HOW SING

by Cynthia MacGregor



In the early days of our country, everything was rural—even the cities. Houses often overlooked pastureland, and the milk delivered every morning wasn’t processed in plants (e.g. geranium, see chapter on Botany) but at the dairy farm up the street. Therefore, wherever you looked, you saw cattle, a process that cowed many city folk but guaranteed your milk was always past your eyes.

This tendency to have rural-looking cities confused many people, who didn’t know if they wanted to go back home to the farm or if they already were there. But it eliminated many of the urban stress factors that sent their latter-day descendants screaming to psychiatrists, sweat lodges, and feng shui practitioners. (“Feng shui” is pidgin Chinese for “my footwear have long teeth.”)

Living in the city was peaceful in those days when the bulls had horns but the taxis didn’t—in fact, there weren’t any taxis at all, which cut down considerably on rainy day frustrations. You got awfully wet, but you didn’t get into a fight with three other people who claimed it was their cab, they had seen it first. You just walked home and caught pneumonia. Or, if you had had it before, you caught the same old monia. Medical doctors are cheaper than shrinks (and Sigmund Fraud hadn’t yet come along and invented “the talking cure” anyhow), and pneumonia leaves no visible scars, unlike a street brawl, so altogether things were better…at least for the survivors.

City life in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s was very different from what it is now. You’ve seen pictures of old Nieu Amsterdam (not to be confused with new Old Amsterdam)—did you see a single skyscraper? Subway kiosk? Mugger? Three-card monte dealer?

But the population grew, often in booms. (The booms were caused by the population exploding.) This led to the expression, “Boom or bust.” The latter half of this expression was especially applicable in western towns, where “ladies of pleasure” plied their wares—and their underwears—more openly.

But as the population swelled (mainly from eating too many sweets), the cities also grew larger. And soon it became obvious that they had to grow upward as well as outward, or else the city limits of Boston would soon encompass Philadelphia.

The sporting goods stores were doing a brisk business in climbing equipment, bought by urban dwellers who daily hiked up and down to and from their sixth-floor apartments and eighth-floor offices. The urban gym was an unknown entity in those days—people got plenty of exercise just going up and down stairs (so called because of the goggle-eyed look people tended to get after four or five flights).

But humankind was hungry to put a man on the moon. (A century later, kids would develop the custom of mooning, but that’s not the same thing.) They thought a good leap upward from the balcony of a penthouse might do it. So taller buildings were the order of the day. (So was a ham on rye.) As more and more people aspired to live among the stars, some bought penthouses while others moved to Hollywood.

But none of this would have been possible without the original efficiency expert, Mr. Otis. Mr. Otis believed that everything should serve at least two purposes simultaneously. Also at the same time. And that includes rooms. Mr. Otis envisioned a room that would move and take people places while at the same time jamming them into a small space with a bunch of strangers, at least one of whom doesn’t practice good personal hygiene, and another of whom has just lunched on beans. Mr. Otis decided that being crammed in in this way would be great training for airplane travel, although Wilbur and Orville didn’t prove just how Wright their theories were till some time later on.

Nonetheless, Mr. Otis’s invention offered an early version of many of the thrills of airplane travel, such as wondering if you’d get out alive without the elevator crashing. It wasn’t, however, quite as much fun as a plane. There were no beverage carts to dodge on your way to the bathroom (there was also no bathroom, a definite drawback when the elevator got stuck) and there was no overhead luggage bin from which you could play drop-the-suitcase-on-an-unsuspecting-passenger. Lost luggage is seldom a problem in elevator travel, and people getting on an elevator going to the 28th floor seldom find their elevator diverted to Chinatown. These were all improvements that Wilbur and Orville’s successors added to make air travel the jolly adventure it is today. But Mr. Otis’s invention, however rudimentary, got people where they wanted to go...as long as where they wanted to go was Up or Down, and not to Hawaii or Uncle Bob’s farm in Kalamazoo.

So cities grew taller, as elevators became more and more popular. Tourists from rural areas returned home with cheap souvenirs, picture postcards, and pains in their necks from walking around constantly looking up. And many, liking the city, moved there. The cities grew taller. Elevators had to travel farther. And soon, people were packing a light snack to eat during the arduous ride up.

So high-speed elevators were invented, and express elevators, and elevators that go so quickly that your stomach is still on the third floor when the rest of your body reaches the sixty-seventh. But this enabled the construction of the Empire State Building, which was a wonderful thing for Fay Wray and the critter she made a monkey out of. Hollywood cashed in big-time.

Ah—Hollywood. Now, there’s a city that built more out than up, with the result that instead of getting stuck in elevators, people there are more likely to get stuck on freeways. The advantage is that your cell phone is more likely to work in a car that’s stuck on the freeway than in an elevator that’s stuck somewhere between 43 and 56.

(Cont'd tomw)