One Summer: America, 1927

Half of those 120 million still lived on farms or in small towns, compared with just 15 per cent now, so the balance was much more in favour of the countryside.
    Cities were, on the whole, agreeably compact: they had not yet acquired the radiating shock waves of suburban sprawl that we find today. Nor, by and large, did roads of any consequence emerge from them. In 1927, when people travelled or shipped goods, it was still almost exclusively by rail. Paved highways in most places were a rarity. Even the great, newly built Lincoln Highway – which proudly called itself the first transcontinental highway in the world – was continuously paved only from New York City to western Iowa. From there to San Francisco, only about half of it was. In Nevada, it was ‘largely hypothetical’, in the words of one contemporary, with not even roadside markers to indicate a notional existence. Other, shorter through routes like the Jefferson Highway and Dixie Highway were beginning to appear here and there, but these were enchanting novelties, not true harbingers. When people imagined the future of long-distance transportation it wasn’t highways they thought of but aeroplanes and giant dirigibles cruising between city centres.
    That was why the Orteig Prize was for an epic flight and not a road race. It was also why skyscrapers of the period began to sport pointed masts – so that airships could tie up to them. That this was patently inadvisable – imagine the Hindenburg crashing in flames on Times Square – seems not to have occurred to any architect. Even in routine dockings, airships often had to discharge quantities of ballast water for purposes of stability, and it is unlikely that passers-by below would have welcomed a regular downpour of aquatic bilge.
    An alternative possibility for getting passengers into cities was the skyscraper aerodrome, with runways cantilevered outward from lofty rooftops or shared between buildings. One visionary architect came up with a plan to build a kind of giant table, with skyscrapers for the four legs and a four-acre landing platform perched across them. The New York Times for its part imagined a more personal approach. ‘The helicopter and gyroscope will enable a man to land and start from a shelf outside his dwelling window,’ it stated with hopeful conviction in an editorial on the coming future.
    That none of this was in any respect achievable – in terms of engineering, architecture, aeronautics, financing, safety, building codes or any other consideration – seemed hardly to matter. This was an age that didn’t like practical concerns to get in the way of its musings. A writer in the popular Science and Invention magazine confidently forecast that people of all ages would soon be travelling – and briskly – on motorized rollerskates, while Harvey W. Corbett, a prominent architect, predicted that skyscrapers would rise hundreds of storeys into the clouds and that people living on the upper levels would get their meals by radio, without explaining exactly how he imagined that would work. Rodman Wanamaker, the department store magnate and financier of Richard Byrd’s flight, sponsored an exhibition in New York called ‘The Titan City’ that depicted a future world in which magnificent urban towers were connected by sleek aerial expressways while citizens were shot through glass tubes in pneumatic trains or glided regally from place to place on moving walkways. Whatever the future held, everyone agreed that it would be technologically advanced, American-led and thrilling.
    Curiously, it was the present that people weren’t so certain about. The First World War had left in its wake a world that nearly everyone thought shallow, corrupt and depraved – even those who were enjoying it for those very reasons. Prohibition was in its eighth year, and was a spectacular failure. It had created a world of gangsters and rattling tommy guns, and turned ordinary citizens intocriminals. New York had more saloons now than it had had before Prohibition, and drinking remained so transparently prevalent that the mayor of Berlin on a visit reportedly asked Mayor Jimmy Walker when Prohibition was to begin. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company reported in 1927 that more people were dying of alcohol-related causes now than at any time before Prohibition was introduced.
    Moral decline was evident everywhere, even on the dance floor. The tango, shimmy and Charleston, with their insistent