The question naturally arises as to the sound of conversation from the
roof reaching the living-rooms or the sound from the rooms reaching the
roof. The cement walls are practically sound proof and for sounds to be
heard from roof to house or house to house requires that it pass into
the open air and bend through a 180 degree angle. Sound does not travel
in that way as one may readily prove by trying to shout around the
corner of a ledge of rock or over a stone building. With all windows
and doors wide open in the Roadtown home, the only sound of ordinary
magnitude to be heard will be from the singing of birds and the play
of children in front of the window. The uncanny noise of city streets
and of quarrelsome neighbors across the air shaft will be missing.
People who cannot content themselves with the quiet of a Roadtown home
will have to use the telephone, electric music, roof promenade or go
to the social center. Promenaders cannot stare into nor listen at
their neighbors’ windows. The Roadtowner’s home is his castle in the
truest sense of the word, and more private, notwithstanding the close
proximity to neighbors, and hence more consecrated to family life than
any previous style of dwelling known.
The Roadtown will have no streets because it will need none. As it is
built through the country, there will, of course, be roads as well as
streets to cross. Here the monorail will run under, and the roof bridge
over the roads. At such road crossings and such other places where
roads are built back into the country, stables and garages will be
provided.
The natural desire to drive one’s own vehicles up to the door of his
own house will cause an occasional remonstrance against the plan at
first, but as people find that there is no need of such roadways they
will come to consider the Roadtown road crossings as their front door,
when viewed from the auto or equestrian’s standpoint, and no more think
of the necessity of a private roadway to their own house than that of
having their auto sent up the tenth story of an apartment house.
Those who wish to pay a visit to a Roadtown home will come to the
nearest point where the railroad crosses the Roadtown or if traveling
by horse or auto where the public road crosses the Roadtown and will
leave their vehicle in charge of a caretaker and have their name
’phoned in as one does at an up-to-date apartment house or hotel. If
the Roadtowner is at home, the caller will then take the monorail or
the roof promenade as the distance or his inclination dictates, and
thus reach the door of his friend’s home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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