HOW SING (cont'd)

by Cynthia MacGregor

(cont'd from yesterday)

Of course, the Empire State Building didn’t spring up just like that. The city worked its way up slowly. The Empire Building was preceded by several others notable for their height. There was the Woolworth Building, constructed entirely of materials that cost five and ten cents each. Then there was the Cry Slur building, constructed by racists. And finally the Empire State. Much later came the World Trade Center. And other cities were having similar growth spurts. It was as if someone had fed the cities hormones.

In some cities, people still lived in houses, but in most cities, people lived in apartments. And construction was done with ever less durable materials. Even apartment-dwellers who lived alone never had to feel lonely—they could always hear their neighbors’ voices. If neighbor John sneezed, neighbor Joe would call out, “Gesundheit!” It got so that folks were afraid to sing in the shower, lest their neighbors send the local papers a review of their singing. This was known as the How Sing crisis. I don’t want to say what these walls are made of, but the next time there’s a building boom, I’m buying stock in Kimberly Clark.

Apartment buildings were getting taller than ever, to the extent that people in apartments on the upper levels of buildings had to use the “high altitude instructions” on cake mix boxes. To lure more tenants, apartment buildings offered more amenities, such as a doorman and/or a concierge. The latter is a French borrow and is a helpful building employee who can get you a tailor, a taxi, a perfect scone, an out-of-town newspaper—everything but a date for Saturday night.

But not everyone lived in either an urban or rural environment. There was a huge population shift to the suburbs, especially in the era immediately following WWII. Wanting the relative quiet and solitude they had left behind when they moved to the city, urbanites flocked in droves to the suburbs, making them, of course, almost as crowded.

The fifties were a time of terror, when The Red Menace faced us everywhere. Suburbanites built bomb shelters in their back yards or created them in their basements. Books about equipping your basement for post-holocaust survival became best cellars.
Now that housing has spread outward and grown upward, down into the ground is the only place left to go…even if we no longer are worried about the rushin’ menace. The last great migration may be not suburban but subterranean. (If you break that word down, “terranean” is an adjective form of “terror” and “sub” is, of course, a kind of sandwich, also known as a “hero” or “hoagie” or “grinder,” so the whole thing refers to people who are phobically petrified of sandwiches.) As these sandwich-fearing people move under the earth, we’ll need a people-moving system and an air-delivery system; right now we need the inventor who can come up with the systems we need. Where is he?

Or maybe he is Where. After all, Howe and Watt were great inventors of the past. Maybe Where is the great inventor of the future.

And of course, Who’s on first.