THE SEED OF REVOLT

In the hearts of many New Yorkers there glowed a strange and savage sense of satisfaction when fire, a few weeks ago, destroyed the wooden staging which had encased the lower half of the new Aeolian Building under construction at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. That fire may prove to be the torch igniting a citizens’ revolt of city-wide proportions.

For several years now, ever since they began tearing down most of the buildings in New York and erecting others in their places to be torn down next year, pedestrians have been practically excluded from the use of their sidewalks. On each corner, and in the middle of each block, it has been necessary to tunnel through great wooden passageways, dodging avalanches of bricks on one side and workmen darting out from clammy recesses with wheelbarrows of mortar on the other. These workmen have a system whereby they lie in wait in the ground floor of the new building, each with a wheelbarrow full of unpleasant material poised ready, until you and I are directly upon the plank which slopes across the sidewalk to the waiting truck. Then, at a signal from the boss, they charge out directly in your path, shouting the Fascist war cry and scraping the buttons off your waistcoat. At the same moment a landslide of gravel is let loose from the fifth floor crashing on top of the flimsy structure over your head and sending through a blinding shower of fine white powder which stirs up all that old catarrhal trouble which the doctor has assured you will cause your death one day.

They lie in wait in the ground floor of the new building.

If you evolve some maneuver calculated to evade this ordeal by going around the structure on the outside, you are confronted by a line of trucks backed up against the curb, making it necessary for you to go way out to the middle of the street, where you are immediately run over in the traffic.

For years now the supine citizens of New York have forgone the use of their sidewalks, having first been prohibited the use of their streets, until the fire in the new Aeolian Building chewed to pieces the wooden shanty and boardwalk and, it is to be hoped, did irreparable damage to dozens of wheelbarrows. It is said that the fire was caused by a workman leaving an acetylene torch burning in the basement. Whether it was really a workman or some nerve-racked patriot with the courage of his convictions does not matter now. The idea has been implanted in the minds of hundreds of citizens and it would not be surprising if, before autumn, construction companies had evolved some other way of erecting their buildings.

Sending through a blinding shower of fine white powder.