Charles wasn’t waiting at their meeting place.
Henry was glad. He parked the Olds and got out. He looked for a while at the building where his elder son worked. The Green Prairie Professional Building had been the first one erected according to the new plan and the first one to invade the “total destruction” area. It wasn’t high, not a skyscraper, only four stories. But it was as tremendous as the Pentagon—that—was, in Washington-that-used-to-be. It was something like a ranch house, but blocks long, with many “L’s” and “courtyards” between them, with gardens, patios, glassed-in restaurants, even a skating rink in the courtyards.
Someday Green Prairie and River City would have a hundred such buildings all around the circle of ruins, and inside it, and here and there out to the suburbs besides.
“Semidecentralized,” they called it, and “horizontal expansion.” It replaced the vertical growth of the skyscraper age which had let fumed air, heat and darkness and slums accumulate in its canyons.
These buildings took more room, but as architects like Charles had argued—why not?
There was plenty of room for them in the prairies. They left plenty of room, too, room for broad streets with underpasses at intersections, room for vast parking areas, room for gardens, for parks, for picnic grounds right in the center of the city, room for swimming pools and dance floors and everything else that added to life’s enjoyment.
It had not been so difficult as many had expected to “sell” the once-crowded city dwellers on the new pattern for living. Most people had detested many aspects of urban living. And even those who clung to old ideas habitually were shaken in their conservatism. For nobody who had lived in a bombed city wanted to spend another hour, if he or she could help it, in such a deathtrap. To be sure, there was no menace, any longer, of bombs. But the memory that haunted millions slowly pervaded the whole population. Hence the new, “wide-open” cities satisfied unconscious fears, even in people who otherwise would have clung to the traditional-style city: to the narrow streets, the picket-fence skyline, the congestion, suffocation, gloom and noise.
Indeed, by this time, unhit cities were considered “obsolete.” Those that had been bombed provided people with a surge of exhilaration, for the bombing had proved an ultimate blessing by furnishing a brand-new chance to build a world brand-new—and infinitely better.
So Henry gazed at the structure where his son worked. Then he faced around, walked to a fence, and drank in the scene opposite.
The rough circularity of the destroyed area could be perceived from where he stood, though a man in the middle of that desolation could see the circle more plainly. Such a man could pivot three hundred and sixty degrees: everywhere the earth would sweep away, bare and comparatively Hat, to standing buildings (or ruins) approximately equidistant from his position.