Chapter 1
Meet Mr. Murphy
2Let US imagine an early fall evening in New York City. Rain and a high wind terminating the heat of an exceptionally warm Indian-summer day have brought on prematurely the blackness of night.
3 Into the gloomy downpour thousands of doors, architecturally designed for giants, have jettisoned half a million workers homeward bound. Subway entrances are jammed by inflowing masses in quest of swift transportation from local darkness to lighter suburbs. The stairways to the sheltered heights of the ‘‘elevated,’’ linking, with steel rails, the Battery, Bronx, Astoria and Flushing with midtown Manhattan, are vibrant under the stomp of a multitude of mounting feet.
4 The pressure of traffic in the streets is terrific. Vast streams of upbound mechanical vehicles, interrupted by intersecting multiple crosstown flows, forge ahead, inch by inch—lines of cars, so closely compacted as to be in effect solid trains, miles in length, broken only by traffic lights and policemen’s whistles, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth in every block.
5 The din of horns, the roar of the elevated trains, the spattering wind and rain, together with the brilliance of a myriad of automobile lights, neon signs and shop window glares (doubled in intensity by a galaxy of reflections on wet pavements and glistening automobile bodies) constitute a picture exquisitely confusing to the ear and eye. Heightened by the imaginative glamour of a swift, duskless nightfall, the scene would terrorize a simple savage and would have been utterly incomprehensible to ancestors who, only a few generations ago, laid the city’s foundation unaware of portending electricity, steam and steel. What a projection of ‘‘hell,’’ this bedlam, this stirring inferno, for ancient man, yet so unquestionably accepted and so little understood by current city dwellers!
6 Nowhere visible a vestige of any other living organism than ‘‘man’’; no trees, no horses, or other form of ancestrally familiar life, with the possible exception of a wet, scurrying cat. Not even a patch of raw mother earth. A completely by-man-fashioned environment, from the hard pavements serving dually as surface traffic lanes and as roofs for a honeycombed maze of arterial passages interweaving the depths below, to the roofs of brick, stone, steel and glass buildings. New York City! A one-piece dormitory, work, and play shop three hundred square miles in the horizontal plane and thirty to one thousand feet in thickness.
7 Suddenly the red brilliantines flash STOP. The traffic snake is cut. The foremost cars of a bridge-bound stream, their drivers’ vision blurred by the wet confusion, stop abruptly within inches of a north and south bound traffic stream, surging forward again on the change to the green GO signal.
8 Mr. Murphy, worker, pushed his way through the traffic, paused an instant to buy a newspaper, and threaded his way sidewise between bumpers of halted cars to the opposite side of the street. Ducking into a plain man’s open bar, he called for a glass of beer, and one more, and then continued his few blocks’ trek to an east-side subway.
9 Primed by the beer, Murphy elbowed his way good-naturedly through the crowd. At each corner he was caught in a mash of people, whose umbrellas held too high dripped onto his new $1.00 fall hat, or clutched too low caught at the sleeves of his suit. But he did not mind. Then, just before descending into a dank subway, he was jostled unpleasantly by several persons. He jerked backward quickly to escape being soiled by two cars, splashing crazily through a pool of water.
10 ‘‘You damned bastards!’’ Murphy exploded, using his neighbors as the arbitrary representatives of all automobile drivers. ‘‘Do you think you OWN the street?
11 Poor Murphy!
12 He could not be blamed for relieving his feelings. The other pedestrians sympathized with him and the drivers of the cars, windows closed, did not hear him. If they had, they would merely have countered with blasphemy more eloquent than his own.
13 The transition in Murphys mood from the pleasurable glow of his home-bound beer to a general condemnation of the world and all its mechanistic manifestations was not occasioned by the weather for, physically, the rain was a relief and Murphy was glad of it. His dangerous nerve snapping was the result of a multitude of over-riding factors not immediately obvious, amongst which may be listed the geographical disposition of shelters and economical factors, universe-wide in scope, controlling that disposition.
14 The solution of Murphys inconvenience does not lie in meaningless words. It must be found in a control of circumstances far removed from questions of automobile driving ability. Traffic is not a willful demonstration of street usurpation. It is a composite of functioning transport media designed primarily for the transport of individuals from shelter to shelter.
15 Murphy dimly suspected that sufficient scientific thought exploration had not been done in the matter of shelter design and its attendant arterial hookups. He could not refrain from contrasting the utter inefficiency of the cockroach-breeding house, wherein his wife spent hours plodding, dustpan in hand, between cellar and attic, thirty feet vertically apart, and to reach which home took from his brief life-span two hours daily, and the magical efficiency of the radio by which, with merely a twist of a knob, he could instantly jump in actuality of the senses from wherever he might be in the flesh to a ringside seat in Chicago or to a ducal vantage in a Westminster coronation three thousand miles away.
16 If living were properly planned, Murphy vaguely and perplexedly conjectured, during the first few minutes of his subway ride, the status of man might be raised to a point where, instead of continuing longer as an impersonal, ineffectual, shuttling population-unit, he might become, at least, majority master of himself.
17 Reflection gave way to activity. Murphy had to fight to maintain a few inches on which to stand. On this particular night, due to the crowd and the warm steam of vaporizing human bodies packed into their transportation shelter like blood corpuscles in a noisily vibrating test tube, the struggle was particularly attention-consuming and very depressing.
18 When Murphy changed trains at City Hall station for the second half of his long journey home, he felt that he was no longer an individual. He was just anyone. Perhaps, even, no one.
19 Edging his way to a less congested portion of the car, he propped himself against a post, took his damp newspaper from his pocket, and tried to read. With two hundred blocks to ride, he speculated that he might arrive at the obituary section before it was time to alight.