the buildings, whose loftiest accommodations were easily and promptly reached by perpetually acting lifts, and whose smokeless roofs were eventually walks and gardens, which added a great resource of health and attraction to future metropolitan life.
Of course, too, in these days of science progress, we were done with the smoke nuisance. Lighting by electricity, and heating by various other than the old coal-smoking ways, had already made such progress, at the time we are now dealing with, as to warrant the trust to altogether proscribe smoke and smoke chimneys to the renovated city. Consequently new London arose entirely smokeless.
The light terrace structure, which surmounted a lofty ground floor of warehouses, factories, or shops by a walk for foot passengers, led eventually to much novel change and improvement. The streets were bridged over at intervals, in order to make these upper footways continuous and universal; and by this resource for pedestrians, street accidents, previously of alarming frequency, became wholly things of the past. The city, in fact, had now settled itself into three tiers of business life; first, the subterranean, where, as we saw, the great battle of the wants, conveniences, and necessities of the society overhead went on, and where also various merchandise reposed in such spaces as could be spared from the pressure of other and prior demands; second, the ground floor, where the productive and the wholesale, together with all the vehicular traffic went on; and, lastly, the upper level of the first floor, devoted to foot passengers, and to all the retail shopping and general locomotive life of the pedestrian public.
