet. Or, if he stands on the right corner—southwest corner of Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street for instance—he can feel beneath his feet the shudder of five hundred letters in a pneumatic tube, clipping along at thirty miles an hour on their way to an uptown post office.*1
New York City’s engineers are the world’s leading research workers and experimenters on manhole covers, and other cities usually follow their lead in weight and design specifications. For the past three years the city has been experimenting on silent manhole covers, non-clankers. Clanking is responsible for most of the replacements. On corners where buses stop or the main stream of traffic turns, the whirling wheels, catching the manhole off center, give it a twist and eventually it becomes a clanker with possibilities of becoming a tiddly-wink.
Up Washington Street, as far north as King, is a row of manhole covers set about six hundred feet apart, marked “USTD.” Underneath them is the pneumatic tube system of the United States Treasury Department, carrying papers from the Customs House at Bowling Green to the Appraisers’ Stores on Varick Street. Like most of the conduits on the periphery of the island, the lower Washington Street system is under tidewater. When this part of the Treasury tubes was built, it could be worked on only at low tide, for three hours a day.
The covers saying “W-U-TEL CO” mark another pneumatic tube system of downtown Manhattan.*2 That one is easy to guess, but how about “NYM&NT,” “ECSCOLTD,” “CT&ES CO,” “HPFS,” “MRC,” and “BPM”?
The New York Mail and Newspaper Tube Company manholes, one to every three or four blocks, string for fifty-two miles along the city streets, from 125th Street down to the tip of the island and over to Brooklyn, linking the main post office to the branch stations. Spaced between the manholes, to facilitate the spotting of leaks, are service boxes with six-inch square metal covers from which the NYM&NT initials are soon worn. The mail tube covers are replaced at the rate of only about one a year, but once during a skyscraper construction job, a heavy truckload of steel broke every cover on its route and had to be trailed by a mail tube truck with a load of new manhole tops.
HPFS for High Pressure Fire Service can be seen only south of 34th Street, where the Department of Water Supply provides pumping stations and additional pressure to be used in case of fire. The very large manhole covers with an unequivocal “FIRE” are part of the Fire Department’s alarm system.
Those little rectangles, marked BPM, set in the corner of the sidewalk, are under the jurisdiction of the Borough President of Manhattan, and cover the city’s sunken surveying monuments.
The ubiquitous CT&ES CO castings, Consolidated Telegraph and Electrical Subway Company, mark the course of electric wires. Their abundance is astonishing, evocative of the city’s probable appearance if the wires they cover were all strung up on poles. About six years ago, when Edison’s conviction that the wires should be put underground was hooted at, he countered with the suggestion that the water and sewage pipes be carried overhead on crossers too. Among the first wires to go underground were those of Maiden Lane. During a few hours of the installation, the moist earth of the street conducted a current, mildly electrifying the horses that passed by.
Some of the early electric company manhole covers were square, but now, like most of the other manhole covers of the city, almost all the CT&ES CO covers are round; they’re easier to cast and they can’t slip edgewise through their holes. The electricity manhole covers, designed to carry a twenty-ton truck, weigh 475 pounds.
Manhattan’s share of the city’s 10,000,000 miles of telephone wire is harbored in the ducts of the Empire City Subway Company, so 10,000 square and round covers marked with a cryptic ECSCOLTD mean “telephone.” When the lead-covered cables are installed, they are inched along their underground duct banks with pushers and pullers, and are spliced where they emerge at the manholes.
The Gas Company has no manholes proper, but it has a multiplicity of doors to the underground—12,091 drip boxes, 5,443 main valve boxes, and 150,000 service valve boxes in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens. Those little iron-bound concrete squares, imprinted with a “G,” that dot the sidewalks are the surface indications of a gas tributary. If, in an emergency, a building’s gas supply must be cut off, the concrete cover is smashed and a valve turned with a four-foot-long key. Iron covers might corrode and stick at harrowing times.
The only system to bolt down all of its manhole covers is the Steam Company, not for fear of geysers but because most of the covers are out near the center of the street where high-speed traffic would rock and wear them. Th
e 3,000 manholes, marked NYS CO or NYS CORP, are all in Manhattan, from the Battery to 96th Street, and First to Ninth Avenues. In this area there are also 20,000 square valve boxes, marked NYS. The steam main encasements are square, with a twelve-inch pipe entered in three feet of asbestos insulation, tile, and concrete. Even so, on cold or rainy days, dank little clouds of water vapor float from the edges of the metal covers. The Steam Company has used manholes only since 1925; before that time they dug whenever they wanted to get at their conduits.
To chill the refrigerators of the great wholesale produce and meat markets, cold brine travels underground, 0°F on its way from the cooling plant, 5°F on its way back. East of Hudson Street, from Fourteenth on the north to Horatio on the south, the heart of the meat distribution center, are the manholes of the Manhattan Refrigerating Co., bearing the initials MR CO on their covers. In the vegetable district, especially on Greenwich Street, between Franklin and Duane, the pavement is spotted with MRC irons, covers of the Merchants Refrigerating Company.
The city’s new sewer manhole covers will say “BPM,” meaning “Borough President, Manhattan.” For the past thirty-four years they have said “DPW Manhattan.” The Star Heads, those openwork drainage covers starred in the center, used to say “Dept. of Public Works, Borough of Manhattan,” but the new ones will be streamlined, without the star and with “BPM” on the back. Some of the oldest sewer covers merely say “S,” some “BS.” The southernmost manhole cover on the island in Battery Park bears simply an “S.”
The city’s enormous water supply tunnels are as much as 850 feet below the surface, and these torrents through Manhattan rock are not punctured from the street. But the mains that tap the underground rivers, and the mains that tap the mains that tap the mains that tap the rivers are given access to the surface by 24,827 manholes. Except for the covers antedating the city water supply department, most of these are labeled “DWS.”
Of course the most familiar initials are on the transit line manhole covers, giving access to the lines feeding the power cables of the underground trains. “BMT,” “IRT,” “NYRT,” they all follow the route of the subways and branch off to the power houses, far to the east and west side of town.*3 Even the vanishing streetcars have their manholes; the Third Avenue Railway system lines are riddled with covers so that their contact rail may be cleaned.
Like everything else in the world that has been made by man or nature in more than one design, manhole covers have their collectors. At the Municipal Building they speak with awe of a caller who had, as a hobby, made elaborate full-sized tracings of scores of the iron squares and circles. Even so, his collection was not yet complete; he had only made a beginning.
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*1 The U.S. Post Office’s pneumatic tube network was one of many such systems built in New York and other cities around the world. First installed in 1897 and run by private companies, the NYC mail tube system by the early twentieth century featured twenty-seven miles of pipe connecting twenty-three post offices. The tubes sat four to six feet below the street, and each canister held up to five hundred letters. A run from Bowling Green, at the southern tip of the island, to Manhattanville at the northern end of the system took about half an hour. Automobile delivery chipped away at tube service, but the tubes survived until 1953, when the final canister went whooshing beneath the street. Since then, most if not all of the system has been dug up and lost during routine infrastructure repairs.
*2 Well known to Jacobs’s readers in 1937 as a way to communicate person to person, the Western Union Telegraph Company survives today largely as a way to send money. Almost as fantastic as the idea of vast subterranean mazes of pneumatic tubes crisscrossing Manhattan is the idea that Western Union operators once tapped messages out on the “Victorian Internet” and sent them out along a great network of telegraph wires to stations far and wide, from which they were printed and delivered to their intended recipients by horse, bicycle, car, truck, and pneumatic tube.
*3 Before the New York subway system was consolidated, a host of independent companies operated various lines in the city. These acronyms were the commonly used handles for three of the companies in existence during the mid-1930s: the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT), Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), and New York Rapid Transit (NYRT). All three of these lines would be taken over in 1940 by the city’s Board of Transportation, which already operated the Independent Subway System (IND). In 1953 New York State created the New York City Transit Authority to run the entire system.
30,000 Unemployed and 7,000 Empty Houses in Scranton, Neglected City
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THE IRON AGE, MARCH 25, 1943
While manpower and housing shortages cause problems in war production centers, there exist in the U.S. 82 paradoxical industrial areas of unemployment and empty houses. These areas of surplus men and homes include some of the best established industrial cities of the country, with trained labor, transportation, and economically sound locations.
The strange neglect of these areas appears even stranger and more tragic upon examination of their World War II case histories. As an example, the case of Scranton, Pennsylvania, is presented here. In many ways its experience in attempting to get war work and the frustration it has encountered parallel that of other depressed areas. It is, however, atypical in that it is believed to have made the hardest fight to channel its idle labor into war production.
In Scranton men are now applying for women’s jobs.*1 In the greater Scranton area, with a population of 300,000, there are more than 30,000 unemployed and 7,000 empty homes. More than 20,000 men have entered the armed forces, one of the highest per capita rates in the country. Another 20,000 or more men and women have left for Bridgeport, Baltimore and other already crowded war boom cities. They send back to their families in Scranton more than half a million dollars a month.
Heightening this paradox, the War Department, in awarding about 25 percent of its contracts for camouflage nets to Scranton plants, called the city one of the best locations in the country for war production, well protected in the mountains, near points of embarkation, with good transportation, good fuel and good labor. “Economically,” said the War Department spokesman, “there are few like it.”
The veins of anthracite coal in Lackawanna County, of which Scranton is the seat, are running out. During the last decade 25,000 miners’ jobs have disappeared, leaving only 12,000 employed in coal mining. The manufacturing plants already in existence in the area are working nearly at capacity, but the great need of Scranton and its idle labor is new plants. This was the conclusion reached by the Federal Anthracite Coal Commission, appointed in January 1942, by the President.*2 The Commission commented as follows:
This investigation has shown that the anthracite area has substantial possibilities for industrial expansion. At a time when most manufacturing areas of the nation are driving desperately to meet shortages of manpower and to build new housing and other community facilities, it is in the national interest that the industrial resources of the anthracite area be utilized. It is strongly recommended that the war agencies of the Federal Government give careful consideration to the suitability of the area for the location of necessary war plants, particularly those for the production of aluminum, zinc, synthetic ammonia, explosives, castings, forgings, armor plate, machine parts, aircraft parts, tank parts and ammunition.
In April this report was sent to the Army, Navy and WPB by the President, together with a letter urging that they act on the Commission’s findings.*3 In June another Presidential letter was sent to Secretaries Stimson and Knox and to Donald Nelson, WPB chief, asking what had been done and urging action.
To date, the only concrete result has been the location of a piston ring factory, employing 400 on a shift, obtained over opposition that provides a strange tale.
The director of the Scranton Chamber of Commerce and the editor of its morning newspaper, hearing that the Air Corps had requested greater piston ring production from th
e U.S. Hammered Piston Ring Co. of Sterling, New Jersey, persuaded the company to build the necessary new plant in Scranton. After much battling with the WPB Plant Facilities section, which wanted to locate the plant in Baltimore as a part of American Hammered Piston Ring Co., the Scranton site was finally approved. Approval proved to be only tentative, however; the company was abruptly asked for a stiff production guarantee which it felt unable to meet and the plant building was canceled. This created so much protest that the plant was relocated in Scranton, under management of the Silkening Mfg. Co. of Philadelphia. It will be ready for operation in June.
After many months of cajoling the WPB’s Plant Facilities section and its aluminum and magnesium branch, Scranton was promised, in June of last year, an aluminum extrusion plant to employ 2,000 on a shift. It was to have been located at Harding, between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. This approval again proved to be only tentative. WPB reported that engineers who drilled at the proposed site said the ground would be unable to stand the pounding of the machinery because of quicksand between the rock strata.
Scranton hired Dr. Arthur Casagrande, soil mechanics expert of Harvard University, to make drillings and a survey. He reported no quicksand to be present and reported that he found no reason why the site was unsuitable. When this report was submitted to WPB, it replied that new arrangements had already been made for the plant. The plant was assigned to Erie, one of the cities of acute housing shortage (though the government has built several housing projects there).