The Fed

My City is Real, But My Love is Not

Dhruv Bansal

Robert Moses is my hero. From creating America’s first modern suburb to building a system of interconnected parkways across the greater New York area, Moses transformed American culture and the American way of life in a way that Elvis, F. D. R., and Steven Spielberg could only dream of.

Still, Moses’ dreams of inexpensive tract housing and a pre-planned community were just baby steps along the road to complete control of the American populace through technology and foresight. I have a greater dream. I will take the next inevitable step. I will design and plan the greatest, most advanced, most awe-inspiring city the world has ever seen.

The roads in my city will be smooth, poured asphalt. Each corner will have a garbage can and a recycling bin (Keep Our City Clean!). In downtown I would allow zoning for megalithic high-rise buildings. Perhaps the World Bank will occupy the 150-story skyscraper on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Michelson Street? Maybe a chemical company will set up its headquarters on Ninth Street, between Third Avenue and Western Boulevard? The specifics hardly matter— my aluminum and concrete megalopolis would no doubt attract all the most famous scientific, financial, and industrial firms on the planet.

Airports— I would build two. No, three. Two international and one domestic. The city would be near some major waterway, no doubt, and I would have to build large marinas and huge seaports. Sydney has a floating opera house, right? My city would top that — we would have an underwater opera house — and on nights when Wagner was being performed, it would rise up from beneath the waters like some terribly beautiful Nautilus and spread wings made from advanced steel alloys and Teflon. No! Better yet, Kevlar! It would fly through downtown and midtown and uptown and all the other, neighboring towns as huge speakers (complete with subwoofers and tweeters) blasted "The Flight of the Valkyries" in an homage to technology and the power of man and his ability to conquer nature! Francis Ford Coppola would sue.

No matter. The case would be tried in my state-of-the-art courthouse. It would have TV monitors and vibrating chairs and it would use a supercomputer instead of a jury. After Coppola’s inevitable conviction for high treason by attempting to malign the state with a nuisance suit printed out on the computer screen, he would be imprisoned for life in a high-security prison, conveniently located beneath the courthouse.

Ah, but there would be more to my city than just impressive buildings and a top-notch justice system. The fruits of advanced technology are many. There would be no crime because all the potential criminals would be identified by age six and shipped off to neighboring states. There would be no poverty. I’m not exactly sure how there would be no poverty, but it would probably have to do with some machine…maybe with flashing buttons or something? And the machine would beep.

There would be no grocery stores or hardware shops. People would wear paper clothes and eat a pre-fabricated gruel which would be delivered to their apartments via a complex system of pipes not unlike the current water system. Hospitals would not exist. I saw this Charleston Heston movie once in which they used undesirable people to supplement the food supply or something. It seems like a reasonable enough idea.

My creation would be more than a town, more than a city, more, even, than a metropolis. It would be a vision. An ideal to which lesser conglomerations of steel and stone like New York City or Los Angeles might aspire. It would be a revelation. A beacon in the darkness. A city upon a hill.

Eat your heart out Robert Moses