Cities

The national government is glamorous, but it is the city government which steps most noticeably on people's toes. It is the city that a man curses when he finds a parking ticket on his car, when his car is stolen, when he gets dust in his eye, when the street sprinkler squirts his new suit, when his son comes from the public school with a bloody nose, when his son cannot go to school because of a measles epidemic.

So last week, to discuss this necessary monster, mayors, professors, doctors, businessmen betook themselves to St. Louis, to the 32d annual convention of the National Municipal League. They . talked feverishly about everything from city-owned taxicabs in Philadelphia to "half-baked vocational education." However, they all remembered the words of one man who stung the pride but revealed the feeling of many a metropolis dweller:

"The skyscraper has already become a plague that we may well range alongside our ancient city scourges of cholera, yellow fever, tuberculosis and slums. . . .

"In New York it is the collective skyscraper at the city's workaday hub that breeds more subways, less money for other needs, and more motor vehicles in the skyscrapers' service to kill more children in the children's only playground, the roadways between the sidewalks of New York."

The speaker was able, genial Henry H. Curran, Manhattan attorney, onetime Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island, candidate for mayor of New York City in 1921, who is fast becoming a national figure as anti-skyscraper man.*

* "Thomas Alva Edison has prophesied that traffic strangulation would eventually doom the skyscraper.