Marvelous Movie Miniatures Portray Cities of the Future
THE scenarist’s dream of New York City in 1980 has been done in miniature at Hollywood for “Just Imagine,” a motion picture fantasy. This model took five months to complete and cost approximately $200,000. It was built in an old blimp hangar once used by the U. S. Army balloon corps and covers a ground area 75×225 feet, representing the most extravagant effort yet conceived by the American cinema industry.
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Well, we do have flat-screen computers you can write on that fit in a briefcase, but I’m still waiting to take my 250 MPH car to a business meeting in another domed city. Perhaps by the end of the year.
40 Years in the Future
By James R. Berry
IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper—which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.
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Manhattan’s $300,000 Roof Dwellings
By ORVILLE H. KNEEN
The Story of the Penthouse Apartment
Roofs of metropolitan skyscrapers are now the most sought-after and expensive sites for exclusive apartment dwellings. Rentals for some of the roof houses range around $2000 per room per year!
I HAVE heard much about New York penthouses lately. Thinking of a penthouse as a little shack on a dingy roof, I asked a realty friend to show me one.
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Big Cities to Have COOLED Sidewalks
COOLING big cities by means of underground air ducts has long been the dream of inventors and sweltering citizens alike. A plan is now being seriously considered by a Chicago scientist, Dr. Gustav Eglov, of the American Chemical Society.
Dr. Eglov believes that huge refrigeration plants built at intervals of a mile and a half along city streets would rid the canyons between sky scrapers of humid hot air.
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Endless BELT TRAINS for Future Cities
TRANSPORTATION of city inhabitants through subway or overhead tubes on endlessly moving belts, providing more speed and comfort than our present systems of passenger service, loom as a possibility, according to Norman W. Storer, engineer of the Westinghouse Electrical Co., who has developed the idea.
As described by Mr. Storer, the system is an arrangement of continuous trains or belts of cars, running on parallel tracks. There is a stationary loading platform along the entire course of the system.
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This is a fun look at the city of the future. Their New York of 2000 seems fairly similar that of today, just with more blimps and less variety of food. And I can’t wait to see the giant milkquitducts “carrying great white streams into the city from the dairy regions, 200 miles away.”
Babies Born Today May See
Cities of 30,000,000, Skyscraper Sidewalks, Roof Top Airports and Food Piped As Water Is Today
By MYRON M. STEARNS
FROM the height of a great precipice two men looked down on a continuous stream of moving automobiles. Farther from the ground than the Palisades rise above the Hudson River at the highest point, they were on no natural crag. They were looking down from a window on the twentieth story of a New York hotel—not a fabulous building of a hundred years hence—but a matter-of-fact structure of today. Dinner was served in their room. The fish had traveled more than 6,000 miles to reach them— Alaska salmon. The steak came from a steer raised near the Mexican border, shipped a thousand miles to be “finished” by a special feeding, another five hundred miles to be dressed, and still another thousand miles in refrigerator cars to reach the metropolis. Fruit from Southern California, vegetables from Georgia, olives from Italy. And the eggs in the Mayonnaise dressing for the salad—no joking—were laid on the other side of the world, in China, nearly two years before. It was good Mayonnaise, too. There was a knock at the door.
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It sure would screw up your property value if someone tried to build a billion ton sky-darkening airport over your house. Also I’m not quite sure why it needs to rotate…. bonus feature?
Proposes Orientable Roof-Top Airports For Cities
PROPOSED as a solution to the problem of locating an airport in the heart of any big city, a design for a long orientable runway, which would be mounted on circular tracks atop tall buildings, as sketched above, has been conceived by a French engineer.
Highways of the Future
By E. W. MURTFELDT
PICTURE a 15,000-mile network of twelve-lane motor speedways spanning the nation—three of them linking the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, six more crisscrossing the country north and south —and you will have an idea of the vastness of a spectacular highway plan proposed by Senator Robert J. Bulkley of Ohio. Requiring twenty-five years for completion, the mammoth gridiron of superhighways would change long-distance driving from a motorist’s nightmare of snarled traffic into a reality of fast, safe transportation. It would represent an impressive start toward an era of scientifically constructed speedways, and crashproof cars of radical new design to run upon them, foreseen by leading experts for the not-too-distant future.
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Filling in the Hudson to Rebuild New York
by ALFRED ALBELLI
PLUG up the Hudson river at both ends of Manhattan . . . divert that body of water into the Harlem river so that it might flow out into the East river and down to the Atlantic ocean . . . pump out the water from the area of the Hudson which has been dammed off … fill in that space . . . ultimately connecting the Island of Manhattan with the mainland of New Jersey . . . and you have the world’s eighth wonder—the reconstruction of Manhattan!
That is the essence of the plan proposed by Norman Sper, noted publicist and engineering scholar. It is calculated to solve New York City’s traffic and housing problems, which are threatening to devour the city’s civilization like a Frankenstein monster.
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