Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

BEYOND 1984: THE PEOPLE MACHINES

People ask me to predict the Future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better. My plan is to sneak us by 1984 when it isn’t looking and make it to the high ground of 2001, which will be a good year, a vintage year. Who says? I do. Guaranteed? If you follow my nose.

First off, between now and 1999 we must engage in the greatest Airlift in History.

To save Berlin? No. Beach more boat people? Hardly. To salvage refugees adrift in a wrecked city called Detroit, New York, or Chicago? Yes.

For if we can take in one million Cubans, and welcome four hundred thousand strangers each year from far places, we can surely pull three or four million Americans out of their Primeval Digs and Black Holes.

Up and away from the Chicago Abyss. Down and onto the Kansas Plain. OZ has got to be out there somewhere, doesn’t it? For God’s sake, let’s find, no, let’s build it! For it’s no use airlifting beast-people out of their sties if we have nowhere to go, nowhere to put them down.

Once upon a time, of course, there were places. They were called small towns. But for various reasons—jobs, money, wanderlust, sex, technological change, mass media—the siren metropolis called, and the Jerkwater Stops fell flat in the dust. What was left of the small town was smothered and crushed when a Juggernaut Shopping Mall wheeled mindlessly through and squatted in a meadow a mile out from Main Street to sell its medicines and grab yokels.

The pattern is familiar now. We have seen it repeated and repeated by mall builders, who think too much and city fathers who think too little.

The situation calls to mind that Mexican farmer who, 36 years ago, while plowing his field, stumbled over a small fire-and-smoke pothole in the midst of his maize. By late afternoon, there was a small creek of lava in his front yard. At noon the next day, the hut was long lost in a burning river. When it was all over, a mountain of lava had surrounded and taken the nearest village and put the town church hip-deep in cooling rock. So, the Paricutin volcano was born.

For that surprised Mexican farmer, substitute your typical small town mayor and chamber of commerce. For Paricutin, substitute any one of several thousand shopping malls or centers that have erupted across America in the past ten years, and you have an inundation in reverse. The townsfolk rushed out to view the shopping explosions. Downtown Pigs Poke, Idaho, soon resembled Saturday night at the old burying ground. When the folks wandered back in from the shopping mall cow pasture, they took one look at Main Street and never set foot in it again or went away to Minneapolis forever.

How do you make the small town work again? How do you prepare it for my airlift of forlorn and despairing city folk clamoring to be born-again hayseeds?

Putting wheels on the meadow mall and rolling it back into Dead Falls won’t do it. But it would be a start.

All right then, what do we build?

A People Machine.

Walt Disney didn’t exactly patent the idea, but by God he surely reinvented it. Disneyland and Disney World contain many of the Machine units that we could nail together and set down in a thousand lost towns between now and 1990.

What are we talking about? Not just a shopping center where people come to buy one sheet, one shirt, or one shoe, but a place where lingering, staying, dawdling, socializing are a way of life. A refuge from the big city, or, sometimes worse, your own parlor. A place so incredibly right that mobs will rush to it crying “Sanctuary!” and be allowed in forever. A place, in sum, where people can come to be people. The idea is as old as Athens at high noon, Rome soon after supper, Paris at dawn, Alexandria at dusk.

Let’s face it, there is no use building a center or a mall where people only come on occasion to argue fresh fruit and give up coffee. A town is conversation, gossiping, chatting, watching, looking, noting, and staring. We must give people back their eyes. And their mouths. And their derrieres.

What to do with your eyes is what our People Machine will teach.

What to do with your mouth is what our townsfolk will learn.

What to do with your rump roast posterior is Ballet Position Number One in the plaza of the future.

We must build a social machine of such curious and mixed and delightful parts that the city beyond the horizon will fall over dead with envy and sink into the tar where its dinosaur unsociability belongs.

“Okay, Prophet, put the pieces together,” you cry. “What do we build and fit?”

For starters, a fresh new idea, thought of just seventeen million mornings ago: The Town Plaza.

If you have one lying about, summon it back to life.

“How?” Here’s the blueprint:

The Longest Bar in the World is in Tijuana. Why not, facing our plaza, build the Longest Soda Fountain in the World! With one hundred stools facing an old-fashioned soda fountain. Beyond the stools, put another 50 to 80 tables, and beyond the tables another 40 or 50 booths.

On the opposite side of the plaza, let us add a wonderfully colored, imaginatively built bookstore, whose paperback department, in particular, would carry a cross section of just about every and any kind of book that people out in the Plaza might want to hold in their hands or sit on. The bookstore would open late in the afternoon and stay open until at least midnight every night.

The bookstore, needless to say, should be fabulous, metaphorical, mythological, and as exciting as the books that line the shelves. Libraries may well demand silence, but, why not as you enter our bookstore, have a Robot Computer King or a Queen-of-Egypt mummy standing near the door, to whom you can whisper your needs, and who will tell you all the latest wonders in the grand stacks and corridors! The mummy’s breastplate might have, in gold beetle symbols, the names of the various sections, which, if pressed, would whisper the new stuff just arrived from across the world! A golden amber beetle, plucked up on its wire, would tickle the quiet message in your peach-fuzz ear.

Wandering the stacks, you could stick your hands in various myth-holes to view tiny dioramas of the areas you are traveling through by book. Stick your head in here: OZ, with music. Stick your head in there: Caveman Territory. Next hole: Dinosaurs. Next after that: Alpha Centauri! Andromeda! With sound! With symphonies!

How do you get to the Children’s Section?

By sliding down a Rabbit Hole into the basement!

Who could resist that? Not me!

Where are all the Star Books, the Future Books? Where is the Grand Universe itself? Up a twisting circular staircase into a miniature, domed planetarium where John Carter, Luke Skywalker, and Chewbacca wait!

Over in the adult mystery section, as you prowl the stacks, why not, on occasion, the sound of a faintly squeaking door, a dim rattle of gunfire among the dark, leaning books if you pick up some stethoscopes hanging there and give a listen. Now—back out to the Town Plaza!

On the third side of the plaza build a fairly large bike rink, with humps and hills and semi-detours, fast and slow lanes, where you can rent a bike and take off for a few miles of nice work with a view of the plaza, the ice-cream eaters, and the book people. Under a canopy, of course, for fair and foul weather.

On two opposing corners of the plaza, the finest restaurants you can put together under sane or insane but imaginative chefs. On two other opposing corners, cinemas running the latest appalling imports from the prison side of Hollywood, or the great stuff from Alpha Centauri and Beyond.

If your plaza is near a college or university, great. Lacking that, toss in a university extension building as close to the Ice Cream Parlor as possible. We want all those nice young bodies, every three years a new mob, parading around being lovable idiots.

Now, next door to the bookstore, what?

That old-fashioned Kaleidoscope, the vast store you could hold up to the sun and see just about anything you wanted to see and touch and buy—The Dime Store!

And I mean a bright, well-lit, clean, uncrowded, though full of incredible junk, Dime Store, the way they used to be before you took one look and never went in again—the year they began to look like garbage dumps.

Next to that, a Drug Store, and I mean a Drug Store, the way they used to look and smell. Remember the smell? All the mysterious medicines and cosmetics and perfumes. Somebody should bottle that. The smell alone makes the feet drift, the body turn and move in its direction.

Next to that—a Penny Arcade, but not just your old-fashioned Penny Arcade with robot-tarot-witches, penny-moviola machines, and Electrocute-Yourself-For-A-Penny devices. I mean an Arcade where Darth Vader will cream your tiny guts with his laser. Where Outer Space beckons in three dimensions, where you can blast off in an electro-sensor Pod, to knock hell out of the Empire’s rockets, zap the Orion Nebula, disintegrate the Moon, and rebirth ten billion Suns, all in an afternoon. Talk about your Old-fashioned Shooting Gallery taking on new intergalactic aspects! And, with bigger, better, more incredible Computer Games coming up, in monster as well as mini-sizes, you can add to your Penny Arcade, your Outer Space Arcade, as the money pours in.

The Laser Light Arcade, incidentally, might be the first stopping place for any People Mover or electric bus that enters the downtown area of your Future Small Town. Mothers who want to gab and shop can drop Annihilating Junior or Bust-’em-Up Betsy at the Arcade for a few hours of socking Martians or traveling to far countries.

Part of the Electro-Computer Environment would be, of course, my Asking Room. You walk in and ask the room to take you anywhere and it does. “Africa! You Shout.” And Africa’s all around you, on four walls—or one great shell wall that encloses you, if you’re seated. The varieties of adventures a child—or an adult—could ask for might be endless. Each adventure lasting from ten to twenty minutes.

If the town ever got around to building an overhead people mover, or miniature monorail, the pods from this practical ride could, if one wished, detach themselves and Detour to Paris or Turn Here For Bombay. By pressing a switch while enroute across Peoria, the tired housewife could derail on a sidetrack that slid into an experience tunnel near the Arcade, there to see the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal or the Houses of Parliament before returning to the wonders of Kraft dinners and Coors beer.

All the above, of course, is expensive. Spend your money first on the Town Plaza and its environs, plus the Arcade. The People Mover Pod Experience can come as a dividend, later.

Where were we? Oh, yes…

Back to the four corners again. On the second and third floors of the four buildings on the four corners are the Gray Battalion Headquarters, the Old Folks homes, with the best damn views in town of the bike-riding, ice cream-eating, park-strolling, people-watching, book-reading public. Out of the two-fisted TV grip at last and back out on the street where the greatest danger is an elbow, and soap opera, the real stuff, boils in every passing bod.

Was it Aristotle who woke one morn in his sixties and discovered that for the first time in Lord knows how many years, he had no a.m. erection, and raced down the streets, shouting to the skies, “Free! Free at last! Free!”

Our People Machine, with all its components, promises just that. No more crowding in the TV room with all those strange people and their maniac grins and lousy lines and ill-mannered laughter. No more being forced to stay in school (Channel 2, that is, or Channel 4) when the great world of the town invites and truly beckons.

Free! Free at last! Free!

What have we been building here? Not just simple hungers and needs. Not just shopping for things. But shopping for sociability, shopping for people.

Consider this: people on a jet have only been on a trip. People on a train have been on a journey.

Jets bore.

Trains enchant.

Because of—texture.

Jets diminish and vanish people.

Trains summon them back in harvests on both sides of the track.

As with jets and trains, so it is with cities and towns.

If you send people only on trips around your town, don’t be surprised if they go off on journeys or hoped-for journeys to other cities as they used to be.

It follows that the more texture, the more surprise you can build into a small town, the better chance you have of keeping them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree.

We’ve pretty well built our plaza now. How about the Main Street leading to the plaza? Starting one or two blocks away, of course, is where you leave your damn car and hoof it, happily I might add, with or without family, toward the Hearthing Place, the Town Family Park we have been describing. Along the way, the more fast-food places you can add to it the better, so that people can carry their own hot dog or pizza onto a park bench. One of the shops, right at the plaza, might be a picnic-basket lunch emporium where for ten bucks or so you can get a wicker of chicken, corn, french fries, and for a few more bucks a bottle of wine, which you tote over to picnic tables in the plaza which, on its dullest night, is ten steps up from “Starsky and Hutch.” And where, for a dollar, you can step up and sledgehammer a TV set to death in the Play Pit.

What else do we need for people input? The best damn LP record shop in the world, open until two a.m. Popcorn machines everywhere. Candy-making devices in sweet shop windows. Plus the best magazine and newspaper racks this side of Peoria. Stationery shops with so many lovely papers in the window you can’t resist buying what you don’t need.

On the way into all this, some Burma Shave signposts, please:

1984 Will Not Arrive!

But 2001? Man Alive!

Do you see where I travel? Do you know where I want us all to arrive? There isn’t one new idea in all the above. Everything is ancient. But, idiots that we are, we have lost our plazas, destroyed our drug stores, dismantled our fountains, grassed over our sidewalks, and driven our ownselves back into our houses to serve prison sentences meted out by “Baretta,” “Quincy,” or the “Dallas” idiots.

At Disney World, thousands of people just sit and watch, every night. Trouble is, you have to pay to get in, and at midnight or so they shut it up and kick you out.

Look at your average architectural rendering or building layout viewed in magazines during the past 40 years. Where in hell are the people? Those little ants running around on the super-clean sidewalks—are those people? What are they doing? Nothing. Just standing there.

What we do here is put people back into proper scale. Our renderings will show people doing things. Like talking, eating, walking, sitting, playing music, playing games, riding, picking each other up, taking each other home. Their acts, their needs will be visible supports on which to lean a town or draw a facade. They won’t exist for the town, the town will exist for them, which is only proper and right.

It follows that any architect/city planner, future builder, mayor-dreamer, chamber of commerce patriot who welds this People Machine together, will have what happen to him?

One late day in 1988 or so, this builder-planner-dreamer will be seen racing down Main Street pursued by ten thousand wild citizens. Freed from their TV bastille, these maniacs of joy, will catch the builder-dreamer of the People Machine, and will run him for president or (why not?) emperor of the universe!

And when the town center is rebuilt let the refugee airlift begin. From the Piranesi Prison cities mired in 1984, let those who will move back and ahead at the same time. Toward a 1999 that buds and a 2000 that blossoms. Bringing with them, of course, your small or large corporation for employment and sustenance.

A large order. But then the death of towns, the stagnation of cities, and the dooming of millions is no small matter.

But what about those left behind in the big tubercular cities?

The People Machine will fit there, too. Portions of every metropolis are towns to themselves. There’s nothing wrong with Greenwich Village that adding in some of the elements mentioned here wouldn’t cure. In other parts of New York City, clean out a whole city block and load in all of my components. Plaza, bookshop, ice cream parlor, penny arcade, and all.

So, by this century’s end, we can not only revive the small town, but cure the big one, with the same tonics.

And, while we’re at it, try to give back to the cities some of the other elements they have lost, without realizing it, over the years.

We want to stay young forever, isn’t that true?

We want every day to be that day when we were young and we leaped from bed and asked the world what it had to say or show or be that was brand-spanking fresh-born.

We go to world’s fairs for that.

We travel to faraway places for that.

But if all you find when you turn a corner is one more flat surface of marble, one more bank, one more glassless frontage, one more uninhabited edifice, one more unlit shop, the desire to wander, to wonder, extinguishes itself. Torchless candles, we turn and go to other places, other cities that promise delightful twists and turns amongst shops that stay open late or at least stay lit late, so we can eye-browse the trinket windows.

Think how nice it might be if the largest building in any small American town could have one flat surface, windowless, on which one night the Eiffel Tower would, projected, build itself during the evening, with immense flood-tossed images of the Tower one-fourth erected, one-half, three-fourths, and then, at last, erupted tall against the Parisian sky.

At midnight, tear it down.

That is, pull the image from your great laser-beam projector.

Next night, build the Empire State Building there.

Or toss up column upon Bernini column, the facade of the holy Vatican and St. Peter’s.

Or sandwich the White House on top of Monticello on top of Mount Vernon with a lower layer of New Orleans.

This way. Delight.

Wouldn’t you, on occasion, want to go downtown some nights, to see just what in hell had been built or torn down? One more reason to visit the old boring Main Street, on its way back through technological rejuvenation.

All of this applies to both small towns and small parts of large cities. We need at least one building in every town, or in some part of a city, that gives us a sense of identity.

Think how it would be if there were one tower in each town that told us not only what we are—the town—but what we can be—the Universe.

If one of these towers were built in a town, as a prototype, others might follow.

Describe the tower?

Here it is.

It would be a tower with a circular escalator moving very slowly up through time, through images, through sounds, through projections, through three-dimensional objects, bas-reliefs.

And most of its images would be of flight: pterodactyls kiting primeval horizons, birds in migration, or sun symbols forever rising in ancient skies to bring with them the sun kings of time. During the ascension, Marco Polo’s imported Chinese fireworks would light the way, lifting architectural beauties up into the explosive light. Migrations of men would follow, climbing the spiral, multicolored with multitudinous dreams. The dreams being newborn kites and balloons, and gliders and skyscrapers imitating flight in stone. And toward the end of our tower museum ascension, the Wright brothers’ winged bike sifting up from the Kitty Hawk dunes, and all the jets and dirigibles to follow. All of it spiraled to music and the vast firebreath of the Apollo rockets lifting us toward the sun from which we all came. At the top of our climb, the planets, the far suns and our possible future. At the end of our hundred-foot climb, we would step forth in a miniature planetarium to scan a universe that can be ours if we reach out a hand willed by a reaching mind. From there, we would watch future rockets moving off on the last migration toward an inevitable existence through all the eons to come.

Let us call it the Hearthing Place. It could be built as an adjunct to the old city hall or as a tower next to a church. Or, excuse our fiery dust, an insurance tower, why not, that insured the future? What better insurance is there than the rocket? What insuring? The health of man. His will. Founded on what? The imagination of man. His dreams. With what in escrow, with what as down payment? The whole history of his planning and thinking and dreaming and making with his hands and night visions and noon accomplishments.

Think how it might be for coming generations to go to bed and, falling into slumber, hear the great tower proclaim futures, even as the old bell tower in the Civil War town hall proclaimed the present with a feel of the Gothic and somehow graveyard past. The tolling of the funeral bell of lost or won wars then. The sound of the rockets moving up in our tower now and forever. A counting up instead of a counting down. A soft voice, not a loud one, whispering the hour that promises tomorrow and survival. And at midnight, if you’re awake, looking out, the dome of the tower, in sudden full firefalls of arrival, as Man reaches and enters the threshold of the universe. All the stars in fireworks there, pulsing, for a brief interval as night turns on its mighty cosmic heel and motions toward a promise of dawn.

What a tower. What a promise. What an insured future.

Architecture that imagines more than itself—that imagines man in order to have even more imagined.

The stuff of tomorrows has always been boys, girls, men, women, projecting images of their days on the ceilings of their bedrooms in the hour before sleep.

Those images we must pluck down and erector-set in our cities. Let the tower be the rocket. Let the rocket show us not north, nor east, nor west, nor south by southwest but—up. Let all the old gods from Olympus visit there to be visited. If you want to ride up and speak with them, late at night, let them be there, in soft converse, for children to question, and in an alcove half up through Time, on the way to Cosmos, let it be possible to step off the escalator and stand watching and hearing Apollo and Aphrodite and Hermes and all the rest telling our visions and pointing in yet further directions.

Architectures that imagine, architectures that promise, architectures that more than stand, architectures that dream. Architectures that tell us what we can be, what our destiny is. The old structures only promised impossible heavens in death. Let the new ones promise possible life for all the generations to come, when we have knocked death ten times over and turned time inside out, and made it beyond the Moon, beyond Mars, to hearthing places and seedbeds we cannot now imagine, far out beyond the reach of that Gothic death that sounds with every marrow-chilling tone of that old city tower.

Buildings with fire in them, with energy, with blood, and all those dear night-thrown visions on dusky ceilings and two-in-the-morning (oh God, I hope I can—!) walls.

Building surprise back into a large city is a matter of erasing blank facades, inserting the small shop back where it once was, on streets that do not refuse us or turn us off, but promise us renewal. Small towns, because of their size, are harder problems. Surprise must come from what little we can do with a minimal amount of architecture and a maximum number of people flowing in surprises around and amongst each other. Big cities depend on mixtures of buildings and humans, small towns must survive mainly with person colliding with person in the most amiable of collisions.

So there you have it. The beginning, most certainly not the middle or the end, of my thinking beyond 1984. That 1984 I hate because it is an intellectual fraud and never had a chance of arriving in a jump-shout-yell culture of ideas such as our own. And on toward the 2001 I truly and completely and resolutely believe in, because it is the chance for us to remake ourselves that is irresistible.

We will do everything, we will solve everything, we will build everything that needs doing, solving, and building during the next few years.

How come? Why the positive bias? Why the inclination toward optimism? Because optimism has only meant one thing to me—the chance to behave optimally. Hip-deep, that is, in our genetics, we behave up to the limit of our blood and brains.

We have done it before. We have done it often.

This is a new war. The best. The war to save our skins, our social selves, the fun of living, to build instead of destroy, to survive rather than be bored to death. To be once more the children of a wide-ranging, imaginative and vital culture, rather than the slaves of network television.

What greater challenge is there?

Forward!