Today, we look for the secret places that complete
a city. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Years ago I read something
that stayed with me. It was about Brasilia, the new
planned capital city of Brazil, built between 1956
and '60. In its early days, Brazilians didn't want
to move there, because it was all clean and out in
the open -- no dark corners, no secret places or
surprises.
Houston is a young city, yet it teems with
surprises. Now and then my wife and I go out just
to turn over stones. We find parks we'd never seen,
The Beer Can House, the Houston underground,
industrial back lots, foreign shipping, wild
ostentation almost hidden from view, abandoned
factories.
A city is no city without those places, and few
cities have accumulated as many as New York has.
Stanley Greenberg's new photo book, Invisible
New York, provides a stunning look at the
hidden warrens in that huge city. It's a small
glimpse, only 52 pictures, but those pictures make
the point.
Greenberg takes us into dank underground chambers
we never knew were there. We see great rooms with
bundles of cables being split off from a huge main
bundle. Have you ever wondered how the suspension
cables of the Brooklyn or Verrazano- Narrows
Bridges are grasped and held within the earth?
They're unwound, and small clumps of cables are
anchored separately, distributing the vast tension
of the cable into the ground.
Here's a forgotten catacomb that provided access
while the Brooklyn Bridge was being built. Then it
served for years as a wine-merchant's storage
vault. An old subway tunnel couldn't accommodate
newer trains, so it was abandoned. Now its mosaic
ceiling looks like Neolithic cave painting. Another
vast subterranean gallery holds banks of valves
that regulate the city's water flow.
Then Greenberg takes us up above ground -- into the
hidden catwalk above the Grand Central Station
gallery, into the attic above the roof of St. John
The Divine Cathedral. We walk into the works of the
city's oldest mechanical clock, situated in the
tower of an old office building. He shows us Con
Edison's huge main turbine bay. One turbine
generates 300 megawatts. Another generates a full
gigawatt -- enough power to supply ten million
light bulbs.
Finally we see what Shakespeare called "this muddy
vesture of decay," a city's worn-out clothing. The
old Roosevelt Island Lunatic Asylum, built in 1839,
is a mad multistoried octagonal building, falling
into disrepair. It might well be a Gothic movie
set.
Old wreckage lines New York's waterfront: tangled
metal of piers destroyed by fire, an abandoned dry
dock, remains of an old barge terminal. It's a Mad
Hatter's tea party of a place -- elements left
behind as they're replaced with something better.
In the end, we see that we aren't really part of a
place until we know these secret places. For each
is a mystic nexus -- a place where the seam between
present and history, for a moment,
becomes visible to us.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
