Skylines

 

It is interesting that when someone asks where you live, you give the name of the city. You don’t give the state or the street or the zip code, but the name of the city on your mailing list.

If you Google the name of the city, you get a picture of a skyline. A skyline is a bunch of tall buildings. Cities are an accumulation of cement, iron, concrete, glass and steel. Society grouped closely together and reaching for the sky.

A city has roads and rooms and people and parking and lives, but you don’t see it in the skyline.

If your city has a recognizable monument like the space needle or the gateway arch or golden gate bridge or the empire state building or the Washington monument, the skyline stands out from the others. Otherwise your cities skyline looks just like a bunch of tall buildings.

How did that city skyline get there?

Cities are nothing more than huts that grow into villages to towns to communities to cities. They usually start on a pathway of water for transportation until an animal trail can be turned into a road. Then the railroads linked the north and south then out west to increase commerce and communication. Then the automobile and the highway connected the cities together.

Cities are nothing more a town that outgrows itself. It has to spread out or up. Cites are built and then torn down and rebuilt and then torn down and built again. The skyline of today does not match the skyline of 100 years ago.

People will say life was simpler then. This is a true statement. Cities had no paved roads. Traffic was animal drawn carts and their waste. Indoor plumbing was a dream and water ran from a bucket. Cooling meant opening windows without screens and warming meant stocking a coal furnace or stove. Telephones, electricity, Wi-Fi had never been thought of.

Cities usually started with the church. The church was nothing more than a big building that could be used by whichever popular religion was prominent to use on Sunday to give thanks, pass out information, share food and fellowship and become a town hall meeting place. It was usually built on the high ground for protection and was surrounded with the graves of the dead.

Then pubs and brothels sprouted to give diversion from family home life and an attraction to passerby travelers. Hotels provided way stations for those passing through. Merchants saw the opportunity of selling wares provided by the commerce traffic and required by the town’s citizens who couldn’t grow, barter or manufacture their own.

People living in rural areas found cities had employment opportunities with factories, construction, services and banks. Cities also offered the thrill of theatre, dances and music.

Skylines of cities on or near a river, lake or ocean offered reflection doubling the size. Skylines from above only looked like ribbons of roads weaving in and out of these spikes in the earth.

On the ground the skyline is only gigantic behemoths blocking the sky. The roads and the sidewalks offer the citizen glass and concrete until they enter and find a lift.

There are other skylines that overwhelm the man-made buildings. These offices, apartments, bathrooms, hallways, hospitals, governmental locations, courtrooms, jails, fire stations, insurance companies, newspapers, restaurants, movie houses, lodging and all the rest look very busing from sunup to sundown. Some maintain activity while the others stand vacant. All require electricity, water, communication and waste disposal. An industry of people will wash and sweep and vacuum and change light bulbs while another population goes home for dinner and television with the family. Others will run the wires, clean the streets, dig the holes, patch the pipes, remove the wrecks, water the fires, rescue the cats, feed the homeless, bury the dead.

Driving into a skyline is vision of human production, if seen through the haze of necessity. Once engulfed in a skyline is being lost in a canyon.