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buildings in the central business district
(CBD) of lower Manhattan. One estí–
mate states that 3 million workers gorge
that part of Manhattan south of 61st
street every working day. This works
out to about 250,000 people per square
mile, 400 per acre, or the equivalent of
a 10-by-10-foot block for each person.
Of course they aren't in adjacent
cubicles, they are stacked in multi-story
office skyscrapers. A mere 500 city
blocks hold half of all the wage and
salary workers on Manhattan.
This tidal wave of humanity rolls in
during the morning and rolls out dur–
ing the late afternoon through an
utterly constipated transit system. Those
300-horsepower monsters which devour
oxygen and vomit smog while massag–
ing our egos are lucky if they can crawl
across Manhattan at six miles per hour
in 1971. Compare this to a near double
11.5 miles per hour on one horsepower
(a living one attached to a buggy) in
1907. This one fact alone, humorous as
it is, makes a mockery of "Fun City."
But the inconveniences of traffic and
deteriorating city services are really only
minor compared to the deeper social
cancers of crime, drugs, poverty, rat–
infested "Welfare Hotels" anda govern–
ment powerless to touch
any
of these
problems.
New York's Deeper Problems
The "other half" - sorne sections in
Harlem, Brownsville, or Bedford–
Stuyvesant - also crowds into a density
of 200,000 people per square mile in
sorne sections, but they don't have the
benefit of skyscrapers to divert their
density upwards. Oppressed by the
most inhuman living conditions, these
Blacks, Puerto Ricans and representa–
tives of virtually every ethnic group on
earth, more often than not, are fighting
and robbing each other - while vener–
eal disease, infant mortality, tubercu–
losis, illiteracy, drugs, alcoholism, and
crime are many times the cate of any
other section of the city ... or the
nation ... or the globe.
What's wrong?
For openers, New York is a political
anachronism, governmentally structured
much like the small, bickering, pre–
World War 1 Bal.kan states, or the
feudal city states of medieval Europe.
The
PLAIN TRUTH
Nearly 1,500 competing municipal gov–
ernment bodies and special districts
compete for funds and power. And
New York's budget, second in the nation
only to the Federal Government, buys
nothing but steadily deteriorating ser–
vices. While New York's population
has remained steadily at 8 million for
30 years, the city budget has mush–
roomed from 1 billion to over 8 billion
dollars. There are many causes for this,
as a future PLAIN TRUTH article will
explain, but suffice it to say here that
the cost
per person
of hospital services
is 10 times greater in New York than in
a moderately sized city (100,000 to
300,000), and police services are three
times as great, per person.
New York's annual budget, presently
around
$8
bi llion, exceeds the combined
budget of the next largest 25 cities in
the nation. Costs expand geometrically
with the size of a city and New York
has clearly grown beyond a manageable
size.
Since an overview of massive New
York City stretches our comprehension,
let's focus clown to one lone New
Yorker. By going through a day with
hím, we can barely imagine how a giant
city works.
A Day in the Life of a
New Yorker
Sorne 140 million Americans wake
up each morning in a Standard Metro–
politan Statistical Area, the census defi–
mtwn for the nearly 250 urban
agglomerations with more than 50,000
residents. About 50 million Britons, 1
O
million Australians or Canadians also
inhabit such urban regions, but let's
examine only one persoo, a New
Yorker.
What's his average day like?
First he splashes cold water on his
face, showers, flushes the commode, and
brushes his teeth. There go approxi–
mately thirty gallons, or eighty pounds,
of
water.
Simult-aneously, eigbt million
other New Yorkers make the total,
between 6 and 9 a.m., about 240 mil–
lion gallons of water for merely per–
sonal use !
A word on water. Each person uses
approximately 50 gallons a day for per–
sonal use only: one gallon to drink, six
to wash dothes, five for personal wash-
July 1971
ing, 25 for a shower or bath, and three
gallons for each flushing of the "water
closet." But this is a microscopic per–
centage of our per-capita water con–
sumption in cities. Direct consumption
of water in cities is four times as much,
about 200 gallons per person. But if
you consider the vast amount of water
necessary for every step in the scale of
food consumption, per capita water use
in tbe U.S.
is
somewhere between
1,500 and 2,000 gallons per day.
For instance, to produce a slice of
b.read requires 35 gallons of water; an
ounce of vegetables requires 200 to 300
gallons, a cup of milk 5,000 gallons,
and a pound of meat up to 50,000 gal–
lons of water (Georg Borgstrom,
The
Htmgry Planet,
page 414). Of course,
these totals include all the necessary
rains to grow enough grass to feed and
water cattle, refrigerate the product,
ship, process, and store it.
So much for water in the morning.
Next, Mr. Average Citizen shaves, most
likely using
electrical power.
It's impos–
sible to know precisely how many elec–
tric alarm clocks. electric toothbrushes,
electric ovens, and electric shavers drain
power each morning at precisely 8 a.m.,
but the peak daily electric demand in
cities has
do11bled
every decade since
1930, now standing at 314 million
kilowatts.
After expending those gallons of
water and watts of electricity, Mr. Aver–
age Citizen eats breakfast - orange
juice, two eggs, bread and butter. All
made possible by a massive system of
food commerce and gas heating. Take a
look behind the scenes in your city's
food and fue! systems.
The City- a Well-Stocked Ship
Each morning, shortly after 4 a.m.,
while the lirst light of dawn invades the
sleeping city, the freeways are alive -
not with commuters, but with hundreds
of semitrailer trucks careening into city
center with the day's supply of fresh
food and drink. They converge in
wholesale centers, then whisk to mar–
kets, distributing their day's load well
before the morning shoppers leave their
doorstep.
The metabolism of a city is much like
the well-planned stocking of a cruise
(Continued on page 41)