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I was in my
hometown, New York City, over the weekend. Everybody, it seemed, was outside
swarming in the streets and the parks in perfect strolling weather. The
magnolias and dogwoods were bursting. Anything highlighted in gold leaf was all
burnished up. The city's sparkling physical condition was due of course to
the spectacular flow-rate of money pouring through Wall Street the past
twenty years -- notwithstanding the big burp of 2008.
New York has not been in better shape in my lifetime -- even the former bad
districts like the Bowery were buffed up -- but it was hard not to brood on
its destiny. You could read the blocks of buildings like a chronological
chart. They reflected the very sudden dynamism of this nation, the in-pouring
of the continent's stupendous wealth in a very short span of decades turning
Manhattan island into an urban colossus that, by 1920, stunned even the
city-dwelling intellectuals of Europe.
The city exploded vertically in a very few decades when Thomas Edison's
combined engineering-and-business genius made it possible to deliver
electricity to every block. We'd spent the period just after the Civil War
putting up limestone palaces and brick heaps as grand as the ones in Paris
and London (and about the same size), and then from about 1890-on we tore
them all down when the elevator made it possible to rent hundreds of
apartments or office suites on the same real-estate "footprint"
where there used to be only dozens of rentable units.
You could read the history of our energy resources in the buildings, too.
Until about the 1920s, the buildings were heated with coal. The bulk and
inconvenience of coal was mitigated by hordes of low-paid immigrants who
could wrangle the stuff into basements and shovel it
into furnaces in rotating work-shifts. This made it possible in, say 1908, to
run a building with over a hundred apartments in it. My mother and father
grew up in 20-story buildings like this.
After World War One, when battleship engines had been successfully converted
from coal to oil, the furnaces of big buildings in the city followed that
trend. Oil was much easier than coal to deal with, to deliver, store, and
use. You just ran a hose from a truck to a tank in the basement. You
didn't need a triple shift of Ukrainians to keep the boilers going. You
didn't need a hundred ashcans in the alley to store
cinders. This removed one of the practical limits on how big buildings could
be. So by the 1920s, you got a blossoming of skyscrapers including the most
awesome in the world -- the Chrysler building, the Empire State Building,
objects of the sheerest amazement to people who had been born by candlelight
in one-horse towns.
We
would have built more things like these two extravaganzas except for the crisis
of capital we call the depression -- suddenly there was no money! -- and then the Second World War happened. When that was
over, New York City resumed growing upward. Only now a new fashion-code was
in force: Modernism, which dictated that ornament was
out, sheer, sleek surfaces were in, and the tops of the buildings had to be
flat. This ushered in the era of glass boxes. After a while, it was hard to
tell one from another and there wasn't much really special about any of them.
Even the most canonical glass box, the Seagram building (1958) was celebrated
as much for its vacant plaza fronting Park Avenue than for the brownish glass
building itself. Streets like Sixth Avenue became vertigo-inducing gulches of
identical glass boxes, derided everywhere except the architecture schools.
One
of the dark secrets of the Modernist movement was that doing away with
ornament and making flat roofs ideologically mandatory allowed corporate
America to build huge buildings much more cheaply, and the huge gain in rentable
floor space was an additional boon. Before long, the glass box tower could be
identified with all the worst despotic features of corporate life --
presenting a blank Darth Vadarish face to the
street, concealing schemes to con the public, or pollute the air and water,
or pimp for the military-industrial complex.
Another thing happened after the Second World War. We were
able to swap out oil furnaces in our mega-structures for natural gas.
Gas was even more convenient than oil. You didn't need a truck to show
up twice a month to refill the tank. Instead, a city-wide network of gas
pipes distributed it continually all over town and all you had to do was open
the valve. Heating a giant building now took no thought, let alone work.
Skyscraper building seemed to reach an end-point with the construction of the
ill-fated Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (1970), followed by more than
a decade of oil embargoes, economic disruption, supernaturally high interest
rates, and political uncertainty. This was also the era when New York City
hit the skids economically. Crime went off the charts. Squeegee men ran a
shakedown racket on the bridge ramps. Graffiti erupted everywhere like
scrofula. The town was broke and President Gerald Ford famously told the city
council to "drop dead" (at least according to The New York Post).
It seemed hopeless.
But by the mid 1980s, the Alaskan oil fields and North Sea took the
leverage away from OPEC and the price of oil started sinking until it reached
a low point of $11-a-barrel at the turn of the 21st century and, if nothing
else, the suburban sprawl economy popped with its treasure trove of securitizable real estate. America might have off-loaded
its greasy old industrial economy, but Wall Street was just ramping up a new
trade in all kinds of "derivative" securities that created
"money" out of thin air, seemingly from nothing but bundles of
promises to pay back loans -- producing windfalls of bonuses for the
magicians who designed these operations -- and the new riches were eventually
expressed in what I believe will be seen as the city's climactic final boom
in vertical real estate.
In recent years, cranes could be seen all over Manhattan hoisting up
shiny new condo towers and office buildings. Suddenly we have a problem.
Apart from the sheer fiasco of real estate finance that has spread through
the economy like gangrene, there is the whole issue of what happens to an
urban organism crammed with so many gigantic towers. What we see in New
York today in the masonry-and-glass canyons seems normal, inevitable, permanent. Personally I think it is an extreme freak of
history with a tragic fate.
There is a popular argument these days -- voiced memorably by New
Yorker Magazine writer David Owen -- that Manhattan is the
"greenest" living arrangement conceivable because you can stuff so
many people onto towers on tiny pieces of land. This is an illusion, though
it has come to be the prevailing notion in elite circles. The skyscraper is
already a thing of the past. We just don't know it yet (the same way we
don't know that Happy Motoring is near its end). Even if the shale-gas boom
keeps heating prices affordable a while longer, we face a set of problems
that will make the giant skyscraper city obsolete quickly. The hardware of
the US electric grid is decrepit. We are short of capital. Capital is going
to grow even more scarce.
The recession-depression-whatever-you-want-to-call-it that we're now in is
going to be a long, gruesome slog, perhaps an abiding condition ushering in a
new dark age. Without an ever-increasing supply of energy resources, the
operations of compounding capital growth cease. This much is already
self-evident, despite the dazzling accounting tricks of the big banks, the
Federal Reserve, and the government agencies that abet them.
Probably the biggest reason that the age of the skyscraper city is over is
the likelihood that we will not be able to renovate these buildings --
especially the newest ones with the glitziest systems made of the
highest-tech materials, even the ones that style themselves
"green." We're not going to have the capital to renovate these
buildings and we are certain to not have the modular fabricated materials to
get the job done. These are buildings that have only one generation of life
in them. They will not be adaptively re-used, and when they fail we will not
know what to do about them. Of course, they may not all fail at the same
time, but at least incrementally they will all eventually lose their utility
and their value. They
will no longer be assets, they'll be liabilities.
The city looks great at this moment of history because of the tsunami
of money that washed over it for a couple of decades. But this is the turning
point. From here forward fewer things will get fixed every month. After a
while it will show. We'll get back to conditions like the 1970s rather
quickly, but the process won't stop there. A few centuries from now, the
memory of today's normality will seem like the most exotic wonder that the
human race ever produced. But
most of it will be gone.
________________
A sequel to my 2008
novel of post-oil America, World Made By Hand, will be published
in September 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Press. The title is The
Witch of Hebron.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler’s
new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James Kunstler has worked
as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a
staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write
books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st
century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of
subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest,
and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when
the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat
locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here
: The Long
Emergency .
You can get more from James Howard Kunstler -
including his artwork, information about his other novels, and his blog - at
his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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