The height of the skyscraper is limited by the stresses and strains on the steel, by the instability of the foundation, by congestion of the elevators. The length of the skyscraper on its side has no limit for it is built on solid ground, it has no lighting and ventilating problems. Its transportation system by the aid of local and express service, by the fact that it can run trains, not single cars, and can run many trains following each other on one track and not require a whole shaft for a single car as in the case of the elevator, removes the mechanical limitation of length of the horizontal skyscraper. We can build not only a thousand feet, but a thousand miles and have every story connected with every other story by rails, pipes and wires.
A Line of City Through the Country.
The Roadtown will start at the end of the present subways or other rapid transportation systems of present cities or tap these lines far enough out to get comparatively cheap land and build out in the direction of other cities, passing near enough to the smaller cities, towns and villages to summarily attract much of their renting population. This movement will surely mark the “beginning of the end” of such wasteful loafing centers for the few, and the stagnant pools of wasted energy for the many. It will be a line of city through the country. It will take the apartment house to the farmer and incidentally free the farmer from the necessity of feeding the well-meaning townsfolk who give him in return scant clothing, the use of a hitching post for his team—sometimes; a place to get his weekly paper and a little social fellowship on the sidewalk Saturday afternoons. It will give the suburbanite all that he seeks in the country and all that he regrets to leave in town. It will enable him to play at farming, do real farming or retain his city job. The people will go to the land and take the best things of the city with them, take in fact all that is good in the city to-day and in addition much that is now pigeon-holed as unused patents, because the conglomeration of isolated homes and the crude horse paths called streets, owned by “hold-up men” called politicians, do not permit of the general adoption of these great inventions.
CHAPTER IV
THE ROADTOWN PLAN OF CONSTRUCTION
THE first problem in making a village or a city house is the excavation for foundation and cellar. In the case of isolated houses the cellar is dug by hand labor and dirt carried away by horse-drawn carts. Witness the difference in method between such excavation and that of a canal, the grading of a railroad or any other project that is to be made in line. In the latter case the steam shovel replaces the spade, and the work train, the dump cart.
Those familiar with city subway construction will at first think the idea of a railway in the basement is an expensive luxury. But the excavation of the Roadtown basement should be compared with the New York State canal, not the New York Subway.
To be Built of Cement.
The Roadtown will be built of cement, fire proof and vermin proof. Modern so-called fire proof buildings are frequently destroyed by fire. This is because they contain combustible material. If material in a large building gets on fire and through stairways and air shafts sets fire to other combustibles, the whole building is heated to the ignition point.
The horizontal Roadtown house, only two stories high, cannot be destroyed in this fashion. Even if a Roadtown were built of Carolina pine, it would still be a safer fire risk than modern fire proof buildings in cities. A fire raging in a continuous house could as a last resort be stopped by two sticks of dynamite. In the city the fire line must be fought on all sides of an ever enlarging circle. Dropping this theoretical point we can say that the really fire proof Roadtown can be made at a fraction of the cost of making a building of similar enclosing space semi-fire proof, which experience has shown is the best that can be done with city buildings of the box or tower type. The Roadtown very likely will not carry fire insurance nor maintain a fire department, as every house will have a fire hose which can be instantly applied. The frightful expense and loss of life (and recently the source of graft) that our present civilization suffers because of fire, will be told to the Roadtown children as we now tell about Indian massacres.