Roadtown

by Edgar Chambless

The city man is a little better off. City dwellers are close together, close enough that one electric, gas or steam producing plant will do for many hundreds or thousands of families, but by the present plan which enables them to have these improvements, they pay not only the expense of periodic tearing up of the pavements and the house foundation, but a far greater price in the loss of air, sunlight and privacy.

The Roadtown has these God-given utilities of country air and light on two sides of the house. Upon the other two sides it has blank walls, but the examination of the average isolated residence will show that there is little to be gained in light or air by the two extra sides and much to be lost in privacy. Upon the two remaining sides, i. e., the top and bottom, the Roadtown house has its sidewalk on the roof and its transportation by rails, pipes and wires that are now in the city streets, it has on a far better and economical plan in the basement, now used principally to store old trunks, rubbish and coal.

Picture the installation of a new pipe line through a paved street. The expense and the unsightliness, the danger to human life—and this has nothing to do with getting the pipes into a private house.

Now suppose you are a resident on that line and conclude a couple of months later to install the utility in your home. Again the pavement is torn up, a gang of laborers spend several days on the job, and you as consumer will pay the bill either in a lump or as stiff rates on the utility sold. The result of this clumsy system has been that pipe and wire utilities in the city are limited to those people who use them to a sufficient extent to stand this criminal waste and expense.

Moreover, in all large cities the matter of installing pipe or wire conveyed utilities is also a question of reckoning with franchise-selling politicians and private monopolists who generally work “hand in hand.”

Compare these conditions, mechanical and political, with the Roadtown where all pipes and wires will be bracketed in a runway beneath the floor of a machine-made house on land at farm prices. To put in a new pipe conveyed utility will cost the price of the twenty-one feet of main and a branch pipe leading to the apartment above through suitable openings made when the building is constructed. The expense will be about equal to that of maintaining the red lanterns which are now placed about the torn up city streets.

As a result of these differences there will be added to the Roadtown home—and I mean to the home of the man of average means—a number of utilities now available only to the rich, or not available at all.

Beginning with the following paragraph I will enumerate some of the inventions that will be available in the Roadtown home. I may include in this list some inventions which, while demonstrated on a small scale, may for some reason not now discernible, develop an objection or difficulty in its use. But for every such a one that I may here include, there will be several others that science has already or will yet devise and which can be installed in Roadtown as soon as perfected and demonstrated with no more expense than there would be if it were put in when the houses were built. This feature alone is a tremendous argument in favor of the Roadtown, for every previous form of house construction once finished is set in its equipment and soon gets behind the age and must be torn down to make room for the new. At this time considerable humorous comment is being made in the newspapers over the tearing down of a twenty-two story building in Wall Street to make room for a forty story one. The old one is only thirteen years old. The Roadtown will always be “modern,” and increase in efficiency as it increases in length while the separate building is a complete unit with its height and utilities stationary.

Water.

The water systems of great cities are enormously expensive, as it is usually necessary to build great conduits dozens and even as much as one hundred and fifty miles long. The trouble with such cities is that a very large population must be supplied with water from a very limited area. The Roadtown with a population of about 1,000 to the mile will be able to get its water supply from suitable sources all along the way. The length of line to be supplied from one public station will not be great, but the entire main may be opened so that one station can relieve another in case of excessive use of water at any given point.