New York Diary

It's So Much Cooler In Cross-Section

For my birthday, I recieved a surprising number of awesome gifts. (Surprising only because I thought I was old enough not to be GETTING gifts, you understand.) Somewhere in the midst of all my fantastic edible, imbibable, and readable loot was Kate Ascher's The Works: Anatomy of a City. This is riveting reading. I could tell you all the amazing things I've learned so far--but then again, you could just go read the book yourself. I've decided to pare it down and offer instead only the three coolest things. Here they are.

1. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge is so long and so tall that its builders had to account for the effects of the curvature of the earth when designing it. That's right: cables strung at the top of the bridge had to be significantly, noticeably longer than cables strung at the bottom of the bridge, because, you know, the world is not flat.

2. Mail used to be shuttled around the city at a speed of 30 miles per hour or more ---through underground pneumatic tubes. The pneumatic post connected Post Offices on Manhattan Island (as well as one in Brooklyn). As late as the 1950s, canisters filled with 500 - 600 letters would shoot through the city faster than they could have moved by rail, carriage, or foot. (But then came the car, which replaced the pneumatic post. And then came rush hour. I doubt the cars move at 30 mph these days; perhaps we could reinstate the old, still-extant tube system...)

3. Those of you who grew up in a place that was not Florida may already have realized this, but some cities have steam pipelines. New York is one of those cities. And this was news to me.

I knew, of course, that radiators get hot when we let in the steam. Obviously, it had to come from somewhere. But I figured that every building must have its own furnace or boiler room, the way my house did in college. Well, I was wrong. Get this: along with its subways, electricity lines, pneumatic mail tubes, telephone lines, and a million other buried systems, New York has an underground network of steam pipes (some as much as three feet in diameter). The Met Museum and the Empire State building are heated exclusively by piped-in steam. Laundrettes use the steam in creative ways: every morning, they just open a wall tube and use the hot steam to press suits, use the blotter (for stain removal), and even power the dry cleaner. New York City hospitals sanitize their instruments in steam rooms that tap into the central system, too. There's a whole unique economy in New York which is predicated on the existence of running, ready-to-go, on-demand steam. It's taken for granted the way you, dear reader, take for granted the electricity that you can turn on and off or the hot-and-cold running water in your morning shower.

New York's steam is administered by ConEd, our local electricity supplier; we pay for use the same way we pay for every other utility (though, since landlords are required to heat all New York apartments and to pay the heating bills, no normal renter ever sees an invoice for steam). (Incidentally, it makes perfect sense that our power company is the same as our steam company. When we consider how coal plants generate power, for example, we can see that you have to burn a lot of coal to move the turbines (that are connected to bundles of wire running through magnetic fields) to generate electricity. Given that setup, we may as well run big water pipes through the same burning-hot chamber, while we're at it. This, of course, will turn the water to steam, and from there it's a short step to piping the steam into the city alongside the power we're already generating.)

Cities are cool, no?

posted by Skay @ 12:54 AM