« p. 37-43: Arrival
Heat Wave
p. 43-50
In my hotel room, I let the fan whir and the bath water run as I rub myself with the pieces of ice which the waiter brought me in a porcelain jug. But all of this is smoke and shadows next to the heat wave outside and inside.
From my window, I look down to a small park. I look in my travel guide: it’s Bryant Park. A couple dozen people lie there below on the benches like dead flies in shirts, pants and shoes. Around the spot of lawn, buildings stand long and slender like asparagus, very tiny with tar roofs, and then I see in all directions those monstrous hole-strewn boxes, those four-square upright sieves, gray and stupid, with advertisements five stories high recommending all sorts of things. I really can’t stand looking at this city.
I sit down with my back to the window, and immediately my back is full of flies. Like an old mare, I try to stop the annoying little beasts with little shakes of my body. I’m now sitting in-between the fan and the window. I rummage around in my handbag and read the newspaper the waiter brought with the ice water. This heatwave has hovered over New York for eight days.
A couple of people have fallen out of skyscrapers as they gasped for air. In the east of the city, the women have raided the ice shops. Some brute in the Bronx suddenly went crazy, ran amok, and threw three policemen into shop windows and gutters. The entire length of Long Island, many miles long, has become one giant bathroom. The yellow press keeps on incorrectly adding to the numbers of the dead. And the high point of it all: a clergyman in Newark said the word damn on the pulpit! “Damn the ice industry!” These are the historic words that the brave Reverend Shreve Osborne threw down from the pulpit of Trinity Episcopal Church to the frightened members of his flock. He has my absolution -- the ice pieces I’ve been rubbing on my body have already melted down to nothing, and already the heat wave turns the last atom of cool water on my body to smoke. Sweat is dripping from every pore.
If I’m in this sort of mood, should I really write down the impression New York has made on me, all the way from the pier over in Hoboken, through Broadway and up to the corner of 42nd Street?
Broadway is the greatest absurdity that I have yet seen. A city is just thrown together, poor quarters, rich quarters, large houses, small houses; everything lies around everything else, so that the buildings stand right up next to each other and on top of each other. Poor house, palace, four houses on top of each other, no building, no building, twelve houses on top of each other, tiny building, deep hole, a small city house, a palace, thirty-seven houses on top of each other -- this is Broadway. It’s terrible walking through there. I stick my head out the window and cannot describe how the city looks. The Bavarian quarter in Berlin, where you walk by the lordly houses until you suddenly come across a regular house, is a simple heartfelt folk song compared to this kind of exotic music. I pull my head back from the window and resolve to avoid my European concepts of beauty, and then I stick my head back out the window with cosmopolitan, objective eyeballs.
No one can convince me this city is beautiful, not even Pennell, that excellent etcher, lithographer and student of Whistler, the first man to make great art of down town, those skyscrapers of New York. The man has been named the Piranesi of modern New York.
I’ve brushed by New York for a few days and really have to say that it’s an ugly, abnormal and despairingly ugly city. The undergrowth of grotesquely unequal housing seems to be conjured together at a rate of one hundred kilometers per hour, so that the people in them can carry out their business all the faster. Anyone who has seen an automobile or train station knows the border between the beautiful and the useful.
There are some parts of New York you can call beautiful, but they’re not really New York, just imitations of Paris and London. Riverside Drive on the Hudson is the Avenue du Bois. Gramercy Park and Fifth Avenue around Washington Square are exact copies of Bloomsbury. In the fashionable district, Fifth Avenue is a copy of Piccadilly and Bond Street, and when I bend the brim of my hat so that all the buildings beneath me are no higher than three stories, the benches on the city below look exactly like London around the Exchange. Even the other parts of the city, like the Bowery or First or Third Avenue, look exactly like the corresponding areas of London, like Houndsditch or Tottenham. The famous, notorious Broadway, on the other hand, is gibberish, a collection of all possible bad habits, a completely uncharacteristic street. Anyone talking about the New York style must eventually come up against the fatal S (I mean the tall buildings, the word itself is horrible and too long!), because they represent New York and modern life at the center of America.
On the seventh day, I wait for the S to rise. If the S rises to me, I’m leaving. I want to get to Canada soon, my hotel is much too expensive, and then I’ll be here again in the winter. But I have to be finished with the S right away, because not only is it the problem of New York and America, but also the problem of these modern times. You can’t talk about S like you do about an automobile or a train station, because S doesn’t get its style from any sense of utility. There’s no reason for a building to have three thousand offices, except that maybe it puts people so close to the stock exchange. It’s just that I can’t imagine all these people shooting out of their offices at eleven o’clock and walking ten steps to the exchange. But, confused as I am, I’ll have to accept that this is the situation and the necessity. The price of land here down on the southern tip of Manhattan has driven into the sky at a lunatic pace. At all times, the floors of the building have to chase after the price of the land, and that is the grounding for the aesthetics of the S. I hope that the pyramids will give me one of those shocks that someone had reported to me on the ship, but as I strain my neck on the corner of Wall Street, all I can think is that I am not moved in the slightest. It is indifferent to me that they’ve now built a building of a hundred stories. To stop one of those is as unlikely as bringing a fan to a standstill with your finger.
For three days, I stand in front of the foundation of the Woolworth Building and try to conjure up some respect for the fact that this building will eventually be fifty-six stories high. (Woolworth is the man of five-and-ten-cent bazaars for the whole country; for this piece of ground -- some thirty steps around -- he has paid half a million dollars; the eight million needed for construction has been put up by a Berliner from France, so the S isn’t only an American fact or sin or whatever you call it.) Today someone is digging a hole in the ground for a building one hundred stories tall. The interesting unborn Woolworth is already an irrelevant dwarf and it’s not even out of its mother’s womb. Records.
The mother’s body -- the good mother’s body of the island of Manhattan is rock, solid rock, and every one-hundred-thousand-dollar piece of terrain has to be cracked with dynamite and gunpowder. When I look into the hole under Woolworth, I feel the same thing I felt at my arrival at the sight of the red spider: unlimited respect for the work being done here, which will afterwards result in such a towering absurdity.
I would gladly set up camp opposite Woolworth and watch the hard youth fighting the rock and iron, but I have no time. I stay only an hour on the wooden sidewalk, remove myself from the flock pushing over Broadway, and look and listen as the youth travel 130 feet deep into the caissons and come up blood red into the scorching sun. As the carts roll thundering here and there. As the iron framework slowly commutes into the sky. As the signal-whistle screams and warns. As the courage and strength toil away in this heat in and around this hollowed-out square, I no longer think about dollars and millions of dollars, but instead about life and death, which are constantly at work here.
As I go down the length of Broadway to my hotel, a little dulled and delighted by New York, looking at the skyscrapers in the clouds, the so-called Flatiron on the sharp corner of Fifth Avenue and Madison Square -- I detect something there and write it down in my mind. Not the monstrous construction that could fill me with astonishment and reverence -- but instead the small bellowing newspaper boy, who stands on the street in front of the pointed nose of the Flatiron. “Peipers!” (that is, papers), and the papers fly out of his hand and the cents flies into his hand.