Bruce McCall is the patron saint of secret infrastructure. His book, Zany Afternoons, is one of my most highly valued books. For some odd reason, most of my favorite books were on sale in the bargain bin at bookstores. This one was a mere ten bucks at Barnes & Noble.
While there are too many great Bruce McCall drawings/comics to list, one of my favorite series of drawings is called “New York, Once Upon a Time”. He talks about a parallel universe of New York architecture that never was and never could have been.
There is the Ironing Board Building, instead of the very-real Flatiron Building. There is the Fifth Avenue Line Subway, 1901, which I believe has some vague connection to reality. And then of course there was the time that a portion of Central Park was turned into Jimmy Walker Metropolitan Airfield, back in 1931. Or how about Canal Street, 1934, which had a real canal in front, complete with ferry-trolleys plying the waterways. Of course, Canal Street did have to be drained in 1939 as a precaution against Nazi subs.
The Moto Ritz Towers in 1937 is one of my favorite. As McCall puts it:
Theater people had most of the top floors. They partied continuously. Coming up late at night was hell, you knew some of them were up there somewhere, on the way down. Woe betide the tenant whose driver was yellow. We had nothing but bad luck with ours. One of them–an ex-aviator, if you can imagine–would get halfway up, stop and vomit. Even when it wasn’t foggy. You often just left your car down on the street and took a taxi; those people would do anything for money. The ghoulish publicity after that first bad ice storm virtually forced the city to tear the roadway out. As a compromise there was talk at the time about guard rails. We didn’t want guard rails. The absence of guard rails, wasn’t that the whole and entire point?
