Editor’s note, December 5, 2025: Six decades ago, humans were already concerned that thinking machines would soon outthink us all. Fortunately — at least back then — there were still a few glitches in the programs. As one-time city editor of the Voice and long-time fixture at WNYC radio and TV, Mary Perot Nichols, reported in this cover story about IBM computers being used by the New York City Buildings Department, “Those who fear the coming of automation can take comfort … Human beings are still necessary, first as key punch operators and programmers to feed the machine; then when the inspection orders pop out at the end, human inspectors are needed to go out to the houses and take a look.”
So maybe we can have hope that humanity is not heading toward an ignominious end right out of the “Terminator” franchise, since even today, one still needs the human touch to check up on negligent landlords.
→ This article from the archives is part of a series celebrating the Voice’s Platinum Anniversary — 70 years! — on October 26, 2025. ←
The Little Machine That Couldn’t
By Mary Perot Nichols
November 21, 1963
Last spring New York City’s Department of Buildings showed that it was capable of acting with dispatch in a crucial situation. It caused the eviction from their midtown headquarters of a group of women who were busy studying the city administration’s progress toward Mayor Wagner’s announced goal of a “slumless city.” The women, who were volunteers in a group known as Call for Action, were taken under the roof of Radio Station WMCA at 415 Madison Avenue. The offer of hospitality undoubtedly had something to do with the fact that one of the Call for Action volunteers was Ellen Sulzberger Straus, wife of WMCA owner R. Peter Straus.
Mrs. Straus, when asked to comment on her group’s eviction, showed ladylike restraint as she said, “We were pleased with the efficiency with which the Buildings Department found the violations at our headquarters last spring. Call for Action was started in February. In May we were evicted.” She pointed out that an ordinary complainant has to wait about 90 days for an inspector to show up. She added, with a smile, “I hope everyone in the city gets as quick action as we did.”
Private Explosions
While the Call for Action women are not given to hurling epithets or emoting publicly about the doings of city officials, a recent story in the New York Times headlined “Electronics Ends Housing Muddle” did cause a few private explosions. The Times story, based on the 1962 annual report of the Building’s Department, could easily have led the unwary reader to believe that it was all coming up roses in the field of housing code enforcement. It was not until the 20th — penultimate — paragraph that some doubt was raised that the housing muddle had really come to an end. Said the Times of the new IBM miracle the Buildings Department is using:
“Despite this potential, however, it still takes the department about two weeks to acknowledge receipt of a complaint because it lacks the budget money to hire more key punch operators. The Community Service Society and the Women’s City Club have criticized shortages of clerical and inspectional personnel.”
A few days after the Times story appeared, WMCA chief Straus blasted Mayor Wagner in a radio editorial for almost “bursting his buttons with pride about the performance of a certain IBM machine in the Department of Buildings.” But what are the facts, Straus asked? On the basis of 7000 complaints made to WMCA’s Call for Action, he said that research showed that “it takes an average of nearly three months to get an inspector to your home.” And here is the punch line: “The department’s own inspectors say that the IBM machine has actually increased the delays in getting action on slum housing.”
No Correlation
Last week Mrs. Straus and Mrs. Samuel Hartwell, another volunteer, briefed The Voice on what they had discovered about the IBM machine. In the first place, the machine only processes Buildings Department complaints and thus attacks only one problem. The ladies have charts to show the myriad other agencies — health, police, fire, sanitation, water supply — to which a variety of complaints may be directed. They say that about 65 per cent of all complaints Call for Action receives relate to either building or health violations. But, they point out, even these two departments are not correlated by the electronic brain. “What the IBM refuses to think about,” says Mrs. Straus, “is at least half the story. The housing muddle is bigger than the Buildings Department.”
As for the IBM machine itself, Mrs. Straus emphasized its real potential, but both she and Mrs. Hartwell can quickly illustrate where the system presently breaks down. Those who fear the coming of automation can take comfort from their story. Human beings are still necessary, first as key punch operators and programmers to feed the machine; then when the inspection orders pop out at the end, human inspectors are needed to go out to the houses and take a look.
Into the Machine
After the complaint has been taken by a human telephone answerer, it is sent a few floors downstairs to a key punch operator, also human, who punches out the required symbols on the card that goes into the IBM.
Then, 17 to 21 days after the original call, out pops a form in triplicate, report the Call for Action ladies. The pink one that goes to the tenant says, if the complaint is not taken care of within 30 days, return the slip with that information on it. At the same time that the pink form goes to the tenant, a white form goes to the owner or agent of the building telling him of the complaint or advising him to fix up or face an inspection.
So, say Mmes Hartwell and Straus, the tenant, if he can read English and understand the pink form, waits 30 days and mails it back, saying “my complaint is not fixed.” They go on: “It goes back into the machine, which winks and blinks for at least another seven days, then out it pops ordering an inspection.” “Hot dog!’ says Mrs. Hartwell sarcastically. “Now it is ready for the chief inspector’s office, where it will sit for 25 days because there aren’t enough inspectors.” Thus, some 82 days after a complaint is made, an inspector shows up, according to Call for Action.
What Then?
What happens then? The inspector looks at the apartment and at the public halls as he mounts the stairs, and then he files a report at the Buildings Department. The report waits until a supervisor and a reviewer (the reviewer is a specialist in the limited vocabulary of IBM) processes it, and then it goes back again into the machine. Seven days of winking and blinking later, a get-tough-with-the-landlord sheet — salmon [colored] — fix up the violation or else face a possible court summons. At that point the machine huffs and puffs for an allotted 30 more days when a reinspection order pops out.
“It shuffles over to the Chief Inspector,” Mrs. Hartwell says, “and then again waits 25 days for an inspector.”
A visit to the Buildings Department by The Voice showed that the WMCA charges were substantially true. Buildings Commissioner Harold Birns said, “I agree there are delays,” and added that the IBM machine, through no fault of its own, “is not functioning at the optimum level we hope for.” He stated flatly, under questioning, that it is a budget problem. Programmers, clerks, and inspectors are needed, he said.
‘I Screamed’
Why don’t you scream like Traffic Commissioner Barnes screams when he is refused money for his electronic signal program, Birns was asked? “I have screamed,” he said. “I screamed very loudly in my supplementary budget. report, but I don’t go around screaming to reporters.”
It is true that Birns had made his position clear. In December of last year, Birns sent a letter to the Director of the Budget in which he said, among other things, “This department is not equipped to perform properly many vital functions of inspection and regulation of the erection, alteration, and maintenance of the more than 800,000 structures in this city. It cannot adequately discharge its statutory responsibilities to assure safe and healthy housing conditions throughout the city.” The Buildings Commissioner’s portrait of actual problems in his statement to the Budget Director is, however, remarkably at variance with the rosy picture of progress outlined in the 1962 annual Buildings Department report to the Mayor, presented to the public a few weeks ago in the New York Times.
Mixed Feelings
Commissioner Birns seems to have an ambivalent attitude toward citizen criticism of his department. On one day he told The Voice, “I don’t need WMCA to tell me what’s wrong with my department. I have Judah Gribetz (his deputy) to tell me that.” Two days later he viewed the situation a little differently: “I am grateful for the WMCA kind of criticism.” In fact, he noted that “as a result of Call for Action’s work, we now relay complaints directly to the Health Department when that’s called for rather than tell the complainant to call himself.” In the meantime, WMCA goes on building up their dossier of cases that show how muddled the Wagner administration’s approach to slum elimination really is. Mrs. Hartwell put it this way: “When all the delays of processing a complaint have produced a situation that calls for a court case, there are no lawyers in the legal section of the Buildings Department.” And, even worse, the Buildings Department can’t find the landlord. “Why, we know of one case,” she said, “where the department spent eight months looking for a landlord who died three years ago.”
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