Props to the pram.(CITY DESK)(strollers)(Viewpoint essay)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I KNEW the situation had reached critical mass when I saw, on a street corner a block from my apartment, a thick-gauge wire-mesh garbage can holding--a mortgage? A sheaf of dollar bills? Presentation copies of John McCain's energy policy? None of the above. What some New Yorker had discarded because, once broken, it was more cheaply and easily replaced than fixed, was a baby stroller. "The prams go rolling on," wrote W. H. Auden ("Autumn Song," 1936), and he hadn't even moved to New York yet.

I live on a sort of dirt-track speedway of strollers, thanks to two institutions only steps from my door. One is a city welfare office, an imposing yet sad building that anchors one corner of an intersection. Some thought went into the design of it, in the La Guardia administration I would guess, for stylized wings sprout from each roof corner. But they are not numerous enough to be ornamental, nor are they large enough even to seem functional. Their futility serves instead as a metaphor for what transpires within. The building always seems to be girdled in scaffolding, which its bureaucrats lack the clout to remove, unless for reasons of their own they welcome its presence. It does give some shelter (except for leaks) to the people who pass in and out, and to the street-corner merchants who serve them. A fast-food cart always sits outside the door; next to it, a table offering children's books (Elmo learns the alphabet) and educational placemats (presidents, famous African Americans). A high percentage of those who are going or coming, or waiting for those who have gone inside, smoke; vices have classes. In the mix every day are strollers.

But I am not purveying Right World fear of the fecund underclass, for the other stroller-magnet institution only half a block away is a private nursery school. While the children are inside, the vehicles that conveyed them hang folded on the school's iron fence--commuter-infant parking. But since the nursery school, unlike the welfare office, has no ongoing flow of business, there are periodic thunderstorms of strollers on the sidewalk when its half-day sessions begin and end. Though none of the children at the nursery school is black, some of the women who roll them to and fro are. These are the nannies. Do you win more points for having a nanny, or for being so omni-competent that you dispense with nannies? Upper-middle-class Manhattan parents have so much to put up with, even beyond toilet training and why did the kitten die.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I can only imagine what they are like to maneuver and carry. The simplest strollers seem to be little more than lengths of fabric stretched over wheeled frames, though sophistication must go into the making of even these; the fabric, for instance, has to be washable. Options proliferate: toys, sun shades, shopping baskets. The website of one popular manufacturer says the vehicles weigh anywhere from eight ...