Broken Necks/The New Skyscraper

It is almost completed now. Window washers are rubbing the chalk paint from the great checkerboard of windows. The carpenters, masons, iron workers and electricians have disappeared like bees into a hive. A mysterious activity continues within the towering white shell. But for us who pass in the street the engaging miracle is practically accomplished. There remains a tower to fit on—a pretty white ornament that will beckon gracefully to the clouds.

It is toward the thin scarlet lines of this skeleton tower that we now raise our eyes as we pass. They have not stopped adding to it yet. Who knows how high it will reach before the girder cranes are taken down? We in the street still feel hopeful about the tower. We watch its ribs balance themselves nearer and nearer to the sky. We will feel sorry when the cranes are taken away and the tower ceases to grow.

. . . . . ..

We who pass in the street pause and stare with a troubled and proprietary pride at the great shell of stone and glass that is to be known as the Temple Building. It seems almost as if this beautiful structure is a monument to our patience. Long ago when the wooden fence first went up around the debris of the tumbled little buildings we began our eager vigil. When there was nothing but mud and donkey engines, scoop shovels and teamsters bellowing at thick-bodied horses and wash-tub shaped motor trucks crawling up and down the wooden inclines—when there was nothing but a blurred and petty confusion behind the wooden fence we were already staring with troubled, fascinated eyes at the empty space above our heads.

With a foresight which we now proudly remember, we knew that out of this puttering of men in the mud and squealing of donkey engines a miracle would be born. And when the first red rectangles began to form their precise labyrinths over our heads we experienced our first thrill of possession—as if our anticipation had somehow assisted in the appearance of the girders.

. . . . . ..

Perhaps our keenest delight came during the days when the stone began to appear and the towering spider web of red painted steel began slowly to vanish behind a new symmetry. The girders were still mounting from the pavements and we who passed would stop and watch the huge pieces of steel disappear gently like floating match sticks into far away lands.

At this time our minds as we passed were still troubled with the curious wordless ideas that warmed our thought and made us for a moment forget our destinations. The scarlet geometry of the great skeleton became a challenge. Our eyes found a strange pleasure in mounting the metronomic patterns of steel. The vastness and symmetry of the design stirred an intangible emotion. And sometimes words formed themselves into little poems in our thought to celebrate this feeling. Passing, our eyes would linger and we would murmur troubledly to ourselves, ‘‘ It looks lke something... it reminds you of something. . . it reminds you of a red advertisement for a dream... it reminds you of magic ladders .. .”’

. . . . . ..

The red advertisement and the magic ladders vanished. It appeared to happen all at once. There were only a handful of workingmen to be seen—slow moving bodies puttering around in the air. We almost lost patience watching the unhurried gestures with which they placed the small white stones into position.

Slowly and laboriously the puttering bodies erased the magic ladders. We passed one day and sighed, "it will be beautiful when it’s done but it takes so long?" And when we went away we remembered the half erased red pattern and the mounting surface of white and ornamental stone as a huge flower struggling slowly into bloom.

Then one day we passed again and the thing had burst. White lines shot an ornamental spray from the pavement almost to the clouds. Windows spread themselves in a silver flight. The red pattern had vanished. In its place, soaring and alive, a white building spread itself like a peacock’s tail before our eyes.

. . . . . ..

Now it is almost completed. A few months more and our eyes will have inured themselves to the engaging miracle. We will pass as we pass other temples—looking only for addresses and pausing to stare only at trinkets behind plate glass.

But at least until the window washers have removed the chalk paint and the tower has ceased to grow there remains for us the warming proprietary emotion. This building which our anticipations seem to have reared and which, now that it is almost finished, fits so mysteriously into our senses—this building is more alive in our thoughts than all the books we have read and dramas we have seen in the theater. It is something that has bloomed out of the endless crowd that passed. Its white body is as delighting to our vanities as were the Triumphal Figures of Gods and Goddesses to the conquering legions returned to Rome.

It is part of the powerful and glittering sweep of walls which we who pass in the street mysteriously erect. High and white, an irreproachable monument, it has grown out of the little greeds and sordid obsessions consuming us from day to day. And passing now under its aloof face we raise our eyes in gratitude to another beautiful effigy that understands us.