When I recently mentioned commuting before cars, David Foster added a link to his own post citing Charles M. Skinner’s 1902 Atlantic piece, The American Will Not Live Near His Work, which was reprinted in Richard Rhodes’ Visions of Technology. Here is how Skinner ends his short essay:
On one point the American is determined; he will not live near his work. You shall see him in the morning, one of sixty people in a car built for twenty-four, reading his paper, clinging to a strap, trodden, jostled, smirched, thrown into harrowing relations with men who drink whiskey, chew tobacco, eat raw onions, and incontinently breathe; and after thirty minutes of this contact, with the roar of the streets in his ears, with languid clerks and pinguid market women leaning against him, he arrives at his office. The problems of his homeward journey in the evening will be still more difficult, because, in addition to the workers, the cars must carry the multitude of demoiselles who shop and go to matinees.
To many men and women of business a seat is an undreamed luxury. Yet, they would be insulted if one were to ask why they did not live over their shops, as Frenchmen do, or back of them, like Englishmen. It is this uneasy instinct of Americans, this desire of their families to separate industrial and social life, that makes the use of the trolley car imperative, and the street railway in this manner widens the life and dominion of the people; it enables them to distribute themselves over wider spaces and unwittingly to symbolize the expansiveness of the nation.
(In case you don’t see the word pinguid every day, it means fat, oily, or greasy.)
Ha, thanks to my [almost] gaming mouse, I “defined” pinguid instantaneously.
You would think in 1902, with hi-rises already very much part of urban fabric, there would be no appeal for “dwelling above the shop” scheme.
The current tendencies, where proximity to workplace is concerned are not so straightforward — and that’s a good thing. Adaptability to concrete situation is better than limited number of choices.