NEW YORK, N.Y. : The Greenwich Village air was sweet with the smell of burning tar, which mingled with souvlaki and honey-roasted peanuts in an olfactory mosaic. Staccato bursts of jackhammer noise, accompanied by equally rapid-fire cursing from road workers, served as percussion for the usual symphony of ambulance sirens and car horns. Weak sunlight filtered gamely through the smog; most blocks had at least one sidewalk passable; in short, it was the perfect day for a stroll down to Cooper Union to talk about the infrastructure.

But then, New York is always perfect for that. In a city where everything is constantly under visible and inconvenient repair, pedestrians are endlessly reminded of the existence and importance of public works—or public doesn’t-works. Unlike Lehigh University’s prestigious Institute for the Study of the Highrise Habitat, whose location in bucolic Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, affords ample opportunity for peaceful contemplation, Cooper Union’s Infrastructure Institute prefers to go where the action is. It couldn’t have picked a better place, because when it comes to infrastructure, New York City has it to the hilt.

The institute is headed by Samuel I. Schwartz, a native Brooklynite. Gridlock Sam, as he is known, spent nineteen years in New York City’s department of transportation, including four in the office of chief engineer, where his candor about the city’s shortsighted budget priorities did not always find favor with his superiors. Since leaving government, Schwartz has continued his lifelong concern with the condition of New York’s public works.

The Infrastructure Institute is the latest example of the spirit of public service that led Peter Cooper to found Cooper Union in 1859. Cooper rose from modest beginnings to achieve great wealth in a variety of industries, and along the way he never lost his belief in the importance of thrift and selfreliance. He also spent much of his life in efforts to improve New York’s living conditions. Toward that end he established Cooper Union to educate the city’s working class. To this day it remains tuition-free, and while the typical student is now more likely to have been born in Bangladesh or Vietnam than in Germany or Ireland, the school’s mission of urban improvement and its focus on practical training remain. These traditions were part of what attracted Schwartz to the newly established institute.

Schwartz traces the decline of New York’s transportation infrastructure as far back as 1911. After several decades that he calls the heyday of public works in New York, the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queensboro, and Williamsburg bridges across the East River were made toll-free that year. (The institute’s Tori Egherman attributes the decision to a rabble-rousing campaign waged by the publisher Joseph Pulitzer in his New York World .) The move was popular with the public, of course, but it set a dangerous precedent. Since then the city has had to fund repairs and maintenance for those bridges out of general revenues instead of dedicated sources.

In principle, of course, it doesn’t matter; the public pays either way. Yet somehow, when times are tough, as they almost always are, the least visible expenditures are the first to be cut. And although maintenance cannot be avoided—it can only be put off, at great cost—politicians calculate deferred expenses at a considerable discount from current ones, especially when they are deferred into someone else’s term of office.

The next stage began in the 1930s, when, under the leadership of Robert Moses, New York began to change from a city built for pedestrians and railroads to one built for automobiles. For example, early in the century the Brooklyn Bridge had two lanes for trolleys, two for subways, and two for horse-drawn carriages. Today all six traffic lanes carry automobiles, and the number of people crossing daily is down by more than half since its peak. As the city shifted its resources to accommodate the automobile, mass transit, which had once been used by virtually everyone, became less of a unifying force. In many parts of the city today, the subway is used strictly by poor people, which, predictably, has led to decreased spending on it.

The postwar vogue for management science created further problems. Professional bureaucrats—"M.B.A.s who think they can run anything,” in Schwartz’s words—used cost-benefit analyses and other fancy techniques to justify stretching out maintenance schedules. Never having visited a job site, they lacked the practical knowledge that would have told an experienced engineer that the city was crumbling. As bureaucrats multiplied, lines of authority got impossibly tangled. When a West Side Highway overpass collapsed in 1973, the city’s highways department had no idea that such land bridges had been under its jurisdiction for more than ten years. New York’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s—along with what Schwartz calls the “disposable mentality"—accentuated a process that had been under way for decades.

What is true of transportation is also true of sewers and water mains and parks, and the experience of New York has been duplicated in many other places. Wherever decisions are made by politicians whose only interest in history is the results of the last election, these lessons from past neglect will be forgotten. A recent paper by Schwartz and Clark L. Wieman, the institute’s senior research associate, makes numerous recommendations for initiatives, programs, and studies, all of which boil down to spending money wisely now to avoid much greater expense and inconvenience later.

Of course, everyone who wants the government to spend more money can make a similar argument. But unlike many of today’s social problems, such as crime and poverty, we know exactly how to prevent infrastructure decay, and how much doing so will cost. Schwartz emphasizes that the policies he advocates are not unproven new methods but rather tried-and-true wisdom. “This is not a moon shot,” he says. “What we’re embracing is essentially nineteenth-century technology.”

In the last issue of Invention & Technology, a story on Othmar Ammann ended with his remarks on how long his bridges could be expected to last. “Well, you never know what men or civilizations will do with themselves,” he said. “But barring catastrophes … forever, of course.” The prospect of humanity’s destroying itself looks less likely today than it did in 1958, when Ammann made his comments. If we can now take a tiny fraction of the funds that were spent pursuing destructive capabilities and use them to maintain construction, Ammann’s words may yet prove to be true. It would be most unfortunate if his works, and those of thousands of his colleagues, were allowed to perish- not through a sudden act of annihilation but through the far less dramatic, and far more avoidable, processes of rust and decay.

WEST ORANGE, N.J. : Most of us have a notebook, or some such place, where we put bits of paper that we don’t know what else to do with. Generally such archives have limited historical value. Throw out the ancient ticket stubs and grocery lists, and except for some faded love letters from your old flame who’s now married to a dentist in Toledo, there usually isn’t much left of importance. Of course, if you had received 1,093 patents, each with a long paper trail, your records would be a lot more interesting—as The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, demonstrates.

Reese V. Jenkins, the director of the Edison Papers project, and his staff are poring through more than three million pages of documents at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange. So far they have put out two volumes, covering Edison’s first twenty-nine years. They expect to publish eighteen more before they’re through. Among their discoveries so far are several items that provide fascinating glimpses into Edison’s personal life. We learn the nickname he gave his bride, and its derivation (Popsy Wopsy, “from a contemporary music hall song”). A rambling prose poem, written in response to some harsh criticism, reveals that Edison’s choice of invention over poetry was a wise career move. There’s even an invitation to a surprise party for his wife.

But the bulk of these first two volumes is devoted to the development, both technical and financial, of Edison’s telegraph business. We see patent applications and caveats, notebook entries, letters to and from business associates, journal articles, and many other documents. Through them all, the various aspects of Edison’s character—designer, manager, entrepreneur—show through clearly. References to the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London and other publications show that he kept up with the latest scientific discoveries. The inventor’s famous diligence is nicely exemplified by document 525, in which he methodically tests three dozen chemicals to see which are best for receiving marks from a tellurium recording pen. The editors have been just as meticulous themselves, noting every time a word has been interlined, scratched out, or entered in the margin, and scrupulously confessing even the most innocuous rearrangement of the text.

A microfilm edition of selected highlights from the papers has already been published; Jenkins’s crew is preparing a more complete one. The book version, while less exhaustive, contains background material and items that round out the picture for a wider readership. With fifty-five years and nearly a thousand patents still to come, the editors need not fear unemployment any time soon. When they finally finish, the world will have its most complete picture yet of how a smalltown boy from the Midwest became the Wizard of Menlo Park.