Cobblestones
For the STSC Symposium, "The Good Life"
I love red brick cities with cobblestone streets. Dublin is one of those cities. I recently watched “House of Guinness,” the first season of the new series, on Netflix. It’s the story of the Guinness family and their brewery. It is set in 1860s Dublin, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution influenced almost every aspect of life, particularly in the Western world. It influenced many aspects of my life. My grandparents were Victorians and they and my parents worked in industry. Economic historians consider the Industrial Revolution one of the most important events in human history. It ushered in the good life for many. During that period the average income and the population exhibited unprecedented and sustained growth. Among those aspects that influence my life is my being riveted by the history of the Industrial Revolution and the events and culture encompassing it: I like density and intensity. The age of the Industrial Revolution embodied both. And, actually, thinking further, I think it’s the converse, that the Industrial Revolution, that era in which I grew up and lived most of my life, has drawn me to density and intensity. It’s familiar, in a way, thereby comforting.
In recent decades we’ve been coming up out of the Industrial Revolution, like ascending the steps from a subway, but with a hangover from the night before. Amid slews of slumbering smokestacks we’ve emerged into the sterile new world of AI, cleaner air, a more sustainable environment, such a good life, the best life yet. That’s one aspect. We’ve entered the world of the AI centipede with sucker-bearing legs cobbled together all over the place, bearing handles for anyone to grasp and buttons to tap and gain control, anyone who wants to co-opt your life, your individuality, your creative work, if you let them. Not me, if I can help it. Scraping a writer’s work to teach AI to regurgitate it for an inquirer who needs an answer without critically thinking about it or working for it is not sanitizing and minimalizing the environment, it’s plagiarism, pure plagiarism.
I embrace the history that carried us to our present destination and want to crawl back down that high, round smoky, brick chimney of industry, breathe deep and inhale the soot, descending down, down, down in a foggy slouching spiral to the floor. In my free-fall imagination and in reality, I emerge on a cobblestone street, for many streets in those days were paved with cobblestones, cobblestones laid centuries before. Whose job was it to lay all those cobblestones? The individual who laid them is long dead, lying in a tomb beneath the ground beside an alley where cobblestones lay. Yet the mark of his craftsmanship lives. His legacy. The job must have been very tedious. Wore him out. Down on his knees in the middle of the street, laying one cobblestone beside the other. But it put bread and potatoes on the table. Walk along a cobblestone street and think how long those stones under your feet have lain there. They don’t wear out like your shoes. Cobblestones are durable. A cobblestone doesn’t grow mold like a loaf of bread languishing on a sideboard. There must be some useful wisdom in that. Cobblestones exist plentifully and exhibit many benefits.
In the “Guinness” TV series, cautioning the Fenians to shoot the British but not the horses, the Fenian leaders state assuredly that all horses are Catholic. I did not know all horses are Catholic. Enlightening. I don’t know any horse who has mentioned it. In fact, I don’t know much about horses, and when I approach one of them, it knows. The horse just turns its head to me and, “Oh, boy. I have me here a genuine gringo. I’ll try to mash this one up against a fence. Moreover,” continues the horse, “I’m Catholic, you know. You may not want to climb into my saddle.” This, straight from the horse’s mouth.
The shod horse finds cobblestones easy on its hooves. In slick, wet weather, the cobblestones enable the horse to get a good footing and keep from slipping. “I appreciate a cobblestone street,” says the horse. This much I know about horses, in the context of cobblestones. And cobblestones kept women from dragging the hems of their skirts all through the mud and puddles when crossing the street on a rainy day. You still had to take care, though, to step around places where some of the horses had stood. (Well, you have to do that with AI, too, if you want to maintain any sane semblance of your mind.)
Cobblestone paving is permeable. Stormwater runs off the stones into the interstices between them and into the ground, in the process trapping and filtering solids and pollutants, reducing surface runoff and thereby increasing ground water level, sustaining the environment and by extension, cobbling together the good life.
The Romans thought so. They found all these smooth stones plentiful in streams and decided to lay them in their roads so they could navigate all across their proliferate empire without their wagons getting mired in the muck or, on sunny, dry days, joggling uncomfortably in the ruts.
I read where cobblestones paved the roads in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. So, the idea isn’t new. Individuals have been crawling around out there on their hands and knees setting cobblestones for millennia, in all kinds of weather. You might call those who laid cobblestones millennials. Old cities have cobblestone streets. The streets and alleys are charming, narrow, sometimes winding, sometimes hilly, the steepest ones even with steps; and the buildings hugging opposite sides of these streets so close, when I wander a cobblestone street I feel a sense of intimacy. I am back in a small, analog village. I am free of information overload, free of nonsensical memes and gossip. Teleported to a slower, quieter, aesthetically pleasing place, I free my imagination to reel out the good life, listening to the sounds, smelling damp old walls, or sundried brick and stone, the scent of the ages, of all the individuals, a good wife stoking the hearth for the porridge, children chasing a ball, a dog barking, the black cat curled on a sunny stoop, the ragman with his horse and wagon, calling “Rags! Rags! Rags!” The fishwife yelling “Feesh! Feesh! Fresh feesh!” The iceman with his tongs, the horse-drawn carriage bringing a welcome visitor to your door, and the old lamplighter who comes by and lights the street lamps at dusk, all who passed through that cobblestone street.
Philadelphia, where I grew up, is a red brick city with cobblestone streets. William Penn, a Quaker born in Berkshire, England, who was granted land in what is now Pennsylvania and Delaware by King Charles II, laid out the Philadelphia city streets in 1681, some paved with cobblestones. The stones are still there.
I have driven those streets, hard to navigate with trolley tracks running up the center of the three narrow lanes, one way—a car on each side and a trolley car in the middle. The trolley can’t swerve out of your way. The cobblestones and tracks catch your tires.
In the 1960s, I worked for an insurance company situated across the square from Independence Hall where our nation’s founding fathers debated and adopted the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, having concluded that King George III was treading the path to batshit madness brought on by tea addiction. Walking the mile home from work to our apartment through cobblestone alley streets in the winter at dusk, just as the lights go on, I liked to look in people’s windows to see how good life was in there, to see if they’d decorated their interiors in Georgian style. I loved to smell the wood smoke from their hearths. Did they keep their kitchen in their basement as in the old days where they originally built them to keep the house from burning down? I romanticized about past life surrounding the names of the old streets—Delancey, Camac, Darien, Cypress, Pine, Spruce, Chancellor.
Cobblestones are living pieces of history.
I have walked those streets—you have to be careful not to get your high heels stuck in the cracks between the stones. So, too, have walked these same streets Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and George Washington. The sense of their presence is palpable even to this day. I am certain I overheard Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, standing beneath a leafing black locust tree one unseasonably chilly spring afternoon, engaged in a heated discussion:
Adams: “Tom, you can’t use Hobbes’ meaning of the social contract in your Declaration.”
Jefferson: “Who’s Hobbes? Isn’t he a tiger? You know, Calvin’s friend?”
Adams: “John Calvin? Did he have a tiger as a friend? I didn’t know. I haven’t read anywhere that was even predestined.”
Jefferson: “Stuffed. Whatever. Anyway, as you can see from the first line of my draft, I have used the social contract meaning of John Locke. His words. He states the human rights we believe in. No kings. No kings. The authority of human rulers has a human origin and is limited. John Locke interpreted the social contract to mean that people keep their rights and can challenge a ruler who misuses power. This is what we want, the pursuit of life, liberty and property happiness. I’ll put that just there in the preamble. The right to the good life. Anyway, once we get to signing this thing, that John Hancock fellow writes so big, he’ll take up the whole page. See that woman over there?
Adams: What? Where? A woman?
Jefferson: There. See? She seems to be watching us.
Adams: A British spy?
Jefferson: What strange apparel she’s wearing. What are you doing? What happened?”
Adams: “I dropped my quill-pen. Let me just stoop and pick it up. Oof. It’s wedged between the cobblestones. Ugh. I wish I hadn’t eaten that Philly cheese steak for lunch.”
In the ‘60s I lived in center city Philadelphia where cobblestone streets were common. My roommate and I lived in a second-floor apartment of a red-brick, Georgian row house, built in the 1790s. When we cleaned, the dust we picked up wasn’t gray, it was black. It was soot. Everything was always covered with soot. We didn’t have air conditioning then. On midsummer nights we opened the windows wide and guzzled iced tea. Some nights we’d hear a group of guys walking up the street, four or five abreast, harmonizing, a cappella, singing close harmonies. Those were the days, as if now but a dream. The good life, soot, close harmonies, doowop, cobblestones.
When I was a child, my family used to drive into Philadelphia from the suburbs to visit my great aunt and uncle. They lived in a big row house on a one-way cobblestone street with a trolley track running up the middle. I remember going there on rainy evenings. Aunt Mary and Uncle Will were retired and had a maid named Otta who prepared their dinner for them and cleaned up after. Had I the same today, I’d be living the good life. Back then, by the time we arrived, we’d sit in the parlor while the adults chatted. In the rain, the “streamlined” PCC1 streetcars slished past Aunt Mary and Uncle Will’s house in West Philadelphia. I remember the sound, the slisshshh of the passing trolleys on the steel tracks on the cobblestone street in the rain. Our family sat in the formal parlor behind the lace curtains and fringed shades with the tassel pull cords—like Eeyore’s tail—that shielded us from the view of the trolleys and the slick, cobblestone street. And their cuckoo clock: when Aunt Mary and Uncle Will signaled, my brother and I would dash between the heavy crimson velvet curtains into the dark dining room to watch the wooden bird emerge and proclaim the end of another hour. And the fascinating second was the mantel clock with the owl eyes that lit up red. It was the late 1940s, the War was over, we were pulling up to the gate of the ‘50s and the Industrial Revolution was riding the steel rails to the terminal. Those were the days. It was a good life. I felt safe and secure there within the fold of my family, no mortgage to pay, no old friends dropping dead, no worries about drive-by shootings like in “The Lone Ranger”—they only happened out in the wild West, and knowing that if I ate all my dinner I wouldn’t have to feel so bad about all those Chinese on the other side of the world going hungry.
I want to see what that street looks like today, so I google it. What I find is that I lived in Philadelphia so long ago that I have become part of the history.
In front of Aunt Mary and Uncle Will’s house, the cobblestones are gone. So are the steel tracks and the overhead trolley wires. The tracks have been razed or covered along with the cobblestones in a slurry seal of asphalt. Who sat there and thought that up? Asphalt is cheaper. But it doesn’t last. Buses run past the house now. Undoubtedly that house no longer smells of Uncle Will’s cigar smoke but rather of diesel fuel. Asphalt has to be regularly maintained and resealed. (Plus, so many people have knee problems these days, you know?) Did the asphalt thinker really save the city money long term? Asphalt is an impervious surface. So is AI, if you let it be. AI searches and scrapes, collects data and puts out slurry-sealed sterile sentences and paragraphs, and people believe it, too self-satisfied in their impervious-surfaced glass world to step through that portal of their smartphones for a deeper look. Literally and metaphorically, respectively, the rainwater and all the toxic runoff spills straight into the river; in the latter sense, the river of life. My grandfather told us he used to swim in the Delaware River off Philadelphia when he was a boy. As a child I tried to imagine that, with all that industrial pollution having spilled into the river by then. I saw globs of multicolored gloss glinting in the sun, slicks floating from the oil refineries lining the banks up and down the river. Globally, in today’s sanitized environment we swim in slicks of AI pollution and misinformation coloring our sensibilities. In some Philadelphia neighborhoods, though, the 1947 streamlined trolleys are being refurbished at a million dollars apiece and are coming back.2 And the cobblestones remain along the lines. There’s hope for the return of the good life. It wouldn’t surprise me that they’ve analyzed and planned this restoration employing AI, though. I can’t imagine a group of bespectacled men and women wearing khaki coats all standing around a ping-pong size table pointing at things on a map; no, more likely a guy at a computer, in a screen-printed T-shirt and jeans, wearing glasses.
When I was a kid we’d drive along the river or through the city past all the factories, refineries and steel mills belching soot and chemicals, navigating those narrow cobblestone streets and say with pride, “This is the backbone of America.” Not anymore. All the while, writing this piece I’ve been floating on the gaseous foam of nostalgia, romanticizing the good parts of the good life. Across the years, I’ve cobbled together many lifetimes into this one lifetime. Would I go back and repeat them all? I’d pick and choose—only the good parts. Right? This life today has good parts, too—the lessening of industrial pollution, a smidge less soot in the air. I remember sitting in my grandparents’ house in West Philadelphia when the coal man would come and I’d listen to the coal sliding down the chute to the bin by the furnace in the cellar. We’d go down to the cellar with Granddad to watch him shovel the coal into the furnace. The good life. Except that Granddad kept the house as hot as a furnace. All that soot going up the chimney.
Coal is used to fire furnaces to make steel. In the past twenty years many steel mills have closed. Smokestacks stagnate that not long ago spewed soot into the air. We used to have heavy industry. We used to make steel.3
We still use cobblestones.
~Samantha
PCC streetcar (tram)—The Presidents’ Conference Committee emerged from a United States committee formed in 1929 to design faster-accelerating and more comfortable electric streetcars. First built in the U.S. in the 1930s, the streetcars came into wide use, and after WWII were licensed for use elsewhere in the world. Production continued into the 1950s.
Restorers of these streetcars must build new parts, since the streetcars are no longer produced and old, worn parts can’t always be repaired.
A line I borrowed from the British TV show, “Would I Lie to You?”
This story is presented for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the theme was “The Good Life.”
This was a lovely read Carol thank you, written in your inimitable style. The cobblestones and hobbling stones. Horses, ancestors ... much more. I could hear the sounds ..
That was a fun read Carol.