Yes! People should be reading those books in school to understand the transition of society in the 20th century. The Power Broker is of course Caro’s most famous book but the LBJ series are incredible and underrated.

Something that many people don’t appreciate is that plumbing wasn’t necessarily universal.

People with disposable income in NYC and other places would just go to a Chinese laundry. Folks without alot of money were in a variety of living arrangements that weren’t standardized in the same way things are today. It was very common into the 1970s for rural homes in upstate NY where I spent half my childhood to have outhouses and manual pumps.