Behind the facades.(City Desk)(Column)

BUSY man does a million things, and cities collect many of them. Yet most of our public activities fall into a few large categories.

One might be called Putting in Rivets. By the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread, God told Adam, and most people the world over sweat indeed. But for many Americans the curse has been modified. William Bendix in The Life of Riley went to a factory every workday where he put rivets in the wings of airplanes. There was no suggestion that this job fulfilled him in the way that Marx imagined labor might fulfill men under socialism. But neither was it drudgery. He put in his rivets, chatted with his friend and co-worker, and took home his earnings. This is the world of work--dull, necessary, not unpleasant.

Other public activities fall into the category of Mysterious Purposes. We see others doing many things we not only do not do, but cannot comprehend. Nanotechnology, hip-hop, banking (what is interest--really?)--some people know it, not us. They may not all know what we do, of course. Lacrimae Rerum are things we all, alas, know well. The phrase (literally, "the tears of things") is from the Aeneid, when the wandering Aeneas sees, on the walls of a temple in Carthage, where he has just arrived, images of the fall of Troy: He suffered through it, the Carthaginians know of his suffering: the universal language. Activities devoted to pain and death are obvious candidates for Lacrimae Rerum, though cleaning up after sin and boredom (the latter often begetting the former) claim their share. Things We Like are the happy pleasures.

Things We Don't Like are the would-be happy pleasures that fail to please. A lot of public space, finally, is taken up with the citadels of private life: houses or apartments. Let us call the activities that go on there Sleep, after the most private activity of all, though sleep bleeds, metaphorically, into other activities, such as prayer (now I lay me down to) or sex (sleeping around). Why are the things that occur in our homes public activities? Because, unless we live on the frontier, or in gated communities, the public sees at least the shells. The El Dorado is as visible as a row house in Queens.

Let's take one city street and slice it. Thanks to Manhattan's grid, most of its streets north of 14th St. are miles long, but Irving Place is only six blocks. We'll walk uptown, crossing back and forth.

Consolidated Edison. Putting in Rivets, big time. This is a massive limestone office building, in the style of a Babylonian temple, filled with worker bees who decide our electricity rates. Because it is a public utility, national-greatness conservatives would love to put one on every block. But that would be tiring aesthetically, as well as politically. Would Athens want a hundred Parthenons?

Things We Don't Like: a shop of cheap gifts. I imagine they're ideal for the homebound worker who has only just remembered a birthday or an anniversary, yet ...