Persons per Hour

by Paul Goodman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Monday

In the spring of 1961 the Department of Traffic sent Arthur Kolb, assistant civil engineer, to sit on Leroy Street for a week and count what went by.

It was not an important assignment. He had it because he was good at it and nobody else wanted it, since it meant eight hours on a sidewalk instead of at a desk. He had a folding canvas stool, a clipboard of forms ruled in fifteen-minute intervals, a thermos of coffee his sister had filled at six that morning in Jackson Heights, and two chrome hand tallies, one for each hand: the left for passenger cars, the right for trucks. Buses did not use the street. He was forty-one. He wore a grey suit that was too warm for May, because he did not own a jacket that was not part of a suit, and he kept his hat on.

The count was for the sidewalks. In a file in the Municipal Building there was a plan to take four feet off each side of Leroy Street between Seventh Avenue South and Hudson, so that the street could carry two moving lanes where it now carried one lane and a line of parked cars. The plan was costed: the curbs reset, the flagstones relaid, two hydrants moved, eleven London plane trees and one ailanthus taken down. What the plan did not yet have was a number, and Arthur was to bring back the number.

I want to say something plainly here, because it is the kind of thing that is never said in the Municipal Building, though everyone there knows it. The plan was not drawn up because of the cars. The cars were going to be the reason for the plan, which is a different thing. In our society an engineer is not asked whether a thing ought to be done; he is asked to supply the figure that shows it must be. This is what I mean when I say that the persons have become personnel. Arthur Kolb was a decent man and a competent engineer, and on Leroy Street that Monday he was an instrument for producing a number that, in a sense, was already known.

He set the stool down in front of a five-storey tenement with a brownstone stoop, the steps worn into shallow dishes in the middle by seventy-five years of feet. On the stoop were six coffee cans with tomato seedlings in them, and a kitchen chair chained by one leg to the iron railing. The chair stood on the sidewalk, about three feet out from the bottom step.

He counted. A Ford, a Chevrolet, a laundry van, which was a truck. A Studebaker with a dented door going too fast. He clicked and did not look up much. At each quarter hour he wrote down the two numbers and reset the tallies with his thumbs, and the little wheels spun back to zero with a sound like a cricket.

At ten past two the door of the tenement opened and a man came down the steps in an undershirt and work trousers, barefoot, carrying two cups of coffee. He was in his thirties, thick through the shoulders and the belly, with black hair that had been slept on.

"You've been here since eight," the man said.

"Half past seven."

"I heard you. You click. I'm on the second floor front." He held out a cup. "I work nights. I go to sleep at seven-thirty in the morning and at seven-thirty there's a man under my window going click, click."

"I'm sorry."

"Take the coffee."

Arthur took it, because he had a cup in his hand before he had decided anything, and because in eleven years of fieldwork nobody had brought him coffee. He set the right-hand tally on his knee. A bakery truck went by and he missed it, and then he made a mark on the margin of the form so that it would be counted.

"What are you counting?"

Arthur told him. It was public information. The man listened and looked at the curb, and then at his chair, and then at the curb again, measuring.

"Four feet," he said.

"On each side."

"So you count the cars, and they take my chair."

"I count the cars. What the Department decides to do with the—" Arthur stopped, because it was the sentence that everybody in the Municipal Building said, and he had never before heard himself say it out loud to the man it was about.

The man's name was Aldo Spina. He was a short-order cook on the night shift at a cafeteria on Sheridan Square, where he fried eggs for the people who came in at three in the morning: musicians, taxi drivers, drunks, and men who had not found anybody and did not want to go home yet. He had grown up on this block and gone to Our Lady of Pompeii and left school at fifteen. He sat in the chair from two until five every afternoon, which was his evening, and he grew tomatoes in the coffee cans because his window did not get the sun and the stoop did.

He went back upstairs at a quarter to five without saying goodbye. Monday, seven-thirty to six: four hundred and twelve passenger cars, sixty-one trucks.

Tuesday

On Tuesday Aldo came down at half past one with a box of school chalk.

On the top step, in the flat part beside the worn dish, he drew a rectangle, and every time a person walked past he made a stroke in it, and on the fifth a crossbar, the way prisoners do it in cartoons.

"What's that?"

"I'm counting what you don't count."

Arthur watched him for a quarter of an hour. Aldo counted everyone: the women with string bags going to the market on Bleecker, two longshoremen walking down toward the piers with their hooks over their shoulders, a priest, the boys from the fruit store throwing a ball against the wall, a girl on roller skates who went by three times and was counted three times, a blind man who walked close to the curb and touched each plane tree with the flat of his hand as he passed it.

"You're counting the kid every time," Arthur said.

"She goes by every time."

"Then you're counting trips, not persons. That's all right, it's what I do with the cars. But you have to say so. And you need intervals, or nobody can tell your peak."

"What's a peak?"

Arthur showed him. He took the chalk and ruled the step into columns, two-fifteen, two-thirty, two-forty-five, and explained why you reset at the quarter hour and what you could tell from it: when people went to work and came back, when the schools let out, when the street was most in use. It took him twenty minutes. Aldo understood it in ten, because he needed it; the other ten were for Arthur, who found that he liked explaining a thing to someone who would use it the next minute. I do not think either of them would have said that anything was being taught on that stoop. But Arthur learned the street, which he had been looking at for a day and a half without seeing, and Aldo learned the method, and both of them learned it well, as people learn what they learn while they are doing something for its own sake.

The blind man, Aldo said, was Mr. Feld, who had lost his sight in a boiler explosion on a harbor tug in 1947 and lived on Bedford Street. He went down Leroy every afternoon to sit at the end of the pier. He did not use the curb, which had cars parked against it; he went by the trees. There were six of them on this side, and he knew where every one was.

Arthur wrote that in the margin of his form, beside the trucks. Then he looked at what he had written and did not cross it out.

Tuesday, seven-thirty to six: three hundred and ninety-eight passenger cars, fifty-five trucks. On the step, in Aldo's columns, one-thirty to five: one thousand one hundred and sixty-six trips on foot, with a peak between three-fifteen and three-thirty, when the school round the corner let out.

Wednesday

It rained. The instructions for a manual count say that the count continues in rain, and Arthur sat on his stool under a black umbrella with the clipboard inside his coat and his hat getting dark at the brim.

At two Aldo opened the street door and said, "Come in, you'll drown. You can see through the glass."

The vestibule was four feet by six. It smelled of wet plaster and of somebody's peppers frying on the third floor. Through the glass of the door, which had 1886 cut into its transom, the whole of that stretch of Leroy Street was visible, grey and running with water, the planes dripping. Arthur stood at the glass and clicked. Aldo stood beside him, close, because there was nowhere else to stand, and they watched the street together, and neither of them said anything for some minutes.

Then Aldo put his hand around Arthur's left wrist, over the tally, not hard.

"You going to count me?" he said.

I will say this as directly as I can, since the evasions are where the harm is done. Arthur Kolb had been with men before. He had been with them in the dark at Riis Park, and in the men's room of the IRT station at Times Square, quickly, without names, with one eye on the door; and afterward, every time, there had been the long ride home on the Flushing line and his sister's pot roast and the radio, and the sense of having got away with something and of having been robbed of it at the same moment. He was not ashamed of what he wanted. He was ashamed of how he had arranged to get it, which is a different thing and the thing our society arranges for men like him. What he had never once had was a man who knew his name and asked him a question at four in the afternoon in the daylight.

They went up to the second floor front. I am not going to describe it, not because it is shameful but because it was theirs, and ordinary, and good, and a description would turn it into a dirty joke or a tract, and it was neither. The window was open an inch on the rain. The bed was not made, because Aldo had got out of it two hours before. Afterward Aldo smoked, and Arthur lay with his hand on the other man's belly, which rose and fell, and he felt his own breathing come down to meet it, and he was not thinking about the ride home.

For forty-five minutes nobody counted the cars on Leroy Street.

When he went back down, Arthur filled in the form for the three intervals he had missed. He could have written in an average; that is what averages are for, and every engineer in the Department would have done it. He wrote not observed in each box, in his small square capitals, and initialled it.

Wednesday, seven-thirty to six, less forty-five minutes: three hundred and one passenger cars, forty-four trucks.

Thursday

Garven came by at noon in a green Department Plymouth, double-parked, and walked over with his hands in his raincoat pockets. He was Arthur's supervisor, a big, pleasant man of fifty with four children and a house in Bayside and a pension coming in nineteen years. He had been an engineer once; now he was the man who saw that files were complete.

He turned the pages on the clipboard. "What's this, 'not observed'?"

"Wednesday. I was off the street."

"Rain. Average it, Art."

"I wasn't on the street, so I didn't observe it."

Garven looked at him for a moment the way you look at a man who has started using a word you have not heard him use before. Then he saw the chalk on the step, the ruled columns, the strokes with their crossbars, smudged where Wednesday's rain had got at them.

"What's that?"

"Pedestrians."

"We don't count pedestrians."

"Somebody's counting them."

Garven laughed, not unkindly. He put the clipboard back in Arthur's hands. "Listen. This is in the capital budget for sixty-two. Borough President's office wants it. Nobody's going to read your sheets except me, and I'm not going to read them, I'm going to put them in the file. Get the number, Art. Friday you're done." He looked at the tomato cans. "Nice block."

He drove off toward Hudson Street, and Arthur clicked him with the left hand, because he was a passenger car.

It would be easy to make Garven a bad man, and then the reader could feel that the trouble is bad men. He was not a bad man. He was organized. The function of Leroy Street, which was to be a place where people lived and walked and sat and went down to the river, had become the goal of nobody, and the function of the Department, which was to move vehicles, had become the goal of the Department; and Garven stood at the joint between them and kept it from squeaking. When you ask why a decent man does an indecent thing, the answer is usually that the organization has made it a thing that nobody in particular does.

That evening, at the oilcloth table in his sister's kitchen in Jackson Heights, after the dishes, Arthur did two sheets.

The first was the count. Four days, an average of three hundred and seventy passenger cars and fifty-three trucks between seven-thirty and six, with a peak hour of sixty-four vehicles, about one a minute. He knew, and every man in the Department knew, that a single moving lane of city street with parking on one side will carry several hundred vehicles in an hour before anybody has to wait. On the Department's own figures the street did not need a second lane. It needed nothing. He wrote that in one sentence at the foot of the sheet.

The second sheet was not asked for. At the top he wrote Alternative, and under it, in the same square capitals, he costed the opposite of the plan. Close the block between Seventh Avenue South and Hudson to through traffic from two to six in the afternoon, deliveries and residents excepted. Two Department sawhorses, which existed already in a yard on Varick Street. One sign, painted, eleven dollars. One patrolman's half-hour a day, which the precinct would not want to give, so: no patrolman, the sawhorses moved by the residents themselves, the way people move their own garbage cans. Against this he set the figures from the file: curb resetting at so much a running foot, flags, hydrants, the trees. The difference was a little over thirty-one thousand dollars. He added Aldo's columns, as a note, with the peak at three-fifteen when the school let out.

His sister Ruth came in to put the kettle on and looked over his shoulder.

"What is it?"

"Arithmetic."

She put her hand flat on the top of his head for a moment, as she used to when they were children and he had a fever, and then took it away. "You got sun," she said.

Friday

The last day was clear and cool. Arthur came at seven-thirty and set up the stool and counted.

At two Aldo came down with two cups and sat in his chair, and Arthur showed him the sheets. Aldo read them slowly, moving his lips a little on the figures, and when he came to his own columns copied out in Arthur's capitals, with Count by A. Spina, resident written beside them, he read that line twice.

"Will it work?"

"No," Arthur said. "Probably not. Garven will put it in the file."

"Then why'd you do it?"

Arthur thought about the question honestly, which took some time; a truck went by and he clicked it. "Because it's what I'd do if they let me," he said. "So I did it."

Aldo nodded, as if that were an ordinary reason, which it ought to be. He drank his coffee. Mr. Feld came along the curb, touching the trees, one, two, three, and said good afternoon to Aldo by name and to Arthur by no name, as a man sitting on a stool. The girl on roller skates went by twice. At three-fifteen the school let out.

At six Arthur reset the tallies to zero for the last time, folded the stool, and took the subway to Chambers Street. He handed in both sheets at the Municipal Building at six-forty, the second clipped behind the first, where Garven would either turn to it or not.

Saturday

There was no count on Saturday. He came anyway, on the Flushing line and the Seventh Avenue local, without the stool or the clipboard, in a pair of slacks Ruth had found for him at Alexander's and a short-sleeved shirt that showed how white his arms were. He had told her he was going into the city to see a friend. She had said, "Good," and nothing else.

Aldo was on the stoop. He had brought down a second chair, a kitchen chair with a split seat, and he had not chained it to anything. He pointed at it with his cup, and Arthur sat.

The street was full of Saturday: the fruit-store boys with their ball, a woman beating a rug over a fire escape, a radio playing a ball game from a window across the way. Arthur sat with his hands on his knees. A green van came down from Seventh Avenue, slowly, a bakery truck, and as it passed, his right thumb pressed down hard on nothing.

Aldo saw it and put his own hand over Arthur's, and left it there on the knee, in the sun, on Leroy Street, where anyone going by could count it.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Paulō Goodmanō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Paul Goodman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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