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Put this on our holiday wishlist: Kate Ascher's book The Works: Anatomy of a City. Ascher has compiled various facts and figures about New York City infrastructure, which is just the thing for anyone who wonder how the city is put together. Here are some questions about the book's description, with some of our answers:
- Did you know that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long, and its towers are so high, that the builders had to take the curvature of the earth's surface into account when designing it? Uh-uhAccording to an interview, Ascher says that she was inspired by David Macaulay's The Way Things Work, which is one of Gothamist's favorites. We're totally going to be repeating trivia from The Works and annoying people this holiday party season a la Rain Man or Professor Frink, give or take a festive drink!
- Did you know that the George Washington Bridge takes in approximately $1 million per day in tolls? Nope.
- Did you know that retired subway cars travel by barge to the mid-Atlantic, where they are dumped overboard to form natural reefs for fish? Yes, but we like thinking about it because it's just so cool!
- Or that if the telecom cables under New York were strung end to end, they would reach from the earth to the sun?No!
You can get The New The Way Things Work, and there's also the invaluable How Stuff Works online.
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Sounds like a cool book indeed but the part about old subway cars being thrown into the ocean to form natural reefs is b-s. It's cheaper for the MTA to dump them in the ocean than to recycle them up on land and a lot of these cars are full of toxic chemicals. Even considering all that, the old cars have also mostly failed in creating the what the MTA would like you believe is a magical habitat for fish...
I have a copy of "Underneath New York" by Harry Granick, which was first published in 1947 and republished in the 1990s which seems it would make a lovely retro companion to this new book. "Underneath New York" details all the stuff that was beneath NYC back then. It was really intresting how they had coordinated traffic lights way back then.
And yeah I knew that about the Verrazano-Narrows, as I have always been deathly afraid of going over it. And I knew about the subway car reefs from watching the MTA's magazine show on Saturday afternoon on WNYE.
Thanks for the tip, Toby. I'll have to get Underneath New York.
I would like to encourage you to use language that articulates thoughts without resorting to sophomoric idiosyncracies, such as the following use of the word "totally."
" . . . We're totally going to be repeating trivia from The Works . . ."
It makes me want to stop reading.