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A Treasury of Brooklyn (see page 57)

p 289

"Lewis Mumford in a chapter called "The Insensate Industrial Town" in his Culture of Cities mentions Brooklyn: the indifference to geographical contours in the application of the formal gridiron to the land surface, was nothing short of sublime: the engineers' streets often swept through swamps, embraced dumpheaps, accepted piles of slag and waste, climbed cliffs, and ended up a quarter of a mile beyond the low water mark of the waterfront."

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan McGraw Hill

paperback ed. 1965 p 93-94

"The wheel and the road are undergoing recession and obsolescence; but in the first instance given the pressure for, and from, wheels, there had to be roads to accommodate them. Settlements had created the impulse for exchange and for the increasing movement of raw material produce from countryside to processing centers, where there was division of labor and specialist craft skills. Improvement of wheel and road more and more brought

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the town to the country in a reciprocal spongelike action of give-and-take. It is a process we have seen in this century with the motor car. Great improvements in roads brought the city more and more to the country. The road became a substitute for the country by the time people began to talk about "taking a spin in the country." With super-highways the road became a wall between man and the country. Then came the stage of the highway as city, a city stretching continuously across the continent dissolving all earlier cities into the sprawling aggregates that desolate their populations today."

8.9.69

p 598-99 Modern European Poetry - Bantam Books 1966

The Street by Octavio Paz