The Works: Anatomy of a City [Review]
Tags: crosswalk, economic development corporation, fertilizer, infrastructure, interesting facts, kate ascher, new york city, pneumatic tube, solid waste, streets maps
The Works: Anatomy of a City
I just finished reading The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher, former vice president of New York City Economic Development Corporation. The book is a beautiful compendium of description of New York City’s guts, covering moving people and freight, providing power and communication, keeping the city clean, and what the city may look like in the future. The Works is well organized, moving from more general ideas and examples to really specific examples. The book is also a pleasure to read. The Works is full of infographics, cross-sectios of streets, maps, illustrations, historic photographs, and charts. It is also full of really interesting facts, like the following description of the pedestrian crosswalk signals in New York with push buttons:
Some 3,250 or so of these buttons remain in New York City, but fewer than a quarter of them actually work. The cost of removing the deactivated ones is high (roughly $400 per intersection), so they remain – a testament to the level of control by man over machine that many New Yorkers might wish still existed.
Another fascinating section describes the city’s historic pneumatic tube mail network. According to Ascher, the pneumatic mail system could send 5 canisters an hour at 30 miles per hour, to deliver nearly 95,000 letters daily.
I also learned that about half of the city’s solid waste from sewage is turned into pellets for fertilizer.
If you love cities, you will probably love this book. You can proudly put it on your coffee table and hope that your guests not only enjoy browsing through it, but also learn something, too.
