cities
Video: A Ride Down San Francisco’s Market Street, 1905
Absolutely stunning footage of downtown San Francisco in 1905. Check out how multi-use the streets were. Pedestrians, automobiles (some probably gasoline-powered, others electric and steam), street cars, horse-drawn carriages.
I could go on about the various energy systems represented here, but just watch this video. It’s incredible.
If you like this stuff, and you live in [...]
What Levittown Got Right
You probably know Levittown as the place where America went wrong, if you’re a sustainability nerd. The tract home development in Long Island became the model, so we’re told, for all kinds of suburban development, setting the nation on a path to oil addiction and high energy usage.
But the more I look into the place [...]
The City That Has Fallen
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was the Katrina of its day. Commentators the country over held forth on what The City meant. Perhaps the most stylish of these was The City That Has Fallen by William Marion Reedy, a St. Louis editor who’d never seen the place. I ran across it in a slim [...]
The Electric Truck’s First Heyday — 1900-1925
The Infrastructurist notes today that a new electric truck can carry 16,000 pounds and has a range of 100 miles.
Well, electric trucks actually have a long and illustrious commercial history that has been nicely excavated by the historians Gijs Mom and David Kirsch. They found that there were actually quite a few electric delivery trucks [...]
How Many Buggy Whip Makers Were There, Really?
It’s common to deride the “buggy whip makers” as a class of businesses that couldn’t hack the technological disruption caused by the introduction of the automobile. The once-vibrant whip business run over by the internal combustion engine’s power. The horror! Is there no respect for the past?
Anyway, I was researching Louisville in the mid-19th century [...]
Solar Towers and Their “Spatial Byproducts”
We read on infranetlab.org about the the solar updraft tower, “a combination of a solar chimney, greenhouse and wind turbine.” Yet another example of an old technology made new, this particular kind of solar machine was first dreamt up in 1903 “by Spanish Colonel Isidoro Cabanyes in the magazine La Energia Electrica.”
The solar tower exploits [...]
The Naturmensch, America’s Maladapted Urbanite
Every day, I walk through Buena Vista Gardens on my way to Wired. It’s a park, a public space, but most of the young people and almost all of the Americans use it as a cut-through road, to make the long block between 4th and 3rd a little shorter. As you wend through the park, [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
