Down the Toilet

For some reason the cold seems to release them. As I move through the frigid streets of Toronto, the noisome fumes of the city’s underground digestive tract spew up through the sewer covers and grates into the windswept streets above. What would normally be a minor unpleasantness in urban life becomes for me— knowing that I will be writing an appreciation of Jamie Benidickson’s The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage—an occasion for reflection on the dirty world that heaves and flows beneath the visible urban landscape.

I remember reading somewhere that without the invention of the elevator there could not have been buildings of more than six or so stories high, and therefore there could not have been modern cities. While Paris gives the lie to that contention, at least in part, there is nevertheless truth in this observation about the role of elevators in modern urban life. Equally, there would be truth in a similar observation on the...