Toggling/ customizing appearance of "fringe" in emacs 21

[Peter Daum]

Is there any way to adjust the visibility and width of the "fringes"
that newer emacses have at the left and right margins of the window?
Most of the time they don't display any useful information, so I'd
rather save some screen real estate by making them smaller or, even
better selectively toggling them on/off.

I did some pretty extensive searching, but all I could find is the
face named "fringe" which can be customized (which would allow me to
change the fringe color).

Furthermore it looks like there once were parameters "left-fringe" and
"right-fringe" in default-frame-alist describing the width of these
fringes (I found some elisp code named "fringe.el" by Simon Josefsson
which mostly manipulates these) but setting these does not seem to
have any effect in emacs 21.3.

Regards,
                      Peter Daum