My Hometown and Its Fate (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Apr. 12, 2010 -- I was in my hometown, New York City, over the weekend. Everybody, it seemed, was outside swarming in the streets and the parks in perfect strolling weather. The magnolias and dogwoods were bursting. Anything highlighted in gold leaf was all burnished up. The city's sparkling physical condition was due of course to the spectacular flow-rate of money pouring through Wall Street the past twenty years -- notwithstanding the big burp of 2008.

New York has not been in better shape in my lifetime -- even the former bad districts like the Bowery were buffed up -- but it was hard not to brood on its destiny. You could read the blocks of buildings like a chronological chart. They reflected the very sudden dynamism of this nation, the in-pouring of the continent's stupendous wealth in a very short span of decades turning Manhattan island into an urban colossus that, by 1920, stunned even the city-dwelling intellectuals of Europe.

The city exploded vertically in a very few decades when Thomas Edison's combined engineering-and-business genius made it possible to deliver electricity to every block. We'd spent the period just after the Civil War putting up limestone palaces and brick heaps as grand as the ones in Paris and London (and about the same size), and then from about 1890-on we tore them all down when the elevator made it possible to rent hundreds of apartments or office suites on the same real-estate "footprint" where there used to be only dozens of rentable units.

You could read the history of our energy resources in the buildings, too. Until about the 1920s, the buildings were heated with coal. The bulk and inconvenience of coal was mitigated by hordes of low-paid immigrants who could wrangle the stuff into basements and shovel it into furnaces in rotating work-shifts. This made it possible in, say 1908, to run a building with over a hundred apartments in it. My mother and father grew up in 20-story buildings like this.

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