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DEWITT CLINTON PARK, IN HELL’S KITCHEN, IS PRETTY TYPIcal for New York City. It’s open to anyone with a ball to kick I or a Frisbee to toss, which means that it has been beaten nearly to death by overuse. The park has natural-grass baseball fields, though there is little grass to be seen on them. It’s more like a sea of dirt, pocked with holes and a few struggling patches of green. When kids play ball, a cloud of red dust hangs in the air, coating their hair and clothes. After an hour on the field they look as if they’d spent a day in the desert.
Parks like DeWitt Clinton are the reason why New York City is tearing up many of its public playfields and replacing them with artificial turf. New York is not alone; Los Angeles, Dallas, and other big cities are buying great swaths of the stuff to repair their battered parks, leading the product into a boom time never before seen. Furthermore, the short, scratchy brush of past decades has had a major makeover; today’s pseudoturf is long and lush, gently padded with rubber pellets. But it’s been a rough road getting there, a road full of twists both comic and tragicomic. It began in 1965, far from New York, at a gigantic party in Houston.
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| | THE WAR AGAINST GRAVITYThe human body was not designed to handle the stress of high-speed aerial maneuvers. And thanks to a group of 1940s researchers, it doesn’t have to. BY NORMAN BERLINGER
COLD COMFORTA century ago, heating a room was easy, cooling was hard, and dehumidification was harder still. Creating genuine comfort with truly practical air conditioning turned out to be the trickiest part of all. BY T. A. HEPPENHElMER
THE HUNLEYThe Confederate Navy’s innovative submarine was deadlier to its own crews than it was to Union ships. Still, it showed the potential value of undersea warfare half a century before World War I. Plus, a look at other subs of the Civil War. BY TOM HUNTINGTON
“THE GREATEST DISCOVERY SINCE FIRE”The microwave oven seemed like a Promethean miracle when it was invented, but it took a quarter-century to change from a piece of industrial equipment to a commonplace consumer appliance. BY WILLIAM HAMMACK
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| | LETTERSOn aerial photography, rock ’n’ roll philosophy, pinball processors, life before birth, and Gates the gonif. NOTES FROM THE FIELDIs irradiated food good or bad? To many, it depends on the kind of radiation. Plus: Highly trained MIT scientists discover the best way to make coffee, and how bees have driven American history. BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ
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