It’s a difficult time for the Luddites among us, hemmed in as we are on all sides by technology’s remorseless advance. Facebook, iPhones, Tumblr, YouTube, MP3s, DVDs, HDTV, Bluetooth, Twitter, Skype, Meebo. Touch-screens in taxi cabs, wireless on airplanes, radio tags on clothing labels, GPS in your dashboard. The first web browser hit the market in 1995, and it seems we’ve been running ever since.
Given that, it’s perhaps worth pausing for a moment to ponder the fate of past innovations lest we get carried away in what a certain former Fed chairman once termed our “irrational exuberance.” After all, new technologies are rarely unalloyed blessings. Even leaving aside the more obviously dubious advances (splitting the atom, anyone?), history is replete with tales of seemingly great leaps forward that ultimately turned out to be little more than a sideways shuffle. The TV dinner, for instance, was considered something of a marvel in its day. To a lot of people, the Laser Disc sounded like a really swell idea.
Which is not to suggest, of course, that the march of progress has been all illusory. It’s simply to say that it can be difficult to predict exactly which developments will endure. There are, however, certain innovations that over the years have been tried, tested and found worthy. Advances that so long ago wormed their way into the fabric of our fair city that they seem today like simple facts of life. Century-old technologies that, bizarrely enough, have yet to be improved upon. A few small, archaic slices of New York for the fusty sentimentalists in us to cling to. For example:
Pneumatic Mail Tubes
In 1897 the Post Office installed an underground network of pneumatic tubes connecting some two dozen branches in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Through it flew about 95,000 pieces a day — at the time roughly one third of the city’s mail. Today we have the Internet — a vastly superior network of tubes which nonetheless somehow doesn’t seem quite as awesome. Chalk up another win for the physical immediacy of the analog system!
There are a few places around the city, however, where pneumatic tubes are still in use — the main branch of the New York Public Library, for instance. When you submit a call slip at the library, it’s sent via pneumatic tube to the Rose Reading Room, where the slips are then sorted and sent out again to the building’s eight levels of stacks. One time we spent all afternoon putting in book requests and then racing upstairs to see if we could beat the tube there. We’ve been asked not to come back. You, though, should go and check it out.
The Subway
When a fire torched a signal relay room in the Chambers Street subway station in January of 2005, early reports suggested it could take as long as five years to get the affected lines fully up and running again. As it turns out, this was something of an overstatement — trains were back on their normal schedules within a few months. Why all the initial pessimism? Well, when your subway system runs on seventy-plus-year-old circuitry and fixed-block signaling methods developed nearly a 150 years ago, it can be hard to sort out just what’s going on.
New York tracks its subway trains’ positions using essentially the same relay technology that’s been in place since the city’s first line opened in 1904. Also invented in 1904 — radio tubes, safety razors and the ice cream cone. In other words, it’s probably time for the MTA to do some updating. And they’re trying — as you might have noticed (as you stood outside waiting for the shuttle bus to take you from the Morgan stop to Bedford Avenue), the L recently underwent an overhaul, switching to a computerized control system complete with fancy in-station displays announcing when trains are scheduled to arrive. Yes, friends, progress is on the march. One train line down, 25 to go.
Manually-Operated Elevators
You know how when you drop a beer in a bar and you’re standing there frozen in mute horror at what you’ve done and then from behind the bar comes a bar-back or someone with a mop or a broom or some towels and before you know it they’re down on the floor in front of you cleaning up the mess but it’s your mess and you should be the one down there cleaning only instead it’s this person and they’ve beaten you to it and now really there’s nothing left for you to do except shuffle there awkwardly and so in a last-ditch, half-assed attempt to be helpful you pick up a handful of cocktail napkins and offer them to them lamely?
Yes, well, this is more or less how we feel on our occasional rides in the city’s manually-operated elevators. You step in, give the operator the floor number, he (it seems almost always to be a he) slides the gate shut, pulls the lever, and up you rise, all the time feeling that the whole business is probably something you ought really to be able to handle on your own. On the other hand, there is something delightfully old-world and genteel about it all. “Floor Six, Mr. Bonislawski?” “Indeed.”
Bike Messengers
Given our current state of digital interconnectedness, it seems a bit crazy that there could be a scenario in which the most efficient way to move a piece of information between two points would be to hand a document cylinder to a guy with a bike and tell him to pedal as fast as he can. And yet, as anyone who’s recently been run down by one can attest, bike messengers are still very much with us — weaving between taxis, blowing through red lights, speeding the wrong way down one-way streets. Like David Broder or the horseshoe crab, they’ve managed somehow to carry on in their steady way despite being beset on all sides by evolutionary advances.
Bike messengers began popping up in the 1860s, almost immediately after the first bicycles arrived on the scene. Since then the basic idea has stayed pretty much the same. Even their commonly preferred choice of equipment suggests a certain disdain for the modern age. A fixed gear and no brakes? How much lower-tech can you get?
The Brooklyn Bridge
If you’re ever up for having your mind boggled, try taking a stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge and considering for a moment the following question: How the hell did they do that?
If you want the answer, you can find it more or less on the bronze plaques lining the bridge’s pedestrian walkway. For those disinclined to make the trip, it went something like this: Giant, bottomless wooden cylinders (caissons) filled with compressed air were sunk to the river bottom where crews of men worked, digging into the mud until they found bedrock for the bridge’s foundation. Then the caissons were filled with cement and the bridge’s stone towers were built atop them. That done, men went to work several hundred feet in the air spinning the thousands of miles of cable needed to string the bridge together.
The truly impressive thing about all this, of course, is that it happened 135 years ago. It’s not like they had a line of backhoes digging down in those caissons. It was just a bunch of Irish guys with shovels and pickaxes. Even more amazing — we’re still using the thing! In two years the street outside my apartment has been torn up and repaved no less than four times. The Brooklyn Bridge on the other hand, just keeps on keeping on — a model of the cutting edge circa 1870.
Rooftop Water Towers
There’s something delightfully archaic about New York’s rooftop water towers. Huge barrels topped with broad cone lids and perched atop steel-lattice legs, they look more like movie props hauled off the back-lot of some turn-of-the-century period piece than an enduring part of the modern cityscape. And yet, here they are — hundreds of them dotting the skyline like strange wooden rocket ships.
They first appeared in the city in the 1890s as a means of providing steady water pressure to the higher floors of tall Manhattan buildings. Some 120 years later, they’re still being built for the same purpose, and still being built (by either of two century-old local companies — Isseks Brothers or the Rosenwach Tank Company) in essentially the same way. In fact, given the recent building boom, they’re as ubiquitous as ever. While most younger cities have since turned to electric pump systems to service their tall buildings, New York is still going with that most basic of technologies — gravity. Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
Coal-Fired Brick Ovens
There are pizza aficionados out there who will insist that the only way to cook a decent slice is in a coal-fired brick oven. Only a coal-fired oven, they say, can reach the temperatures (upwards of 800 degrees) needed to give a pie the proper crunchiness and texture. Only a coal-fired oven, they say, can impart to the crust that necessary hint of char. Only a coal-fired oven, they say… well, we don’t actually know what they say here, we always stop listening before that point. They could be right, though. After all, take a look at almost any list of the city’s best pizzerias, and a good chunk of them — John’s, Patsy’s, Lombardi’s, Grimaldi’s — will be coal-burning spots.
Unfortunately for such pizza-lovers (but quite fortunately, on the other hand, for the aforementioned pizza places) coal-fired ovens have for decades now been illegal to build in New York City (tragic victims of the 1972 Clean Air Act). And so, only those few pizzerias with pre-existing coal ovens (a recent count put the number in Manhattan at about 14) are around to deliver the taste so sought after in your more discerning pizza circles. Of course, when it comes to connoisseurship, nothing heightens desire like a bit of scarcity.
The Shaved Ice Guy
Of the many street vendors to be found pushing their carts about the city, there are none more old school than the shaved ice guy. Your hot dog carts come equipped with generator hookups, your kebab stands have entire grills at their disposal, even pretzel vendors have the little rotating wire hangers they use to show off their wares. The shaved ice guy, on the other hand, has nothing but a couple of bottles of flavored syrup, a chisel and a block of ice wrapped in a cloth to keep it from melting. He’s the last word in no-frills comestibles.
As a child I was a big fan of the Little House on the Prairie books. There’s a scene I recall from one of them of men cutting blocks of ice from a frozen lake and storing them under sawdust to keep for use in warm weather. Little did I suspect that years later I would be buying snacks from an old man employing essentially the same refrigeration technique. •
