From the engineers at Honeywell in 1957 comes this prediction that, by A.D. 2000, we will have machines under our dining room floors that suck away dirty dishes, clean them, and then stack them on the shelves.
If you have any sense of what is possible in the physical world, this cutaway may offend you. An eight-inch thick concrete floor with an automatic dishwasher levitating below it? How do the dishes exactly get washed in there, then pushed up and away? Mostly, how does the machine sort and stack the dishes?
The Year 2000–as it was called before 2000–is looking awfully distant with each passing year. Will it ever happen? And what I mean by this is the chasm between what was promised and what we’ve got: the old “Where’s my jetpack?” meme. Or, “I wanted cars in tubes but all I’ve got is Twitter.”
Yes, cars that travel in tubes. This one comes from the engineers at Honeywell, in the 1950s a cutting-edge company sprouting all sorts of innovations. This photo, from Popular Mechanics, December 1957, comes with no context other than the caption, “Honeywell engineer predicts that by A.D. 2000 cars will zip through network of crashproof pneumatic tunnels.”
The plan made a lot of sense. If you were going to have a freeway running right through San Francisco’s Panhandle, which itself connects to the eastern end of Golden Gate Park, why not partially cap it off?
Edmund G. Burger, principal at Burger & Coplans, wasn’t the bad guy here, not by any stretch of the imagination. Burger, born in 1930, was a renaissance man, an innovator who seemed to excel at every thing he tried: basketball scholarship, founder of the Grow Homes movement preceded Habitat for Humanity, and architect for the American Pavilion at the 1992 Olympic Games, in Barcelona, among many achievements. Yet to freeway-sensitive San Franciscans, anything related to a freeway, even a sensible mitigating device such as this, was a no-go.
Burger’s defense of the high cost of capping the Panhandle Freeway was that freeways running through difficult topography in open areas often incur extra costs to bypass, remove, or ram though those obstacles. Burger felt that dealing with a city’s topography and the related costs shouldn’t be viewed much differently.
San Francisco Panhandle Freeway Cap, Aerial View, 1967
The cap would have run along a four-block section at the end of the Panhandle, partially covering a recessed freeway. Cantilevered concrete walls 60 feet high would have slanted inward 24 feet on each side over this freeway. These walls would actually be the backs of three story apartments for moderate-income residents. While the walls would have been concrete, the apartments were designed to be constructed of wood.
San Francisco Panhandle Freeway Cap, Fell or Oak Streets, 1967
The 90 foot-wide slot above the freeway would have given drivers light and air, and would have allowed exhaust fumes to escape. The walls and ground-level garages were estimated to cost $1 million per block.
San Francisco Panhandle Freeway Cap, Inside, 1967
San Francisco and freeways don’t mix. The Panhandle Freeway and Burger’s cap would politically go down in the Freeway Revolts of the 1960s. That eyesore, the Embarcadero Freeway, literally came down during the 1992 San Francisco earthquake.
Panhandle, 1938
San Francisco Panhandle 1938, Showing Road
The idea of a Panhandle Freeway wasn’t so far-fetched. While not quite a freeway, there was a road running through the Panhandle, as shown in this 1938 photo, above.
Fantastic cutaway of New York’s Radio City Music Hall stage in 1950, showing the 57 foot pistons that operate the three stage elevators. This allowed the Rockettes to perform on three different levels.
Few people realize that half of a department store is devoted to areas they never see. Behind the familiar counter and displays are large areas used for stockrooms and other services that supply the selling floors out front. there is a fur vault, complete bake shop, huge kitchen, and a variety of workrooms. Each one is a little business in itself, and many of them need a lot of heat and cold in order to operate. To control all this heat and cold, they use insulations, the kind of insulations made and installed by the Armstrong Cork Company.
This illustration comes from a Saturday Evening Post from the 1950s, and has a key so that readers can find out what each room does:
That’s why you’ll find such a large machine room (1) down in the basement. Here boilers make steam, and compressors cool a refrigerant. Both the steam and the refrigerant are sent to the rooftop penthouse (2) to heat or cool air which is then blown all through the store in a network of ducts.
Everything about Soltesz cutaways is pitch-perfect. Mood, shadows, people: all the things that many illustrators leave out Soltesz does in force. Note the side action with the traffic cop and the steam pipes coming out off the cutaway ground:
