« p. 50-57: New Yorkers
The Skyscraper Seen From Above and At Night
p. 57-62
The Singer Building is forty-seven stories high, built on the most expensive spot of the already expensive southern tip of Manhattan. From up top on a day like this, you can see for over thirty miles in each direction. The platform can be found on the forty-second floor.
There she is, the whole wonderful coast, where you can see many of the city sites. The inner bay with Lady Liberty, which from up here looks wonderful and majestic, because she is a work of art associated with one word and all your feelings about her are tied in with that idea. Then, all the small, capricious, tailored islands of the inner bay; and then the straits; and behind it all the Large, the Broad, the Wide, the Miraculous, an expansive Hello waiting for you!
I deliberately look at the Hoboken side. It’s Monday, so the Kaiser Wilhelm the Great has to be resting in Lloyd’s pier. I glance at its four loyal smokestacks -- hello! Tomorrow it goes back where it came from. This kind of ship is almost like a human being, a friend -- I know that it has its own destiny -- I’m bound to it in a secret way for all time. I know there are people who think of ships like this as nothing more than a floating hotel, a comfortable means of transport. I want nothing to do with them. This ship has been a good traveler and friend and has introduced me to the depths.
Now I look at the sieves from above. The small white plumes of smoke, prettily attached to the chimneys, flutter here and there below me. The sky-high buildings are now comically short, broad up on top and thinner below, as if they’ve been stuck reversed into the earth, like square sugar-loaves. At the moment, nothing could be funnier. Among them stands the slender church tower of the old Holy Trinity Church. It is small and looks lost in the middle of the giant buildings, but there’s no reason to get sentimental contemplating it. First of all, she can probably afford to stand there, and secondly, I know why she can afford it. In the Jewish quarter, where the poorest of the poor lead hellish lives jammed together in the tenements, you’ll find the most terrifying streets. The responsible city press has screamed its throat sore for a year and a day about this disgrace, but the old bigots stay deaf, sit there in the business district and continue owning things. Their unassuming small towers belong here with the monstrous man-eating towers.
Seen from behind and in front, seen from above and below, I still cannot befriend the S. From above, you can completely see how the things are built; the outline lies right in front of you, and the ground is clear. They wind in and out, without consideration for any proportion. From above, Manhattan is even uglier than Manhattan from below. From above, the skyscrapers are even absurder than they are from below. You can see it from here well enough: underneath, a building starts off in the style of a Greek temple for the first ten floors, then transforms from then on into a square, crude box broken up by rectangular windows. And then it looks as if, from above, a fifty-story Renaissance molding has been pulled over the entire hybrid -- as if the architect, when he got to the top, realized he had forgotten which style he had begun with!
And then there are the trips in the elevators, which is what they call lifts in this country! Yes, they still go up -- but then they go down! The numbers flit by on the floors in regular order. At about 35 your stomach shoots into your skull with a jerk, hops around a bit like a child’s balloon on the ceiling and sits there. At 7 the elevator starts moving somewhat slower, the stomach sinks gently as a result of the changing speed. It’s like you have an elevator in your own body, and when the door shines a number 1, the stomach hops lightly with rubber soles three or four times on your intestines, who don’t like this sort of thing and stage a brief revolt. Then everything stands still. It is inconceivable that these eternal, unheard-of trips up and down the length of the human body have no effect on the people using the elevator. The heart and the brain have to change somehow, the good God did not foresee this kind of up and down traveling in the animal world. It will make a new sort of American person, the skyscraper type, the national cretin.
Yes, but by night! says the unswerving S enthusiast. And at night the S would be something fantastic, if --
Times Square, ten o’clock at night. From somewhere above, an unknown star shines down on me. Seventeen distinctly distributed blue stars shine down from a square cloud I can only barely see. They are the lit windows of the Times Building. Under those stars, men work throughout the night. High above, opposite the giant hotel, garlands of light, glowing light-flowers float into the dark sky as an indistinct light illuminates the fluttering white flags on the crowns of the beautiful buildings. I would gladly forget everything else at night and feast on the new stars, these lightbulbs and acetylene stars, which New York has introduced to the sky -- but soon enough, I’ll lose my delight.
Around these exquisite light effects, advertisements glow stupidly five stories high in the offended night. They’re not content just to be, so instead, in order to be garish and vulgar, they struggle, wriggle, trickle, gyrate, and all of this five stories high.
Horses beat their hooves and shake their manes. A kitten wags its tail and visibly dives into a red ball of yarn. A baby, five stories high, spills cocoa on itself, and when it’s made enough of a mess, it disappears from the scene and immediately begins the same trick, seen for miles around. I walk up to the hotel’s famous rooftop garden, listen to a band play Puccini, it’s a little cool out in the open, and I see the clouds above me -- and immediately a giant mouth with the newest chewing gum takes a bite out of the sky. The advertisements rave day and night. Behind each light, a manager controls this mischief, calculating and dictating to a machine the digits, the ravings, the blasphemy. How can I tell if that star there is Sirius or just a corporation? I very much want to go to sleep, that is, if you can call it sleep, what they call sleep on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street.