The City: The Late Show

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It seemed at first like a great idea. A television camera was discreetly installed in the apartment-house lobby. When an apartment owner's bell rang, all he had to do was flip his TV set to Channel 4, and the image of his caller flashed on the screen over a specially installed closed circuit. Thus tenant could have a good look at caller before deciding to let him in.

But in the system's first year in four Chicago apartment houses, it turned into what one avid viewer described as "the greatest indoor sport since chess." Not content simply to tune in when they themselves had visitors, most tenants were delightedly looking in fulltime at their neighbors.

Via the electronic snooper, viewers could keep tab on which tenant was being besieged by bill collectors, which girls were going out with what boys. In one building, a married tenant whose wife was away was caught, on Channel 4, escorting a shady lady through the lobby. In the University Apartments on Chicago's South Side, the building's bachelors now enter and leave through the basement. Said one unmarried woman resident: "If you come home late from a date and the boy wants to kiss you good night in the lobby, you can almost feel all the eyes watching you. It's downright embarrassing." A high point of "lobby observing" (as it is known to the trade) comes when an unwary caller, thinking himself alone, begins to preen and scratch while waiting for the answering buzzer. One tenant regularly warns his caller over the intercom: "Smile, you're on Candid Camera."

For all its foretellings of Big Brotherism, the system has worked some good. Last Halloween, teen-aged pranksters invaded the University Apartments lobby. Their hands, clutching tubes of lipstick, were poised in mid-air with the four-letter words yet unwritten when a husky voice boomed out at them. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," it said. They fled.