When it comes to urban, you don’t get much more urban than New York City and Brooklyn. My ancestors chose to live stacked on top of each other in buildings where you could hear your neighbor sneeze three floors up. But that urban density brought revolutionary infrastructure changes that transformed daily life. From privy vaults to indoor plumbing (though convincing people toilets belonged inside the house took work!), from gas lamps to electric streets, from horse-drawn cars to electric trolleys—the city evolved at breakneck speed. Telephone service connected neighborhoods, though operators had to manually plug in every call. The revolution didn’t end with my ancestors: my great aunt Madeline worked as a telephone operator, my father spent fifteen years with the phone company, and I now work for General Electric, descended from the Edison Illuminating Company that electrified Fifth Avenue in 1892. Four generations connected to urban infrastructure!