IS THIS JUST A DREAM?
Is This Just a Dream? Or Is It a Prophecy of the Method by Which Some of Our City Problems Are To Be Solved? Will the City of the Future Look Like This? HERE'S the sort of house you, and...
...And this gridiron arrangement puts most of us miles away from the healthful country, gives us noise at our door and neighbors staring at us from four sides, necessitates wagons, motors and dust, and costs like sixty...
...It is no time for the Roosevelt-Perkins Party or the Republican party to maneuver for 1916...
...I cast my first vote for Rutherford B. Hayes and I am glad to hear from a Republican such a sound and patriotic utterance...
...Chambless plans to pipe water, milk, gas, steam for heating, disinfectant and vacuums for vacuum cleaners...
...Chambless declares that life in Roadtown will be convenient and healthful beyond anything yet invented...
...The American people demand that money and credit and transportation, and the market place where labor and the products of labor are bought and sold, be freed from the control of powerful interests...
...Chambless, the inventor, says it's all nonsense about our present system of transportation...
...All you have to do when you want to go to work or to visit your grandmother, is to step downstairs and be whisked...
...It will cut out about 99 per cent...
...It is creating a good deal of comment by persons who are beginning to wonder whether this is really their future residence...
...Chambless wants his Roadtown to be an exhibit for the exposition...
...He wants it made on Twin Peaks, running southward through the Spring Valley property to Stanford University...
...Down in the basement he is going to have all his transportation...
...As to whether people will consent to live in this skyscraper laid on its side, Chambless thinks it better than the hovel, the leaky bungalow, the wooden frame flat, the stuffy apartment house in the heart of a city, or the hotel with few inside rooms...
...He plans to have the buildings permanent, so that it can be used afterward...
...Chambless declares the Roadtown Will transform the industrial system, obliterate the middleman, abolish the sweatshops, glorify the health, nerves and culture of the race and give everybody more leisure than he knows what to do with...
...He answers every argument anybody can raise against the plan, but admits that Roadtown is ten years ahead of its time.—San Francisco Bulletin...
...Then the city will be doomed...
...HERE'S the sort of house you, and everybody else, are going to inhabit some one of these days, At least so says Edgar V. Chambless, the man who invented "Roadtown...
...To begin with, the Roadtown is to be built of concrete, earthquake proof, fireproof, soundproof, germproof...
...My instincts are still Republican but I believe that if the party blocks the way of liberty of the white man as effectively as it helped the liberty of the black man, it will be buried by the American people past digging up...
...A Sound and Patriotic Utterance Editor La Follette's: YOU SAY: "It is no time for trifling or playing politics, or trying to put the Wilson administration in a hole...
...He plans to have wires for lighting, telephone, the phonographic opera and the daily oral newspaper...
...of today's activities, which are largely taken up with transportation...
...All the problems of the modern individual house are disposed of...
...Put the thing in a straight line, and Roadtown is what you have...
...He plans to put two hundred families in a mile, all in a row...
...The Roadtown has been given the use of a patent known as the Boyes Monorail, which is a noiseless and exceedingly swift monorail car...
...All your grocer has to do, in delivering your butter, is to stop at your elevator...
...So Chambless offers Roadtown, a way of living in the country, with all the city advantages boiled down and all the waste motion of transportation eliminated...
...We have east-and-west lines, north-and-south lines...
...It will also be cheap to build...
...Bolton Hall...
...Population is settling in straight lines anyway, says he, along our railroads, and he proves it by pointing to the peninsula...
...The arrangement also is ideal for pipes and wires...
...I am a Reformed Republican myself...
...The picture is now hanging on the wall as a feature of the exhibition of the San Francisco Architectural Club, in the Hale Building...
Vol. 5 • April 1913 • No. 16
