Last week I got all caught up in the History Channel’s Life After People special. The show explained the fate of human civilization in the event of our sudden extinction.
If you’re a fan of humans, the outlook was bleak. Within 100 years nearly every car on the planet will have disintegrated and most roads will have already disappeared. In a few centuries all digital information will have been corrupted, bridges collapsed and skyscrapers fallen. It turns out that steel frame skyscrapers, left without constant maintenance and upkeep are pretty shoddy structures. Within a thousand years Manhattan will look much as it did 1000 years ago. So it goes.
The only buildings that have endured and will continue to do so are those ancient structures that have already proven themselves. The pyramids of South America and North Africa and a few scattered stone structures around the world will be around for a while longer.
Which all led me to the astounding conclusion….
What’s the largest and tallest load bearing, habitable stone structure on the planet? What building has no steel frame and won’t suffer the same fate as every feeble steel frame skyscraper? What building took so long to put together that no engineer in their right mind would ever attempt to build something like it ever again? The answer:
Philadelphia City Hall may well be one of the – it not the – last skyscraper. When LA is underwater, New York is a forest, DC a swamp, Las Vegas buried in sand and the rest of Philadelphia left to trees, meadow, rivers and streams, City Hall (may) endure.
Through the great forest of the Delaware Valley, one giant phallus will continue to rise proudly above the poplars and spruce. To a visiting alien civilization, City Hall may be one of the only pieces of evidence that any marginally intelligent species once lived on the land mass once known as North America. Of all the records that City Hall boasts, I think this may be its most impressive.
But who the hell am I to make these pronouncements? To test my theory I ran it by University of Arizona professor Alan Weisman. In 2007 Weisman published The World Without Us, the book that inspired Life After People.
Of the City Hall question Weisman inconclusively stated: “I think it has a good chance of being what you’re hoping it is, but without researching it, I couldn’t and wouldn’t say.” More concrete… or actually more solid mineral conclusions need to be based on answers to the following questions:
1. What’s the situation with the building’s foundation especially when it comes to running water and the alluvial flows of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers? I also wonder what the nexus of underground tunnels beneath the building’s foundation might do if left to collect groundwater for a few hundred years.
2. What type of limestone was used to build city hall, soft sedimentary or metamorphic granite?
3. What type of mortar was used in its construction and how well has it been maintained? (uh oh)
My completely uninformed and uneducated opinion is that the flood risk posed by the rivers is negligible. Sitting in the geographic center of Philadelphia’s downtown, City Hall is as far from each of the rivers as it can possibly be. The conglomeration of underground subway, trolley and light rail lines sitting directly or almost directly under the building is a much bigger concern.
The city isn’t prone to earthquakes or other Armageddon causing natural disasters, but an ice age would bulldoze over us without a hiccup. The last ice age stopped at Bucks County, but the next one makes no promises.
Overall I’m hopeful that City Hall will live on for hundreds and possibly even thousands of years.
The only prediction Weisman (aka the actual expert) was willing to make was to the endurance of William Penn. While something like an ice age might eventually carry him south to DC, he’d probably end up surviving the trip.
Imagine some tribe of super-smart apes or birds or stumbling across a towering statue William Penn all Planet of the Apes style. Until then…
In the mid 20’s 
Ball Shaving: At my office Christmas party a non-colleague who happened to be hanging out in the same bar tried to pick up my co-worker. Along with his refusal to share his name and his casual acknowledgment of the girlfriend he was trying to cheat on, part of his game was slipping in how he shaves his balls to make his penis look bigger. It’s a line few men can pull off and smooth sack went home alone that night.
Somewhere in the course of internet history, Michael Reichmann got famous. He and his site, 
