“He Urged A Single Vast City To Be Built On Top Of The Niagara Falls To House The Entire Population Of The United States of America”

I read somewhere recently that if all of contemporary America had the population density of Brooklyn, we would be able to fit everyone into New Hampshire. The rest of the country would grow wild and beautiful while New Hampshire would stink like a graveyard restroom. King C. Gillette, razor magnate and Utopian socialist, encouraged the design of something similar in the 1890s: a hyper-concentrated metropolis made of porcelain buildings. Never quite happened. From “Impossible Cities,” by Darran Anderson at 3:AM:

“The inventor of the safety razor, business magnate and socialist, King Camp Gillette had similarly ambitious plans, writing The Human Drift in which he urged a single vast city to be built on top of the Niagara Falls (powered naturally by hydro-electricity) to house the entire population of the United States of America. It would measure 135 miles by 45 and consist of cylindrical skyscrapers made from porcelain. Pre-empting Fritz Lang’s Expressionist dystopia by decades, its name would be Metropolis.”

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