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THE NUMBER OF VEHICLES IN PARIS: Christophe Studeny, L’Invention de la vitesse. France, XVIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 67, cited by Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation),” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 1 (1999), p. 14.
“EVERYONE HAS BECOME A DRIVER”: De l’aurigie, ou Méthode pour choisir, dresser et conduire les chevaux de carosse, de cabriolet et de chaise; suivie d’un nobiliare équestre, où Notice sur les races précieuses de Chevaux Étrangers, leur éxterieur, qua -lités, tempérament, régime, et sur les diverses soins qu’ils reçoivent (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1819), p. 272, cited in Schnapp, “Crash,” p. 15.
THE NUMBER OF CARRIAGES SHOT UP FROM 18,000 IN 1775 TO 106,000 IN 1840: Gordon S. Cantle, A Collection of Essays on Horse-Drawn Carriages and Carriage Parts, Carriage Museum of America (York, U.K.: Image Print, 1993), p. 38, cited in Schnapp, “Crash,” p. 15.
“CAME EFFORTS TO WIDEN AND STRAIGHTEN OUT STREETS”: Schnapp, “Crash,” p. 15.
“SELIFAN PERKED UP”: Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, pp. 283-84.
“THE VITAL EXPERIENCE”: Thomas De Quincey, “The English Mail Coach and Other Writings,” in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1863), p. 302.
“IN DEVELOPING THE ANARCHIES”: Ibid., p. 287.
“POT-WALLOPINGS OF THE BOILER”: Ibid., p. 303. Jeffrey Schnapp explains that “the forward-most seat, shared with the coachman, was considered the most dangerous of all” (p. 24). He cites a contemporary account: “I need scarcely to remind travellers that the most dangerous place about a coach is the box, inasmuch as, should she upset, they are less likely to avoid some part of her falling on them. The hinder seat, or gammon board is the most secure in the event of an upset …” In Charles James Apperley, My Horses and Other Essays, ed. E. D. Cumming (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1928), p. 183. Schnapp is the author of Quickening, an “anthropology of speed” forthcoming from Yale University Press.
“THE PROMISE/THREAT OF ACCIDENT”: Schnapp, “Crash,” p. 26. For more on technological advance and its connection to accidents and disasters, see Paul Virilio, The Original Accident (Cambridge, U.K., and Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2007).
“IDENTIFIED WITH ADMINISTRATION”: Schnapp, “Crash,” p. 13. This began earlier, he suggests, with the arrival of horse-drawn carriages of all kinds.
“THE LIGHTNING HAD LONG SINCE”: Janet Guthrie, Janet Guthrie: A Life at Full Throttle (Toronto: Sport Classic Books, 2005), p. 4.
Five CAPITALIST ROADERS
CHINA, WITH 2.6 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S VEHICLES: See WorldReporton Road Traffic Injury Prevention, ed. Margie Peden (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2004). Also at http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2004/9241562609.pdf.
COUNTLESS TOLLBOOTHS: According to the China Daily of February 28, 2008, “Some 16 provinces and municipalities, including Liaoning and Hubei provinces, have built 158 illegal toll stations on 100 highways under their jurisdiction and had collected a total 14.9 billion yuan ($2.1 billion) in passage fees by the end of 2005, the National Audit Office said yesterday on its website.” Online at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2008-02/28/content_6490949.htm.
A RICH WOMAN IN A BMW: “China Clamps Down on Online Justice,” by Tom Luard, BBC News Online, January 19, 2004. Online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3409995.stm.
THE NUMBER OF KIDNAPPINGS FOR RANSOM HAS SHOT UP: “Kidnapping
INDUSTRY IS BOOMING IN CHINA,” BY EVAN OSNOS, Chicago Tribune, January 22, 2006, p. 4.
UNSURPRISINGLY, I DROVE BETTER WITH MY MOM: My father was not being unreasonably cautious. Two weeks after I turned sixteen and got my license, on a family ski trip I piloted the Catalina down an icy road from our condo toward town. A jeep suddenly appeared in front of me as I rounded a bend, I touched the power brake, the Pontiac skidded, and we crashed; it was totally my fault. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. But the Pontiac was nearly totaled and the jeep, which was being driven by the girlfriend of the Aspen district attorney, was badly damaged.
BEIJING’S SULFUR DIOXIDE LEVELS IN 2004: “As China’s Auto Market Booms, Leaders Clash over Heavy Toll,” by Gordon Fairclough and Shai Oster, Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2006.
OF THE TWENTY CITIES IN THE WORLD WITH THE DIRTIEST AIR: Shahid Yusuf, Ton Saich, et al., China Urbanizes: Consequences, Strategies, and Policies (Washington, D.C.: World Bank Publications, 2008), p. 11.
79 PERCENT OF THE AIR POLLUTION: “In Land of Bicycle, Car Boom Brings Freedom of Open Road,” by Amelia Newcomb, Christian Science Monitor, August 3, 2005.
IN 2004 THERE WERE ONLY 9 CARS PER 1,000 PEOPLE: “China Motorization Trends,” by Lee Schipper, Ph.D., and Wei-Shiuen Ng, in “Growing in the Greenhouse: Protecting the Climate by Putting Development First,” World Resources Institute, December 2005.
A REPRESENTATIVE OF A MOTORCYCLE CLUB: Some of their members rode sidecar motorcycles, which I’d seen on Beijing ring roads. An old East German model is still manufactured in China.
GROWING BROADWAY
THEY WERE NOT THE FIRST PEOPLE: Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham, pp. 5-7. “Wickquasgeck,” in this book, is spelled “Wiechquaesgeck.” Dunlap has it as “Weckquaesgeek.”
THE PATH OF WALL STREET: Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World, pp. 254, 255.
AMONG THE FOUNDERS OF NEW AMSTERDAM: The name Van Kouwen-hoven morphed over the years in the American fashion. Wolphert’s son Jacob spelled his name Van Couwenhoven. A couple of generations later descendants were spelling it Covenhoven, then Covenor, and by the early nineteenth century, Conover.
“A MOB SPILLED DOWN BROADWAY”: Edward Robb Ellis, The Epic of New York City, p. 161.
“THE FINEST PRIVATE BUILDING IN TOWN”: Ibid., p. 188.
IT ENDED AT A FENCE: Ibid., p. 194.
MORE LIKELY, WROTE JOURNALIST AND HISTORIAN DAVID W. DUNLAP: David W. Dunlap, On Broadway, p. 91.
BROADWAY HAD REACHED 14TH STREET: Ellis, Epic, p. 251.
“HOW THIS CITY MARCHES NORTHWARD!”: George Templeton Strong, quoted in Ellis, Epic, p. 258.
THE SLAVES WHO HAD HELPED BUILD NEW YORK: Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, p. 547.
“YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN AROSE”: Ellis, Epic, p. 117.
CHARLES DICKENS, VISITING IN 1842: This passage can be found in Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar, eds., Empire City: New York Through the Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 187.
“A PERFECT MISSISSIPPI”: cited in Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, p. 720.
WALT WHITMAN DONNED TOP HAT AND FROCK COAT: Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, Editor at Twenty-two, ed. Joseph Jay Rubin and Charles H. Brown (State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle Press, 1950), pp. 4-5.
OBSERVING FROM THE SIDEWALK: Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, p. 706. 259 a visiting englishman: quoted in Ellis, Epic, pp. 258-59.
SHOPS AND DEPARTMENT STORES BEGAN TO BE LIT WITH GAS: Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, p. 1066.
A STAGE LINE UP WOODSY BLOOMINGDALE ROAD: Peter Salwen, Upper West Side Story, p. 9.
“FLED BY DIGNIFIED DEGREES”: Putnam’s Magazine of 1853, quoted in New York Times, November 12, 1911, p. xx1.
BY THEN IT WAS CONTINUOUS: Salwen, Upper West Side Story, pp. 59, 69, 124.
IN 1892, COLUMBIA COLLEGE BEGAN A MOVE: Dunlap, On Broadway, pp. 263-70.
“ABOUT AS REMOTE AND INACCESSIBLE AS MT. KISCO”: Frederick Paul Keppel, Columbia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1914), p. 79, cited in Dunlap, On Broadway, p. 263.
BY 1901 THE INTERBOROUGH RAPID TRANSIT (IRT) COMPANY: http://www.nycsubway.org/faq/briefhist.html.
BY 1908 THE “BROADWAY LINE” HAD EXTENDED ALL THE WAY: From northernmost Manhattan, the IRT runs not underground but on elevated tracks over Broadway, as it does around 125th Street.
THE UGLY COLISEUM EXHIBITION CENTER: The New York Coliseum was demolished in 2000 and replaced by the Time Warner Center, an office and commercial complex.
Six DRIVE SOFT-LIFE NO GET DUPLICATE
IT
WAS LIKE ONE PETAL OF A CLOVERLEAF: This style of exit is known to civil engineers as a jughandle.
THE SINGLE NIGERIA TRAVEL GUIDE I HAD FOUND: Lizzie Williams, Nigeria: The Bradt Travel Guide, p. 124.
FOR MILLENNIA, CITIES … ATTRACTED ONLY A SMALL PERCENTAGE OF THE HUMAN POPULATION: From “Cities of the Future: Today’s ‘Mega-cities’ Are Overcrowded and Environmentally Stressed,” by Divya Abhat, Shauna Dineen, Tamsyn Jones, Jim Motavalli, Rebecca Sanborn, and Kate Slomkowski, E/The Environmental Magazine, vol. 16, no. 5 (September-October 2005). Online at www.emagazine.com/view/?2849.
AS LATE AS 1900, 86 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION: “Managing Planet Earth: Experts Scaling Back Their Estimates of World Population Growth,” New York Times, August 20, 2002, p. F8.
THE WORLD’S POPULATION OF 6 BILLION: Ibid.
IN 1950 LAGOS HAD 288,000 PEOPLE: Abhat et al., “Cities of the Future,” online at http://www.emagazine.com/view/?28450.
“IS LURCHING TOWARD DISASTER”: Jeffrey Tayler, “Worse Than Iraq?,” The Atlantic, April 1, 2006.
“HAS BEEN A RECIPE”: Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums,” Harper’s, June 2004, pp. 17-18.
“DANGEROUS BREAKDOWNS OF ORDER AND INFRASTRUCTURE”: Boeri et al., Mutations, p. 686. Also see Abhat et al., “Cities of the Future,” online at http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2850.
NAMED BY PORTUGUESE SLAVE TRADERS AFTER LAGOS, PORTUGAL: For a particularly harrowing eyewitness account of slaves being unloaded in Lagos, Portugal, see Peter Edward Russel Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 241-44.
THREE AND ONE-HALF MILLION SLAVES: Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Slavery,” retrieved May 12, 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com/eb/article-24160.
NIGERIA HAS THE MOST PEOPLE OF ALL: “World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision Population Database,” United Nations Population Division, http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2008/wpp2008_highlights.pdf, p. 41.
ACCORDING TO THE WORLD BANK: See World Bank’s Nigeria Country Brief, http://go.worldbank.org/FIIOT240K0.
THE GROWTH OF THIRD WORLD MEGACITIES REPEATS PATTERNS: Davis, “Planet of Slums,” pp. 17-18.
CAPABLE OF HOLDING 50,000 PEOPLE: Lamin O. Sanneh and Joel A. Carpenter, The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 11.
ONE OF THE YOUNG MEN: English is the official language of Nigeria, taught in schools and used in formal communication. Pidgin is commonly used in informal exchanges between members of different tribes. The tribal languages most commonly heard in Lagos are Yoruba, Ibo, and Hausa.
FEDERAL ROAD SAFETY COMMISSION: The FRSC was founded, surprisingly enough, by Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize winner, when he was a professor at the University of Ife. Among his areas of oversight was the security of public roads; a special police were needed, he argued, to stop robberies of students. Over the years, that corps grew until it had a presence nationwide.
IN A WESTERN CITY, THE RATIO IS TYPICALLY: Personal communication with Timothy Kiehl of TRKKLLC Consulting, of Bethesda, Maryland, and with Mike Smith, director of emergency medical services for Durham County, North Carolina. Many places have fewer ambulances per capita; others have many more. British Columbia and Vancouver, for example, had 462 ambulances around the time of my visit to Lagos, serving a population of 4,113,487, or a 1:8,904 ratio.
A “BORROWING” FROM ITS COLLECTION: The Benin bronze head had been taken in 1973, but only recently had the missing item been discovered … among the collection at Buckingham Palace. As it turned out, General Yakubu Gowon had secretly removed it from the museum and presented it as a gift to the queen in 1973. Palace curators had assumed it was a replica until a query by an arts journalist in 2002 revealed that the bronze head was 400 years old. See “President ‘Liberated’ Bronze for Queen from Museum,” by Nigel Reynolds, The Telegraph, September 16, 2002. Online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1407331/President-liberated-bronze-for-Queen-from-museum.html.
ONE OF THE WORST SPOTS WAS NEAR THE OSHODI MARKET: See Boeri et al., Mutations, p. 693, on the character of Oshodi.
POOR PEOPLE HAD BEEN “BUNKERING”: Another oil pipeline explosion the day after Christmas would kill 500 Lagosians.
THE YORUBA CONCEPTS AIYÉ AND ÓTÁ: Akintunde Oyetade, “The Enemy in the Belief System,” in Understanding Yoruba Life and Culture, ed. Nike Lawal et al. (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2004). Cited in Damola Osinulu, “Painters, Blacks and Wordsmiths: Building Molues in Lagos,” African Arts 41, no. 3 (Autumn 2008), pp. 44-53.
“AGAINST WHOSE STRATEGIES, TACTICS MUST BE DEPLOYED”: Osinulu, “Painters, Blacksmiths and Wordsmiths,” p. 52.
294 THE FAMISHED ROAD: The title comes from a poem of Wole Soyinka, “Death in the Dawn” (1967), collected in Idanre and Other Poems (New York: Hill & Wang, 1987), p. 11: “May you never walk / When the roads waits, famished.” Among the best African fiction I have read concerning roads is Bessie Head’s short story “The Wind and a Boy,” in which a boy in a village is killed by a truck while riding his bicycle. See Head’s The Collector of Treasures, and Other Botswana Village Tales (London: Heinemann, 1992), pp. 69-75. Also see Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson.
“THE BIGGEST NODE IN THE SHANTYTOWN CORRIDOR”: Davis, “Planet of Slums,” p. 18.
EPILOGUE
THE WORDS rumbo AND camino: Sendero in Spanish means footpath. Thus Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the Maoist revolutionary movement in Peru.
“FAR FROM BEING ELEVATED BY CROWN HEIGHTS”: Will Self, Psychogeogra-phy, p. 57.
LEO MARX HAS COMMENTED: Leo Marx, professor at MIT, letter to The New Yorker, October 22, 2007.
A DISTINCTIVELY MALE SPACE: Louis Menand, “A Critic at Large: Drive, He Wrote,” The New Yorker, October 1, 2007. The notion of cars as “male space” also explains the transgressive appeal of the movie Thelma and Louise, about a road trip by two feisty women.
THE PARABLE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN: The quotations in this section are from Today’s New International Version of the Bible. I chose it from various translations of the parable because of its clarity. Online at http://www.ibsstl.org/bible/verse/index.php?q=Luke%2010.
“THE ORIGIN OF EXISTENCE IS MOVEMENT”: Ibn al-’Arab?, Le Dévoilement des Effets du Voyage (Kitāb al-isfār ’an natā’ij al-asfār), edited and translated by Denis Gril (Combas, France: Éditions de l’éclat, 1994), p. 4.
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