Month: January 2024

Underground Wiring That Never Happened

Early in the history of telephones, the state of New York very nearly required all telephone and telegraph wiring to be underground. If the rest of the nation had followed, we might have had a much more attractive landscape today.

A bill to compel telegraph and telephone companies in cities to place their wires underground has passed to its third reading in the New York State Senate. It provides that after March, 1885, no wires or poles shall be permitted above ground, and as it is very likely to become a law, the officers of the companies interested will probably be obliged to set themselves at work in earnest to devise some unexceptionable means of laying and using subterranean lines. The Western Union Telegraph Company has taken the lead, and in a few months the two thousand wires which now enter its main building on Broadway will probably all be concealed beneath the surface. One of the principal difficulties in the way of burying electric-wires seems to be the imperfect character of the means of insulation. now in use. At present gutta-percha is the material most available, but this is not very durable, and is, besides, melted by a comparatively slight heat, so that it runs down, and leaves the wires exposed. In the streets of a city so compact and so modern as New York there are many sources of heat, which may injure cables placed near them, and the pipes of the steam-heating companies have occasioned the destruction of many insulated wires buried near by. One of the greatest needs of electrical practice is a better insulating substance than any yet employed, and the discoverer of such a material will reap an ample reward. The telephone lines, owing to the much greater sensitiveness of the instruments used upon them, are generally assumed to need more careful insulation than even those of the telegraph, but a singular story has been reported in one or two of the technical journals, to the effect that a certain “line-man” in a western city, while intoxicated, carried some wires without insulation, simply securing them to the posts by iron staples, and that these wires were found just as serviceable, even in rainy weather, as those running over glass insulators; so that the company who employed this unconscious inventor afterwards built many miles of uninsulated line, and used it with perfect success.

—American Architect and Building News, March 10, 1883.

Frederick Bigger on Housing and City Planning, 1938

These are the ideas that drove planning in our cities through the middle of the twentieth century. Experience would seem to show that they were exactly backwards, but the arguments presented here will help us understand why so much of twentieth-century urban planning was driven by a need to make people do things they did not want to do.

City Planning as a Determinant of the Location and Character of City Housing Projects of All Kinds.

Abstract of an address by Frederick Bigger, A.I.A., Architect and City Planner, Pittsburgh, at the Conference on Planning, Richmond, May 4, 1936.

There are significant differences between housing projects which raise questions of importance to the city planner.

1. In the first category are housing projects designed to be sold off, dwelling by dwelling, to future individual owners, who are unlikely to preserve the wholesome characteristics of the original unified design.

2. In the second category are projects designed as entities, but rented to many individual families either as a long term high class investment, or as a venture of speculation. In this case, the well-being of the occupants will undoubtedly receive greater consideration.

3. In the third category are housing projects of limited dividend corporations or housing authorities, which have social objectives and restrict their rents; in theory, permanent assets in a city plan. These projects need to be safeguarded by separation from neighborhoods affected by commercial manipulation.

There have been too many cases in which lack of barriers brought changes in zoning regulations, and damaging commercial frontages.

4. In the fourth category are similar projects owned by the occupants of the houses, which require similar protection.

The planner must know whether a project is to be split up for sale or held, whether it is to be merely a profit and loss commodity, whether a social objective is contemplated and whether or not it is owned by the occupants of the dwellings.

If one holds a title deed but is obligated by a mortgage on his property, it is necessary to realize that this privilege of complete control over his property is limited.

If a project is not owned by its occupants, the need for better living and the demand for profit are conflicting forces.

The planner is necessarily controlled by the expenses incidental to the basic cost of the project, such as public utilities, landscaping, etc. If the designer is influenced only by the profit motive, he will locate his housing project so that it can be subsidized by the existing community through an earlier provision of utilities and schools, though another location might be better from the standpoint of the city plan.

Housing designed for sale to individual owners, and large-scale housing on a speculative basis, promise no permanence and no stable contribution to improved housing. The other categories offer possibilities of greater stability and continuity of existence. Community planners must therefore favor the latter groups.

A general amount of open space is a basic element in planning a socially desirable housing project in which financial values are to be permanent. The town planner must consider these fundamental points as of greater significance than the more technical aspects of studies of population and economics.

—The Octagon, August, 1936 (PDF).

Building Wilmerding

The town of Wilmerding in the Turtle Creek valley outside Pittsburgh was designed as an ideal industrial town for the employees of Westinghouse. Here is a note on its progress from the Philadelphia Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, April 17, 1889.

At Wilmerding, near Wall’s station on the Pennsylvania Railroad, work is being pushed rapidly on the Westinghouse air brake shops, previously reported; and plans are ready for the new hotel and club house; also for a number of dwellings. Plot 21, in the plan, is reserved for a park, which will be laid out in drives and a pavilion, band-stand, etc., etc., erected. Plot 22 will be the site for the club-house and hotel, before reported. On plot, No, 5, near the works, Mr. T. W. Welsh, superintendent of the Air Brake Works, will erect a magnificent residence. Plot 26 will be covered with a handsome school house, supplied with every modern convenience and improvement. On plot 4 the Pennsylvania Railroad will erect a large depot and waiting-rooms. Of the 1200 workmen, now employed, fully one-fourth have bought lots from the Improvement Company, and will erect dwellings in the near future, and as many of the employees, are unable to secure lots, the original limit will probably be extended to include the Turtle Creek side. Six hundred and twenty-five feet of frontage on the Monongahela river, near Port Perry, have been bought by the company, in order to supply the new city with water, to be pumped into a reservoir 260 feet above the river, and then piped to Wilmerding. Every dwelling in the city will be furnished with the Westinghouse incandescent light, natural gas, and water. About $4,000,000 will be expended within the limits of 600 acres. It is also stated that a syndicate has been formed to erect a large glass works on the opposite side of Turtle Creek, and that two of the largest glass works in Pittsburg are negotiating for sites on which to erect buildings for their works. This deal has not progressed sufficiently to give names. Mr. Charles Payne is President of the Wilmerding Improvement Company.