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The Footprint of the Twentieth Century:
American Skyscrapers and Modernist
Poems
John Timberman Newcomb
MODERNISM
American poets became modernist in the 1910s not merely
by embracing a new set of formal techniques, but by immersing
themselves in the milieu of the machine-age metropolis. Poetry’s
turn in subject matter has always been neglected because it contravenes the long-consensual view that modernism was defined
by its repudiation of urban-industrial modernity.1 But one of the
salient facts of early modernism is this: beginning suddenly
around 1911, a vast range of American poets, whose predecessors had largely shunned modern subjects, took up the industrial city as a challenge, and an opportunity, to reimagine poetry’s
value for the twentieth century. Their willingness to engage with
urban modernity may have been crucial to the very continuation of poetry in the United States. In the decades since the
Civil War, as American life came to be defined more and more
by the impersonal terms of urban experience, custodians of the
nation’s verse had stubbornly refused to engage with these actualities, creating a crisis in which many predicted poetry would
simply wither away as “the rickety dream-child of neurotic aestheticism.”2 The many verses of the 1910s about skyscrapers,
subway travel, movies, vaudeville shows, baseball games, automated lunchrooms, and other aggressively modern subjects, were
responses to that crisis equally as crucial to modernism’s rejuvenating capacity as poets’ adoption of free verse or Imagist techniques of representation. These verses asserted American
poetry’s ability to recreate itself as relevant to modern American
life.
/ modernity
VOLUME TEN, NUMBER
ONE, PP 97–125.
© 2003 THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
John Timberman
Newcomb teaches in
the English Department
at the University of
Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. He has
published Wallace
Stevens and Literary
Canons (University
Press of Mississippi,
1992) and articles on
Stevens, Millay,Yeats,
MacLeish, and literary
canons. His forthcoming book is entitled
Would Poetry Disappear?:
American Verse and the
Crisis of Modernity.
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98
The richest category of this early twentieth-century urban verse is perhaps cityscape
poetry, which employs a variety of representational strategies to evoke the metropolitan environment in panoramic visual terms.3 The icon of modernity most potent in
American cityscape poetry was the great building, a structure of unprecedented physical scale and grandeur that punctuated the burgeoning industrial metropolis. Most
modern great buildings possessing this iconic power were venues for commerce, transport, or amusement, public not usually in ownership but in spatial accessibility, designed to accommodate a large number and variety of occupants, both permanent and
transient. American verse written between 1910 and 1925 exhibits a persistent fascination with several types of modern great buildings—railroad stations, department
stores, hotels, theaters, sports arenas—but most of all with the skyscraper.
The skyscraper is the central visual symbol of capitalist modernity, as September
2001 forcibly reminded us, and has been so for a hundred years. To American poets of
the early twentieth century, as to painters and photographers, skyscrapers resonated
with tremendous, if profoundly paradoxical, symbolic and emotional power.4 On the
one hand, soaring into the heavens, taking up whole city blocks, housing many thousands of people, the skyscraper of a century ago was understood as an exhilarating
harbinger of modernity’s possibilities, “the footprint of the twentieth century,” as
Munsey’s remarked in 1899.5 The herculean scale of these new buildings was matched
by their daunting complexity as technological, social, and economic systems, which
required precise mastery of “thousands of intricate details” by planners and engineers.6
Machine-age America’s abiding fascination with visual intricacy and structural accessibility was expressed in the cunning stylings of such skyscrapers as the Woolworth Building, admired by the architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler for allowing people on
the street pleasing access to the detailing of the uppermost floors in all its “distinctness
and sharpness.”7
But even as their synthesis of enormity, intricacy, and structural accessibility could
be read as the triumph of system-building, skyscrapers also reminded observers that
prevailing rationalist and individualist models of cultural value were being drastically
altered by the imperatives of consolidating industrial capitalism. Skyscrapers promised to redefine the parameters of American modernity along a sprawling scale in
which the individual, even the exceptional one, mattered less than the forces of the
corporate, the aggregate, the mass. Walter Pritchard Eaton was only one early commentator who noted a tight parallel between the growing enormity of buildings and
the magnitude and impersonality of the corporations behind many of them: “The phrase
‘Big Business’ has leapt into the language, because the thing itself has shot up into the
economic structure, even as our skyscrapers have shot up on every street.”8 Arthur
Goodrich called the drive to the skies an “inexorable force over which its makers have
no control,” while Eaton saw the skyscraper city’s inhabitants as “midgets who have
moulded mountains and who have then been moulded by them, played upon by the
environment they have created” (NY, 6).9 Many early descriptions used the staggering
numbers of component parts in skyscrapers to create ritualized litanies of mass statistics: 35 million bricks in the Metropolitan Life Tower, and 2462 miles of telegraph and
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telephone wire; enough glass in the Woolworth Building’s exterior windows to create a
giant awning extending over all of Madison Square; enough horsepower in the
Woolworth’s giant boilers to lift a hundred Statues of Liberty at one time, and so on.10
No matter how comically arbitrary these transformations of one type of mass into
another might become, they asserted the relative insignificance of any individual element—even the owner of the building.11 For each larger-than-life ego like F. W.
Woolworth, driven to construct, in the words of Citizen Kane’s sardonic newsreel, “the
costliest monument a man has built to himself,” there was a Metropolitan Life or
Equitable Insurance Corporation, using sober actuarial paradigms to calculate the
value of its skyscraper in rentable office space and public relations impact. And even
Woolworth had made his fortune by selling millions of people hundreds of millions of
cheap tiny things.
Not surprisingly given these tensions between individual and mass, there was a
persistent paradox threaded through the futuristic hoopla surrounding early skyscrapers. On the one hand, as crowning achievements of rational system-building, they
seemed to convey their inhabitants and observers toward global communication, toward efficient management of resources, toward a modern future without boundaries.
Yet these very hyperrationalist significations carried an ambiguous charge: skyscrapers
took shape out of “an enormous puzzle of interwoven lines and numerals and hieroglyphics worked out on many broad drawing-boards” (“BOAOB,” 2959). As this imagery of hermetic codes and signs suggests, these buildings put new mysteries into play,
and their vast scale confounded adequate comprehension of their possible functions
or meanings. This ambiguity gave rise to a mythic-anthropological rhetoric that often
ironically linked the skyscraper to exotic environments of hermetic insularity. The skyscraper city constituted a powerful challenge to the Enlightenment-capitalist ideal of
rationally planned cities built in low-rise radial shapes, dominated by single-use properties, assuming healthful but not inaccessible boundaries between work and home
environments. This older urban ideal seemed to be giving way to an amazingly dense
vertical model in which the clamoring chaos of the streets was kept at bay by technologically advanced, communally configured modular structures, theoretically of unlimited size, so fully meeting their inhabitants’ needs that leaving them might prove
altogether unnecessary. What future did it augur for human society that, as Ray Stannard
Baker put it in 1899, “a man might live in a modern skyscraper year in and year out,
luxuriously, too, with every want richly supplied, and never pass beyond the revolving
storm doors at the street entrance?”12 One answer to that question was provided by
the guidebook and travel publisher Moses King, whose postcard “Future New York:
The City of Skyscrapers” (1910s) offered a paradigmatic cityscape—staple of later
science fiction films from Metropolis to The Fifth Element—consisting of buildings so
tall and densely grouped that they appear to give no viable access to the ground at all.
(Fig. 1)
In this view of skyscraper modernity, urbanites were imagined as contemporary
“Cliff Dwellers,” a metaphor that drew upon the turn-of-the-century fascination with
the Anasazi peoples who had built eyrie-like dwellings high on the mesas of New Mexico,
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Fig. 1. Postcard captioned “Future New
York: ‘The City of Skyscrapers.’” Manufac-
▲
tured by Moses King between 1913 and
1918. Author’s collection.
Colorado, Arizona, and Utah at some unknown time in the distant past (later determined to be between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries). In the late 1880s, anthropologists and mountaineers had begun to explore, photograph, and write about
these remarkable places, emphasizing the architectural acumen, tactical ingenuity,
and sheer nerve of those who built and lived in them.13 In early accounts these spaces
conveyed a strong sense of the uncanny, which was not due merely to their extreme
spatial inaccessibility. Commentators were also fascinated by the Cliff Dwellers’ unknown origins, and by their seemingly sudden and unmotivated disappearance from
places that seemed tactically impregnable even by much later standards.14 Adding further to the mystery surrounding them was the belief that the Cliff Dwellers’ remains
showed a puzzling mixture of physiognomies, and their artifacts a marked eclecticism
of style and sophistication, both of which implied a greater degree of interchange with
the outside world than their hermetic living spaces seemed to admit.15
In 1893, the Cliff Dwellers were brought vividly into the consciousness of hundreds of thousands of machine-age urbanites through an exhibit at the Columbian
Exposition in Chicago, featuring a massive composite simulation of a cliff, painted to
resemble rock, into which were cut tiny apertures approximating their living spaces,
along with relics and “portions of the real houses” taken from a dig in Colorado.16 (Fig.
2) The use of the Cliff Dwellers to describe the new spaces being created in the skyscraper metropolis was already in the Chicago air even before this exhibit went on
public view. Also in 1893, the Chicago novelist Henry Blake Fuller published his novel
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101
▲
Fig. 2. Photoengraving of “The Cliff-Dwellers” exhibit constructed and shown at the Columbian Exposition,
Chicago, 1893. From The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (St.
Louis: N. D. Thompson, 1893). Author’s Collection.
The Cliff Dwellers (1893), which cemented the metaphor’s applicability to modern
urbanites. Fuller’s novel is one of the earliest attempts to integrate the skyscraper
setting into the genre of social-realist fiction. His most original stroke was a mockethnographic introduction presenting the book’s narrative as an analysis of the site of a
new culture that needed to be named and understood:
Between the former site of old Fort Dearborn and the present site of our newest Board
of Trade there lies a restricted yet tumultuous territory through which, during the course
of the last fifty years, the rushing streams of commerce have worn many a deep and
rugged chasm . . . . Each of these cañons is closed in by a long frontage of towering cliffs,
and these soaring walls of brick and limestone and granite rise higher and higher with
each succeeding year, according as the work of erosion at their bases goes onward—the
work of that seething flood of carts, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, cars, messengers, shoppers, clerks, and capitalists, which surges with increasing violence for every passing day.17
Fuller’s facetious archaeology of the Chicago Loop centers on the Clifton Building,
a fictional eighteen-story skyscraper housing “four thousand souls,” and featuring wonderful elevating devices that “ameliorate the daily cliff-climbing for the frail of physique and the pressed for time” (TCD, 4). His narrative captures vividly the skyscraper’s
paradoxical combination of variety and insularity, spatial openness and hermetic inac-
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102 cessibility. The Clifton’s “tribe” is notably fluid and “heterogeneous,” containing all
walks of life from bankers to janitors, all of whom seem to be recent arrivals from
elsewhere (TCD, 4–5, 12). Of course the building enables state-of-the-art accessibility
to distant places, so that “the warriors” of commerce may “communicate their messages, hostile or friendly, to chiefs more or less remote” (TCD, 5). Yet in gathering its
vast variety of functions and resources into a single space, the Clifton aims above all
“to be complete in itself,” to make it “unnecessary” for its inhabitants, their archaeologist, or his readers to “go afield either far or frequently” (TCD, 5).18
A great deal of writing on skyscrapers between 1890 and 1915 emphasized this
incongruous mixture of hypertechnologized urban space with the unknowable, uncanny, and hermetic landscape of the western desert. A writer in Munsey’s in 1898
noted that many streets “are already darkened by the huge cliffs of masonry that rise
above them”; in Collier’s C. P. Cushing objected to the “cheerless cañonlike streets”
created by the skyscrapers.19 C. F. Carter, writing in The Technical World, a venue we
might expect to embrace the skyscraper, remarked on the menace to health and life
from “the crowded warrens of the cliff dwellers towering . . . three hundred feet into
the air on either side of the narrow slits called streets.”20 In 1911, Edgar Allen Forbes
synthesized these images and anxieties into a powerful vision of the future skyscraper
city as “a collection of towns and villages under separate roofs,” each “complete unto
itself,” its elevators like “street railways running perpendicularly.” The surrounding
streets will be “canyons of a depth varying from 200 to 400 feet, through which the
wind will sweep like gales,” and “the sky will be practically blotted out” from this “city
of electric lights on the brightest days,” which is inhabited by businessmen who seldom glimpse the sky at all.21 These are but a few of dozens of similar references to cliff
and canyon (usually spelled cañon), which became consensual metaphors for the urban spaces, at once rational and mysterious, that were being remade by the rise of
skyscrapers. (Fig. 3) Mildred Stapley noted that the “cañon streets” of lower Manhattan were the consequence of intractably contradictory requirements: economic efficiency dictated that builders maximize rentable space right up to the property line, yet
code forbade any part of a building to extend into air space that was not over part of its
lot.22 The inevitable result was the “sheer vertical wall deviating neither outward nor
inward.”23 Eaton best captured the paradoxical character of this imagery with this 1915
remark: “Through the cañons he has made, Man hustles and bustles, creating more
perplexities than he can solve” (NY, 4).
The practical strictures of skyscraper-building may have perplexed and darkened
the streets of lower Manhattan, but they also helped beget new aesthetic styles and
notions of beauty. Eaton’s 1915 account of his evolving attachment to the skyscraper
city reveals an important link between its sheer lines, massive forms, and constantly
changing state, and an emerging aesthetic of modernism. At first perceiving the city as
“miles and miles of ugly dwellings, cave dwellings where people lived in layers” (NY,
5), Eaton comes to love the “mortared Himalayas” of Manhattan’s streets, and credits
skyscrapers and the spaces they create (“great crags in the walls of a man-made cañon”)
for providing him with an aesthetic of beauty appropriate to the twentieth century,
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Fig. 3. Postcard captioned “The
Canyon, Broadway Down Town, New
York.” Manufactured by “L. Jonas &
Co, Woolworth Bldg., New York,”
1910s–1920s. The Singer Tower rises
in the center of the background, while
the Woolworth Building hovers hazily
in the narrow gap between the Singer
▲
and the building in the right
foreground. Author’s collection.
modernist in all but name, that repudiates “symmetry” and “conformity” (NY, 10), and
instead embraces ceaseless variety (NY, 6), “stirring challenge” (NY, 9), “endless surprises” (NY, 7), “sudden revelation. . . amid apparent ugliness” (NY, 9), and anything
that “rouses the eye to keener attention” (NY, 10). These are the very qualities that
drew the eyes, brushes, and cameras of modernist visual artists to skyscrapers and
cityscapes. Indeed, the artist Robert MacCameron concluded in 1913 that the modern city’s new lines and forms augured a twentieth-century aesthetic that would emerge
across many genres, as the skyscraper’s “freshening of the vision” was sure to catalyze
“fresh problems and solutions in other forms of art.”24
American poets of the 1910s and early 1920s would perceive that same allure, and
explore those new notions of beauty, as they used cityscape verse to work toward a
vigorous modernist aesthetic capable of negotiating, even embracing, the paradoxical
conditions of modernity. In their poems, skyscrapers carry a wide range of emotional
meanings, and function within a range of political discourses from capitalist intimidation to revolutionary praxis. In short, they exhibit the depth, variety, and complexity
that the most resonant symbols of a cultural moment possess. Some verses read the
skyscraper city as an image of bleakly depersonalized modernity, others as a locus of
utopian possibility. Most bear the traces of both these responses at once, experiencing
the skyscraper city as contradiction, instability, and challenge. Perceiving the metropolitan grid as an arresting abstract pattern of lights and lines that rivals the creations
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104 of nature, they ponder how to balance this detached aesthetic perspective with
empathetic connection with others. As they feel the skyscraper city hurtling them into
a future of unimaginable marvels, they question whether the constantly mutating metropolis would allow any meaningful relationship with the past. As skyscrapers inspire
them to new metaphors for conceptualizing mass society, they worry that a society
defined by its masses might prove wholly inaccessible to the powers of poetry. As they
perceive the skyscraper’s transformative power, promising access to new levels of experience and understanding, they wonder whether it will take them places human
beings would want to go.
1 Challenging the Skies
The young American poets who began to write about the modern metropolis in the
early 1910s had grown up while skyscrapers were rising in the nation’s cities. Since
1905 they had witnessed a breathtaking increase in the height of the tallest structures,
the culmination of thirty years of skyscraper development. In the last decades of the
century, the economic imperative for taller buildings, which one early commentator
called “the capitalization of the air,” had become enormous in the densest and most
desirable commercial areas such as lower Manhattan and the Chicago Loop, as rents
had become “prohibitive,” and the purchase of land “impossible.”25 For many years,
the tallest structure in Manhattan had been the spire of Trinity Church on lower Broadway at 284 feet, asserting, as Thomas van Leeuwen notes, the longstanding “material
claim of the church on the territory between Earth and Heaven”; but by 1880 Trinity
had begun to function as a “mere yardstick for any new skyscraper that was thought fit
to carry the name.”26 Through the 1880s, steel-frame technology, which theoretically
eliminated height restrictions upon architects’ imaginations, were rendered practical
possibilities by the continuing refinement of the high-speed electric elevator, and the
falling cost and better quality control of steel. The success of the nine-story Home Life
Insurance Company in Chicago (William LeBaron Jenney, 1884), the ten-story Wainwright Building in St. Louis (Louis Sullivan, 1890–91), and other experiments indicated that the steel-clad tower could look good, inspire public wonderment, and make
its owners money. Even so, various factors, including residual skepticism that buildings several hundred feet high could be physically stable, retarded great increases in
height for some years after the principles of steel-frame construction were established.
By 1900 the world’s tallest building was the Park Row Building in lower Manhattan (R.
H. Robertson, 1899), which rose 383 feet (thirty stories). The most distinctive modern
structure in the artistic and cultural landscape of New York City before 1905, the
Fuller Building, better known as the Flatiron (D. H. Burnham Co., 1902), was, at
twenty-one stories, still under 300 feet high.27 Still, the drive to the skies had begun in
earnest, and the visual scale of Manhattan life was being altered from street level to
hundreds of feet in the air. In 1890, only six buildings in New York City rose as high as
ten stories: by 1908 there were 538 such buildings, and by the end of 1912 this number
had doubled again, to 1048.28
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In the decade after 1905, the emergence of the twentieth-century skyscraper would
culminate in three lower Manhattan behemoths, each in succession the tallest building in the world, which became magnetic icons of the city for modernist writers, painters, and photographers: the Singer Tower (612 feet, Ernest Flagg; completed 1908,
demolished 1967), the Metropolitan Life Tower (700 feet, Napoleon LeBrun & Sons,
1909), and the Woolworth Building (792 feet, Cass Gilbert, 1913). The heaven-storming years that produced these three skyscrapers can hardly be overestimated as a defining moment of urban modernity. Because of the more height-restrictive zoning laws
of the mid-1910s, and the more conservative business climate produced by the Great
War, these towers stood as the three tallest in the world until after 1920, and the 700foot barrier was not eclipsed again until 1930.29
Virtually everyone who approached Manhattan from the south or west during the
last thirty-five years of the twentieth century remembers, now painfully, seeing the
bland yet unmistakable twin towers of the World Trade Center as the first visible signs
of the city. Before 1930, the very tallest buildings were even more prominent signifiers
of the metropolis. The Singer, Metropolitan, and Woolworth towers dwarfed almost
every other building in the city by hundreds of feet, and were not obscured by a forest
of surrounding skyscrapers until the 1950s. They could be seen from virtually every
prospect in greater New York City.30 An early booklet for the observation deck on the
50th floor of the Metropolitan Tower claimed plausibly that from there one could see
“the homes of over one-sixteenth of the entire population of the United States” (MLIC,
45–46). The reverse must also have been true: certainly millions of people would have
seen the Metropolitan, Singer, and Woolworth buildings, virtually every day of their
lives.
Commanding this level of visual prominence and novelty, the tallest skyscrapers
became a form of spectacular popular culture, providing symbolic currency in an era
in which points of common understanding were generally perceived to be disappearing. For better or worse, they were the modern urban analogues of the small-town
churches and schoolhouses around which most American lives had once revolved:
instantly recognizable structures whose distinctive architectural features carried vivid,
complex cultural meanings, as compass-needles, gathering places, repositories of civic
and national pride—as sites of virtually every type of social interaction, from ruthlessly
commercial to frivolously recreational.31 As such, they laid a forceful claim on anyone
interested in representing the defining features of urban modernity: painters, photographers, commercial artists; manufacturers of postcards, souvenirs, toys, almost every
imaginable genre of material culture; and poets.
The opening ceremonies of the 792-foot Woolworth Building in 1913 evoked the
skyscraper’s complex significance in the cultural landscape of twentieth-century modernity. On the evening of 24 April, hundreds of feet off the ground, a distinguished
group of 800 guests gathered including, as well as the expected industrialists and bankers, a member of the Wilson cabinet, various foreign diplomats, three lieutenant governors, and nearly twenty percent of the U. S. Congress from 28 states.32 When everyone was seated, all the building’s exterior and interior lights were extinguished, and
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106 exactly at 7:30 PM, President Wilson at the White House pressed a button, igniting all
of its 80,000 lights, “enough to illuminate the entire 40-mile waterfront of Manhattan,” no doubt as stunning an effect to the crowds watching for miles around as to the
dignitaries inside (SQMP, 89–90). This dramatic event conjoined a variety of political,
commercial, technological, and aesthetic meanings into a thoroughly ambiguous spectacle. On the one hand, it demonstrated that a single skyscraper’s reach extended not
only throughout the metropolitan area but to the seat of national government. The
fact that such a building so confidently, competently worked evoked a modernity of
complex interconnected elements that promised to be manageable through the unending advance of industrial technologies and organizational skills. On the other hand,
mystifying an enormously laborious effort of construction and wiring into a single
magical instant of illumination, it asked observers to accommodate another possible
modernity, this one so massive in scale and hermetic in character as to defy individual
comprehension.
Not surprisingly given the association of skyscrapers with such monumental spectacle, one group of poetic responses represented them as looming ominously over the
more humanly-scaled structures of the city, monstrous in their sheer height and bulk,
symbols of modern capital at its most unaccountable and self-congratulatory. In his
prize-winning poem for the 1912 anthology The Lyric Year, “Second Avenue,” Orrick
Johns indicts the ever-expanding array of skyscrapers as a “jagged line of mist-enshrouded masonry” that “you, my people, reared and built/ To be a temple and a shrine/
For gods of iron and gilt.”33 In “Lines to the Woolworth Building” (1913), the anarchist
poet and sculptor Adolf Wolff admits that the Woolworth, completed only that year,
“awes my soul,” but quickly goes on to condemn it as a “monstrous sacrilege” because
never “has thing so big been made for end so small.”34 Wolff is playing here with the
specific incongruity of a five-and-ten-cent store housing itself in the world’s tallest
building; his more general point, of course, is that the Woolworth as an achievement is
vitiated because it commemorates only “the priests of lucre” (“LTTWB,” 29).35 Appropriate, therefore, that the building’s “pallor” was “like in color to the tint of bones,” its
“slender, upright lines” “so much like children’s bones” (“LTTWB,” 29). Wolff ended
with a fervent but conceptually banal condemnation of the building to the dust: like
the pyramids, “tyrants’ tombs, built by a million slaves,” “ere long/ Thou’lt be the relic
of an age gone by” (“LTTWB,” 29). Drawing from late genteel poetry’s fusty reservoir
of antiquarian imagery, such castigations of the idolatrous skyscraper espoused the
conventional sentiments that poets had been expected to produce for decades. But
they were not typical of American verse of the 1910s, which more often acknowledged
both the intimidating potential of these great buildings, and also their allure as creations peculiarly expressive of modernity.
Many other poems, especially those in the radical orbit of The Masses and The
Liberator, tended to read the skyscraper as an emblem of modernity defined by the
limitless possibilities of communal effort. The octave of John Reed’s sonnet “Foundations of a Skyscraper” (1910s) evokes the “ghastly” aspects of the construction process
(“Thunder of drills, stiff spurting plumes of steam,–/ Shouts and the dip of cranes, the
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stench of earth”), but also treats this as a site of human possibility, since out of an
inferno of exploitative labor, “men give a vision birth,/ Crawling and dim, men build a
dreamer’s dream.”36 The poem maintains a valuable balance between the utopian vision of “A phantom of fairtowers in the sky” and the grittier assertion that the true
“foundation” of the skyscraper is human labor (“FOAS,” 38). The sestet reinforces this
convergence with a striking image of the building in the strenuous posture of the
workman who built it: “Naked, a giant’s back, tight-muscled, stark,/ Glimpse of mighty
shoulder, etched in steel” (“FOAS,” 38).
Reed’s reference to “the clamor of unknown tongues” (“FOAS,” 38) in the
skyscraper’s construction site evokes the heterogeneous ethnic makeup of its workforce,
and the class-consciousness that such an enterprise might promote, no doubt in spite
of its developer’s desires. Pursuing this line of thought further, two poems published in
The Liberator celebrate great buildings as empowering icons of radical consciousness,
foreshadowing in verbal terms the representational strategies that Lewis Hine would
use a few years later to photograph the workers constructing the Empire State Building in Men at Work (1932). Like Hine’s photos, Raymond Corder’s “The Skyscraper”
(1921) and Stirling Bowen’s “Skyscraper” (1924) convert the modern capitalist tower
into an emblem of the utopian possibilities of collaborative human effort.37 Corder’s
poem begins, “All that steel frame-work bristling in the sun/ Is something we have
done” (“TS,” 21). The physical labor of construction (“We sweated, we plugged, and
built it, span by span”) has enabled the workers to think of themselves as the building’s
“creators,” and therefore, its rightful owners: “And every rusty beam that skyward
towers/ Is ours—we built it—It is ours!” (“TS,” 21). The poem’s distinctive proletarian
voice uses a high-spirited slang to acknowledge the obligations of doctrine (“Sure,
buddy, sure, I know/ The boss has got it now–he’ll have to go” [“TS,” 21]), but prefers
to admire the building a bit longer as an object of beauty and a source of pride, a
central constituent in a materialist-modernist aesthetic that valorizes collective human
achievement above natural verities:
But, say, boy, watch them clouds,
They seem to stand still while that eye-beam strouds
Across the sky.–She’s pretty, ain’t she, son?
That piece of work we’ve done. (“TS,” 21)
As many of Hine’s photos feature iconic human figures who echo the shape of buildings or extend the implied motion of machines, Bowen’s sonnet “Skyscraper” suggests
how heavy machinery exponentially magnifies the power of the ordinary worker: “One
man mops his brow/ And, spitting, scoops two tons of dirt up now/ In one iron fist.—
plain Mike or Tom or Pete” (“S,” 13). Extending the individual human frame, with
“fist” and “great arms,” the crane incarnates the growing strength of the proletariat as
a collective body (“S,” 13). Bowen flatly refuses to interpret the building’s massive
scale as a parable of hubris, and instead appropriates the imagery of pagan idolatry for
the “clear godless” nature of this human enterprise: “No god can muddle anything we
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108 try!” (“S,” 13) The building is indeed “Babel’s modern tower,” since it has drawn together a multiethnic workforce who “confuse the Yankee tongue,” but this is a source
of affirmation as well, as the skyscraper becomes the magnificent result of their growing class consciousness (“S,” 13).
The skyscraper’s contradictory ability to embody both the depersonalizing mystifications of corporate capitalism, and the limitless possibilities of collective labor, is acutely
articulated by Arturo Giovannitti’s “The Day of War: Madison Square, June 20th,”
published in The Masses for August 1916, in an oppressive atmosphere of patriotic
rhetoric and preparedness parades.38 Giovannitti introduces in the first line a “hawkfaced youth with rapacious eyes, standing on a shaky chair” who exhorts an alienated
and scattered crowd, “idle, yawning, many-hungered, beggarly,” to embrace the cause
of radical labor (“TDOW,” 283). Studded with images of bellicosity, this young man
embodies the hard line of The Masses’ revolutionary persona, as “his red tie flows
tempestuously in the wind, the unfurled banner of his heart amidst the musketry of his
young words” (“TDOW,” 283). But he also has a human communicativeness and vulnerability otherwise lacking from the clamorous physical textures of the urban street.
Giovannitti places him at the heart of the capitalist skyscraper city, “in the roar of the
crossways, under the tower that challenges the skies, terrible like a brandished sword”
(“TDOW,” 283). The humanity and sincerity of this warlike youth contrast to the other
version of war that erupts upon the street, which is all the more intimidating for being
disjointed and depersonalized: “the blast of a trumpet, its notes ramming like bullets
against the white tower./ The soldiers march up the Avenue. The crowd breaks, scatters, and runs away, and only six listeners remain” (“TDOW,” 283). Though we get
nothing more than this fragmentary glimpse of the military parade, it breaks the spell
of the boy’s rhetoric, dissipates the “island of silence” his voice had created amidst the
“roar” of the city, and sends most of his audience scurrying aimlessly away (“TDOW,”
283). As the last listeners drift off one by one (even the poet’s alter ego, whom he calls
“the stranger I know”), until only a single young woman is left, Giovannitti acknowledges the difficulty of resistance to a capitalist modernity that enforces conformism by
isolating people from one another (“TDOW,” 283).
However, this story is not over: as Giovannitti repeats four times in the second half
of the poem, “But he speaks on” (“TDOW,” 283). The boy’s persistence marks his
cause as indomitable, as does the girl who remains transfixed, “her upturned face glowing
before the brazier of his soul,” proving that his words need not inevitably fall on deaf
ears, and can produce tangible results in the world (“TDOW,” 283). At the end he, she,
and the tower “are the only three things that stand straight and rigid and inexpugnable/ Amidst the red omens of war” (“TDOW,” 283). Though Giovannitti never names
this building, he certainly has in mind the Metropolitan Life Tower, sited on the southeast corner of Madison Square, at 700 feet the area’s tallest building by far, and containing on its white walls the largest clock in the world. (Fig. 4) At the beginning of the
poem, the tower may seem just another depersonalized and alienating element of the
modern capitalist city. Yet even at that point the building is associated with the speaking boy just beneath, as he mimics its height by standing on a chair. When he exhorts
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Fig. 4. The Metropolitan Life Tower by
day. Postcard manufactured by the
▲
Brooklyn Postcard Company before
1914. Author’s collection.
the crowd, “his shadow is heavy and hard upon their faces,” as the tower’s must also be
(“TDOW,” 283). At the poem’s end, only the girl remains, one resolute listener to
match the boy’s indomitable speech, and the tower’s great clock strikes twelve: “one by
one drop at his feet the twelve tolls of the clock that marks time, the time that knows
and flows on until his day comes” (“TDOW,” 283). By associating the timekeeping
tower with the young radicals, Giovannitti proposes a Marxian reading of capitalist
modernity as an era that has generated both greater levels of inhumane exploitation,
and also the class consciousness necessary for radical change, whose time is inexorably
approaching. For him and other leftist poets of the era, the skyscraper tower signifies
not just alienating and inhumane modernity, but the human race’s ability to create
things. Its great strength, its inexpugnability, even its shape that rebels against supposedly eternal verities (“challenges the skies”)—all these qualities make the skyscraper
central to an iconography of revolutionary modernism.
2 Abyss, Eternity,Threshold
In modernist poems the skyscraper tower often represents rocklike strength, for
obvious reasons; yet as a symbol it is remarkably tensile, allowing Giovannitti to reshape a monument to corporate capitalism into a harbinger of Marxist revolution. This
malleability of symbolic function is congruent with another of the skyscraper’s para-
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110 doxical signifying powers: the ability to transform temporal and spatial principles previously perceived as immutable. A host of early modernist writers explored great buildings as liminal spaces, thresholds to new dimensions of consciousness or experience,
windows into the future or the past, or harbingers of radical, even apocalyptic change.
Harriet Monroe, the poet of her generation most deeply engaged with urban modernity, noted that in many climatic circumstances skyscrapers extended past the limits of
visual perception to create a sublime vertigo that confused terrestrial and celestial:
“The many-windowed walls uprear so high/ They dim and quiver and float away in
mist/ Tangling the earth and sky.”39 Walter Pritchard Eaton likewise perceived the
skyscraper’s vastness outstripping identifiable climatic zones, in effect transcending
weather itself: “On foggy days the Singer Building and its sister peaks go up out of
sight into the vapors. Again, on days of heavy atmosphere and lowering rain . . . I have
seen the lower portions of the buildings obliterated, and only their summits reared on
nothing into the gray air, a dream city, unbelievable, ethereal, immense” (NY, 21–22).
Images of crossing and transformation figure frequently in commentaries upon these
buildings that made people feel themselves “on the abyss of eternity.”40 One of the
most imaginative of these was by Ray Stannard Baker, who described the steel-frame
skyscraper as “more a bridge than a building” (“TMS,” 48). In Baker’s vision of a horizontal structure somehow also becoming vertical, the supporting steel girders are “big
bridges,” and elevators the vehicles conveying us into some unknown region in the
heavens (“TMS,” 56, 48). Eaton too imagined skyscrapers at night as vertical thoroughfares rising into the air, proposing that the “upward rows of lights” give lower
Manhattan “exactly the aspect of a town of many streets running up a great dome-like
hill, each little house by the roadside imagined from its square of light” (NY, 22). The
skyscraper’s ability to blur fundamental spatial distinctions between vertical and horizontal, between earth and heavens, gave it an uncanny liminal force.
As it made people feel they were teetering on the very edges of space and time, the
liminal skyscraper catalyzed some poets into hallucinatory visions of nightmare modernity. Armond Carroll’s “From a City Street” (1912) offers a surreal portrait of “harpies of our modern time,” who perch on the “crags which high uplift/ Their steel-knit
skeletons” above “the surfs that surge and shift.”41 The trope of people surging and
ebbing among the enormous buildings like a restless “surf” can also be read as a punning reference to their serfdom to the forces of modernity tossing them about. Far
above the street, these harpies both “mock the futile restless waves/ That surge in
great affair below,” and ironically “hail to wide oblivious graves/ The victims of the
undertow.”42 The simultaneous mocking and hailing implies that a society gets the
imaginative icons it deserves; these harpies, however murky and unsatisfying, are faithful
emblems of the chaotic and depredatory culture that constructed the crags they inhabit. Their mocking is thus appropriate commemoration for that culture’s victims.
The apocalyptic resonance of the heaven-storming tower, implicit in Carroll’s skyscraperGothic, comes to the fore in Horace Holley’s “Skyscrapers” (1914), which compares
the skyline to “a forest of strange palms” apparently not subject to natural laws: they
don’t sway in wind, “nor nod sleepy at evening,” nor offer to “nestling birds/ A warm
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and comfortable mossy bough.”43 Unnerved at these contraventions of the natural order, the speaker hurls at the skyscrapers the apocalyptic prediction that nature must
ultimately reassert its dominion through “a furious tempest” that will “tear your earthdevouring roots” and rain down “terrible fruit” of stone upon “a shore deserted.”44
The American poem that most fully explores the skyscraper as such a liminal space
comes from a writer few would even associate with urban modernity, Sara Teasdale,
whose work has been unjustifiably miniaturized by high modernism’s interlocking preconceptions about gender and genre. Teasdale’s “From the Woolworth Tower,” published in the 1915 volume Rivers to the Sea but eventually dropped from her collected
works, consists of seventy-four lines divided into short beginning and ending sections
framing a longer central meditation. The first section describes a couple enjoying each
other’s company in the city of modern amusements, arriving “vivid with love, eager for
greater beauty,” into the “brilliant and warm” corridors of the Woolworth Building
(“FTWT,” 12). The elevator’s “sharp unswerving flight” up to the observation deck
transports them from the everyday world into a sublime realm of unseen and uncanny
forces (“FTWT,” 12). As they “shoot” through “swirling and angry” air that “howls like
a hundred devils,” the speaker is highly “Conscious of the chasm under us” (“FTWT,”
12). She has entered an unstable liminal zone in which the division between air above
and earth below can no longer be taken for granted.45 The skyscraper’s liminal force
intensifies when they reach the top, pass through “a door leading onto the ledge—,”
and find themselves perched “over the edge of eternity,” accompanied only by “wind,
night and space!” (“FTWT,” 12–13). Alarmed at the “terrible height,” the speaker still
realizes with some wonder that they have actively chosen to experience it (“Why have
we sought you?”) [“FTWT,” 13]. She speaks here not as a bohemian seeking esoteric
urban thrills, but as an American participating fully in the popular culture of her times:
until its closing in 1941 due to wartime precautions, the Woolworth’s observation deck
attracted 250,000 visitors annually (SQMP, 136). (Figs. 5, 6)
The poem’s second section, describing the view from the tower, negotiates most of
the key themes of cityscape poetry: the perception of the city as abstract patterns of
lights and forms that rival or displace the creations of nature; the desire to balance this
detached perspective with empathy for others; the anxiety that the scale and impersonality of skyscraper modernity may overwhelm the poet’s communicative powers;
and the uneasy attempt to situate the modern metropolis into a meaningful relationship with past and future. Regaining her perceptual and emotional bearings, the speaker
perceives the abstract visual drama of the city’s lights (“A thousand times more numerous than the stars”) outlining its dark shapes: “Oh lines and loops of light in unwound
chains/ That mark for miles and miles/ The vast black mazy cobweb of the streets”
(“FTWT,” 13). As in much cityscape verse, the modernist visual arts provide a point of
reference for the poetic imagination: “Near us clusters and splashes of living gold/
That change far off to bluish steel” (“FTWT,” 13). This painterly abstraction evokes
the poet’s sense of being transported into a liminal city in which the familiar “strident
noises” of the street float up to them, now “hallowed into whispers” (“FTWT,” 13–14).
The stridency has been hallowed out of them, but questions remain. Does the poet’s
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112
▲
Fig. 5. Nighttime view from the observation deck of the Woolworth Building. Illustration from H. Addington
Bruce, Above the Clouds and Old New York (Privately printed. Woolworth Building Visitors’ Brochure, 1913).
Author’s collection.
▲
Fig. 6. Nighttime view from the observation deck of the Woolworth Building. Illustration from H. Addington
Bruce, Above the Clouds and Old New York (Privately printed. Woolworth Building Visitors’ Brochure, 1913).
Author’s collection.
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liminal sensitivity make these “whispers” comprehensible as human utterances? Or
have they simply been distanced and aestheticized into the spectacle of the nocturnal
cityscape?
The anxiety created by these questions becomes primary in the next verse paragraph, which turns toward the human element of the city conspicuously absent so far.
But the results of this turn are immediately discouraging:
We feel the millions of humanity beneath us,–
The warm millions, moving under the roofs,
Consumed by their own desires;
Preparing food,
Sobbing alone in a garret,
With burning eyes bending over a needle,
Aimlessly reading the evening paper. . . (“FTWT,” 14)
Assailed by fleeting perceptions of “the sorrow, the torpor, the bitterness, the frail joy”
of human life that “come up to us” as the whispers had done, but now feel “like a cold
fog wrapping us round,” the speaker can muster none of Whitman’s belief in “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry” that human connection might transcend the distance between the
present moment and other ages.46 She also feels unmoved by the tower as a symbol of
future human progress, concluding that in a hundred years “the anguish, the torpor,
the toil/ Will have passed to other millions/ Consumed by the same desires,” and eventually “darkness will blot the lights/ And the tower will be laid on the earth,” with only
sea and stars remaining “unchanging” and “unconcerned” (“FTWT,” 15). For Teasdale,
the illuminating liminality the tower brings turns out to be bitterly ironic. As a vehicle
for abstracting oneself from the moment-to-moment perceptual plenitude of street
life for a more meditative perspective, as a threshold to deeper understanding, it has
yielded the appalling conclusion that modernity is merely the clockwork acting-out of
petty melodrama, followed by implacable apocalypse.
Instead of, say, a sober descent from the building to contrast the exhilarating ascent, the brief final section retreats from these anguished realizations, and announces
that despite the “sorrow, futility, defeat” all around, love “has crowned us/ For a moment/ Victors” (“FTWT,” 15). Here Teasdale attempts to complete the theme of
liminality, implying that because the building has allowed the lovers to abstract themselves from the strident and chaotic textures of the city, to exist “on the abyss of eternity,” they have understood the power and the value of their love more deeply than
they could have done below (“FTWT,” 15). But this wishful affirmation pales next to
the disillusioning force of her earlier realizations, and whatever fleeting victory she
feels is bittersweet at best. Teasdale’s eventual rejection of “From the Woolworth Tower”
is understandable given its problematic ending, but is also unfortunate, because the
poem is her most ambitious attempt to integrate the idiom of the rhapsodic love lyric
with urban modernity, a project deserving of serious reconsideration by current historicist criticism. The alienated futility she describes here is indeed one aspect of the
modernist response to modernity, though not the primary, much less the only one, as
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114 ideologies of high modernism often assert. The poem remains illuminating as an emotionally raw and ambivalent instance of literary modernism’s horror at depersonalized
modern mass society, before this was styled into seductive elegance by Eliot and the
Fugitives, and then elevated to high-culture dogma after World War II.
Teasdale’s vision of tall buildings collapsing upon the shore in the face of an apocalyptic storm evokes the “falling towers” of The Waste Land (1922), which are seldom
considered in relation to the modern skyscraper.47 In the beginning of “What the Thunder Said,” when Eliot describes “mountains of rock without water” amongst which
“one cannot stop or think,” he refers most directly to the quasi-biblical desert landscape that has framed the entire poem and lent it a title (TWL, 334, 336). But a few
dozen lines later, we approach an arid “city over the mountains” that “cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air,” which leads directly to a litany of human history as
a succession of “falling towers/ Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London/ Unreal”
(TWL, 372–77). This associative sequence links the waste land’s sterile mountains of
rock to the “unreal” cities of modernity, a linkage reinforced by the adjective “violet,”
which Eliot had previously used to evoke the machine-age city at dusk (“the violet
hour, when the eyes and back/ Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine
waits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting” [TWL, 215–17]). Indeed, despite its studied timelessness that draws upon biblical parables and ancient vegetation rituals, the desert
landscape has possessed attributes of the modern city all along. Most notably, existence in the waste land is typified, as in the city, not by true solitude (“There is not even
solitude in the mountains”), but by an alienation from others that is exacerbated by
there being so many of them, so many “red sullen faces” sneering and snarling “from
doors of mudcracked houses” that “one can neither stand nor lie nor sit” (TWL, 343,
344–45, 340). These “hooded hordes swarming/ Over endless plains, stumbling in
cracked earth” (TWL, 369–70) can be seen as analogues of the contemporary crowd
surging over London Bridge, eyes fixed before feet, to arrive at offices “on the final
stroke of nine” (TWL, 68).
The last lines of The Waste Land memorably synthesize urban and desert settings,
as the speaker sits “upon the shore/ Fishing, with the arid plain behind” him, his great
buildings crumbling, his finely styled phrases disintegrating into fragmented collage
(which begins “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down”) (TWL, 424–
25, 427). Eliot prophesies a cataclysmic, if entropic, denouement to the accelerating
human expansion into the sky. The approaching storm at the poem’s end can be interpreted equally as the harbinger of some cleansing spiritual rejuvenation, or as the
cosmic coup de grace upon a self-annihilating culture. Eliot’s ambivalence toward
modernity, his obvious fascination with the industrial city even as he is repulsed by it,
is perhaps the most precious element of his mixed legacy to modernism, but this largely
vanishes from his work after his conversion to Christianity. Still gripped by it in The
Waste Land, he articulates as forcefully as anyone the wonder and anguish of experiencing everything that is solid, even and especially our most massive bulwarks against
instability, cracking, reforming, and bursting in the viole(n)t air of modernity.
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3 The Light That Never Fails
The building in the Manhattan skyline most significant to American poets before
1930 was the 700-foot Metropolitan Life Tower, located at 1 Madison Avenue on the
southeast corner of Madison Square (just across from the Flatiron, the structure that
meant the most to visual artists). The Metropolitan Tower, an instantly recognizable
structure with several unique visual features, was integral to several poems of the
1910s and 1920s that consider the role of poetry in modern urban experience. The
white tower that dominates Giovannitti’s cityscape of revolutionary modernity, “The
Day of War: Madison Square, June 20th,” is the Metropolitan in all but name. It also
initiates the mystical singing of William Rose Benét’s “The Singing Skyscrapers.” In
the opening lines of her exquisite lyric “Parting Gift” (1923), Elinor Wylie, gently teasing her partner Benét for his fascination with these great structures, uses the Metropolitan as a shorthand reference for worldly grandeur, presuming it to be a characteristic object of desire for the modern urban subject:
I cannot give you the Metropolitan Tower.
I cannot give you heaven;
Nor the nine Visigoth crowns in the Cluny Museum;
Nor happiness, even.48
Several of these poems contain glancing references to the Metropolitan’s appearance and lighting effects that may strike current readers as murky or private. But this
is our lack, not the poems’, since the tower’s nocturnal spectacle, visible from virtually
everywhere in the city, must have been known to almost every Manhattanite of the
early twentieth century. Indeed, this imagery is obscure to us precisely because it was
so familiar to the era’s poets and readers, who needed no contextual introduction. At
any rate, these poems use the lights and other attributes of the Metropolitan Tower to
articulate a wide range of emotional states: love, disappointment, yearning for stability, alienation, skepticism, commitment to social change. This range of possible significations invites us to see the building as an exemplary symbol in a poetic modernism
deeply engaged with modernity.49
The first poet to explore the resonance of this exemplary great building was again
Sara Teasdale, whose lyric “The Metropolitan Tower” begins an unofficial sequence of
six poems that conclude the “Love Songs” section of Helen of Troy and Other Poems
(1911).50 All six feature titles of geographically specific settings in greater New York
City (Gramercy Park, the Metropolitan Museum, Coney Island, Union Square, and
Central Park); collectively they trace the unhappy progress of a modern love relationship. “The Metropolitan Tower” initiates the sequence by recounting “Love’s birth” in
the speaker’s heart during an hour spent walking with a companion at dusk around the
then brand-new skyscraper (“TMT,” 29). The first two of its three stanzas use the
tower’s visual sequences and timekeeping function to measure the speaker’s emotionally heightened time:
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We walked together in the dusk
To watch the tower grow dimly white,
And saw it lift against the sky
Its flower of amber light.
You talked of half a hundred things,
I kept each hurried word you said,
And when at last the hour was full,
I saw the light turn red. (“TMT,” 29)
The speaker’s evolving commitment to her companion is precisely articulated through
the tower’s sequence of lighting effects.51 (Fig. 7) The first phase of her experience
corresponds to the “amber light” that flowers on the building’s clock as dusk approaches,
which here suggests the sense of infinite emotional possibility one perceives upon first
feeling love (“TMT, 29). These feelings swell as the building’s illumination brightens
minute by minute, to be culminated by the flashes of the lantern as the “hour” reaches
its end, an event the speaker anticipates as eagerly (“at last”) and feels as intensely as
she might the “full” consummation of her love (“TMT,” 29).
But all the while, her oblivious paramour flits from one trivial observation to another, leading us to suspect that he must eventually disappoint her. The final stanza of
“The Metropolitan Tower” foreshadows the sequence’s bleak ending, wistfully reaffirming her love despite his unresponsive self-absorption:
You did not know the time had come,
You did not see the sudden flower,
Nor know that in my heart Love’s birth
Was reckoned from that hour. (“TMT,” 29)
The syntactic and rhythmic parallels of the phrases “the light turn red” and “the
time had come” create a strong sense of rhetorical momentum and culmination, pulling us forward much as the speaker is being pulled into deep emotional attachment,
even as we note that red lights conventionally signify impending danger (“TMT,” 29).
And yet, in the midst of all this modern inconstancy, the tower signifies not impersonality or alienation: indeed, it is the only constant in the unstable emotional milieu the
speaker has entered, and only through its steadfast presence and knowable visual sequences can she chart her own emotional durée.
To the corporate owners of the Metropolitan Tower, this constancy was central to
its meaning and value. In 1943 the company’s historian proudly described the tower’s
clock, chimes, and lighting beacon, which “flashed for miles over New York City and
the neighboring towns.” This beacon advertised the dependability of Metropolitan
Life, and became the basis of one of the company’s self-defining slogans, “The Light
That Never Fails.”52 Another early modernist poem, Lola Ridge’s “Time-Stone,” examines the Metropolitan Tower as a modern measuring device, literally marking the
passage of time, but also serving as a symbolic locus of enumeration and evaluation.53
Ridge is as fascinated with the tower as Teasdale, but is certainly more skeptical of its
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Fig. 7. The Metropolitan Life
Tower by night. Postcard
▲
manufactured before 1920.
Author’s collection.
beneficence than its corporate biographer. She develops an extraordinarily compressed
and resonant critique of the tower’s entanglement in ideologies of patriarchal capitalism. Here is the poem in full:
HALLO, Metropolitan—
Ubiquitous windows staring all ways,
Red eye notching the darkness.
No use to ogle that slip of a moon.
This midnight the moon,
Playing virgin after all her encounters,
Will break another date with you.
You fuss an awful lot,
You flight of ledger books,
Overrun with multiple ant-black figures
Dancing on spindle legs
An interminable can-can.
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But I’d rather . . . like the cats in the alley . . . count time
By the silver whistle of a moonbeam
Falling between my stoop-shouldered walls,
Than all your tally of the sunsets,
Metropolitan, ticking among stars. (“TSS,” 51)
The title portrays the tower as a device of temporal measurement, a sort of gigantic
sundial, monumental and timeless in its association with ancient products of human
ingenuity. This particular time-stone, however, also possesses a specifically modern
character, signified first of all by its panoptical capabilities (“Ubiquitous windows staring all ways”), and by its function as enormous searchlight and beacon (“Red eye notching the darkness”). The metaphor of notching—marking a surface with a cut, for the
purpose of measuring, counting, or keeping a record—has both temporal and spatial
functions in the poem. The red flashes of the tower’s lights notch the night temporally,
into a finite number of fifteen-minute segments; and spatially, darting outward to illuminate and arrange the otherwise incoherent space of “the darkness” into finite and
discrete units. The illumination and arrangement of the night is no mean feat, signifying here, as would the “emblazoned zones and fiery poles” of Wallace Stevens’ “The
Idea of Order at Key West,” the human power to create, reshape, and organize.54
But Ridge has already begun to scrutinize the value of the tower’s rationalizing
capacity through her use of “staring,” which implies looking without comprehension,
judgment, or emotion. The building’s authority is challenged further through the “slip
of a moon” that “at midnight,” the moment of the tower’s greatest aggrandizement,
when even the hands of its clock point straight upward, will “break another date”
(“TSS,” 51). Even as the tower “breaks” (as in making publicly known) another date in
the passage of human time by recording the advent of midnight, it is confounded by
this timekeeper of a premodern era, which it can only “ogle” fruitlessly. Ridge here
begins a mischievous pursuit of the phallic implications of the tall thin tower—ever
erect yet never satisfactorily coupled—revealing the anxieties of the patriarchal imagination and the powermongering that emerges from them.
As if overcompensating for its inability to get satisfaction from the moon, the tower
embraces and proclaims its own business, in two senses of the word. The skyscraper is
all about doing business, of course; but the “fuss” and clutter Ridge associates with it
undermine its ostensible rationalist precision. The ever-multiplying “ant-black figures”
also do double duty, as both the dark-suited professionals working in the building,
rendered nearly microscopic by its enormity; and as the numbers in the ledger books
that record the business these workers do. Calling the building a “flight of ledger
books” ingeniously mirrors its arrayed material components—such as flights of stairs,
banks of elevators, rows of desks and files—with the columns of figures, human and
financial, that inhabit it. (Fig. 8) That these flights are “overrun” by the ant-black
figures again emphasizes the hectic and uncontrolled—ultimately irrational—character of the building’s business, a critique given further force by Ridge’s imagery of dancing. The tower’s “can-can” insistently asserts the can-do rationalism that creates such
buildings, but this frenetic dance ultimately succeeds mostly in revealing the inad-
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▲
Fig. 8. An office in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Home Office in New York City. The caption reads: “Part
of the Actuarial Division. Nearly all records here are kept on cards, of which more than ten million are
filed in this room.” Postcard manufactured in the 1910s. Author’s collection.
equacies of that ideology. The ant-black human figures are set dancing by their compulsive need to conduct business, to make the figures in their ledgers leap, expand,
and multiply. But the interminability of the dance implies that it becomes its own end,
with no goal or reward outside itself. The fact that the figures, both human and numerical, are “dancing on spindle legs,” offers little assurance of their ability to sustain their
hectic routine. The spindle is yet another intriguing image in this rich passage. “Spindle
legs” evoke the malnourishment, certainly spiritual but possibly physical as well, of the
tower’s human population. Equated with the numeric figures in their ledgers, the humans are metaphorically reduced to stick-figures, their limbs but spindly pen-strokes.55
A spindle is also a literal piece of office equipment, a spike resting on a desk on
which stacks of papers are impaled. This is a suggestive shape indeed in a poem about
a very tall, very thin tower with a pointed top. But while the tower may remind us of a
huge spindle, the main impact of this signification is to complete the ironic inversion
of its phallic power, since the function of a spindle would be to impale forcibly the
paper figures kept within the tower, and by extension, its human figures as well. These
images convey us to a vision, at once sinister and whimsical, of the spindle-tower,
striving obsessively upward but failing to achieve any cosmic intercourse with the moon,
succeeding instead only in skewering its human creators, who may imagine themselves as partaking in its power to penetrate, but who actually are penetrated by it.
Already reduced to the stature of insects in their “ant-black,” these movers and shakers become the moved and shaken, subtler versions of Eliot’s image in “Prufrock” of
modern-subject-as-insect, “pinned and wriggling on the wall.”56
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The office spindle is a tool, rather an elemental one, for assembling, organizing,
and recording information; thus the image can also be linked to the poem’s controlling
metaphor of the tower as a measuring and recording device. It is to this conceit that
Ridge turns again in the final five lines, unfavorably evaluating the tower in contrast to
the more appealing if less exact method of counting time by the moonbeams that filter
between the walls of her building. Embracing the nonpatriarchal and marginal values
represented by the moon, the alley cats, and the horizontal curves of her “stoop-shouldered walls,” the poet playfully presents the tower as grotesque in its enormity, rigid in
its stability, obsessive in its precision, ridiculous as it ticks mechanically away among its
celestial neighbors: ultimately, the emblem of a narrow capitalist patriarchy whose
only response to sunsets is to “tally” them (“TSS,” 51). The tally, like the notch and the
spindle, is a rich term here, again implying both spatial shape and temporal activity. A
tally is a stick on which notches are made to keep a record or count of something,
particularly a debt or payment. The tower, therefore, not only keeps a tally but is itself
a tally, attempting to notch the night and the sunset, but instead mainly recording the
interminable, empty business of its own ledgers.
In exploring the confluence among assertions of patriarchal power, anxieties of male
sexual potency, and ideologies of capitalist aspiration, Ridge has thoroughly ironized
the skyscraper’s symbolic function. Yet the exuberance and wit of this critique suggests
that in spite of her critical gaze, she appreciates the tower for challenging and energizing her creative powers. “Time-Stone” epitomizes a modernist poetics that eschews a
world elsewhere to participate wholeheartedly in the world of urban-industrial modernity. More broadly, the fact that poets as divergent in style and politics as Giovannitti,
Teasdale, the Benéts, Wylie, and Ridge were all drawn to write about the Metropolitan Tower testifies to the depth and complexity of the skyscraper’s imaginative power,
its capacity to signify the varied elements of modern experience. More broadly still,
these skyscraper poems demonstrate something too often overlooked: the American
modernist poet’s rich and complex engagement with the defining symbolic forms of
twentieth-century modernity. Many of the texts I mention here, such as Teasdale’s
“From the Woolworth Tower” and William Rose Benét’s “The Singing Skyscrapers,”
belong to an important category of poems often dismissed as conventional because
they lack the referential opacity and emotional reserve that high-modernist canons
demanded. These poems combine a fascination with urban modernity, and a willingness to explore innovative modes of verbal representation, with the rhapsodic tonalities of nineteenth-century Romanticism. On the other hand, of the neglected poems I
discuss, the most conventionally modernist in style, Ridge’s “Time-Stone,” seems as
witty, opaque, ironic as any New Critic might wish. Yet because it emerged out of a
forceful leftist engagement with modernity, it could not be accommodated within the
interpretive and ideological paradigms of New Criticism. I propose that poetic modernism is, or should be, sufficiently capacious to take all these poems as seriously as
the works of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, or Moore. From seventy years of formalist criticism we have inherited impressive interpretive tools for modernist poetry. Now, in a
postmodern academic climate that relishes contradiction and eclecticism, suspects
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moroseness, resists master-narratives, and yet demands some degree of sociohistorical
engagement, we need to adapt these tools to recovering the many ways American
poets articulated the complex, often contradictory experiences that made modernity
what it was, and is.
Notes
1. In the past few years, the field of modernist studies has been revivified by scholarship that
combines formalist and historicist techniques to resituate modernist texts into the conditions of cultural modernity. Miles Orvell’s The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture,
1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), Martha Banta’s Taylored Lives:
Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993), Bill Brown’s The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), and Michael Brooks’s Subway City: Riding
the Trains, Reading New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997) are but a few of
the excellent contributions to this campaign. But so far only a few pioneering studies have begun to
apply historicist methods to modern American poetry, and to show that verse texts, both canonical
and unknown, can offer powerful new insights when we put the modernism back into modernity, and
vice versa. See Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of
Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Revolutionary
Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (New York: Routledge, 2001), Alan Golding’s
From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995),
Michael Davidson’s Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Mark van Wienen’s Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Michael Thurston’s
Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the Wars (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2001), and Joseph Harrington’s Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of
Modern U. S. Poetries (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
2. Ferris Greenslet, “A Propaganda for Poetry,” Poet-Lore 11 (1899): 52. See also my forthcoming
book Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity for an account of this
anxious and yet productive era of transition in the nation’s poetry between 1890 and 1910.
3. For a discussion of modernist cityscape poems, see my forthcoming article “American City
Poetry and the Rise of Modernism.”
4. A short list of the visual artists who took skyscrapers as subjects between 1900 and 1930 reads as
a who’s-who of the most important American modernists: among photographers, Alfred Stieglitz,
Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, Charles Sheeler, Margaret BourkeWhite; among painters, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, George Bellows, Joseph Stella, John Sloan,
Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, and Sheeler again. For a valuable discussion of the skyscraper’s role in
the modernist visual arts, see Merrill Schleier’s The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890–1931 (New
York: DaCapo, 1986).
5. Munsey’s (1899), quoted in Eric P. Nash, Manhattan Skyscrapers (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 5.
6. Ray Stannard Baker, “The Modern Skyscraper,” Munsey’s 22 (1899): 52; henceforth abbreviated as “TMS.” In 1911, Edgar Allen Forbes noted this combination of enormity and intricacy as “the
most marvelous thing about a tall building”: “that it has been made in millions of pieces in different
parts of the world and yet, when the pieces are brought together, they all fit!” See Edgar Allen Forbes,
“The Skyscraper,” World’s Work 22 (1911): 14395.
7. Montgomery Schuyler, “The Towers of Manhattan, and Notes on the Woolworth Building,”
Architectual Record 33 (February 1913): 111.
8. Walter Pritchard Eaton, New York (New York: Grolier Club, 1915), 4. Henceforth abbreviated
as NY.
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9. Arthur Goodrich, “The Biography of an Office Building,” World’s Work 5 (1902–1903): 2955;
henceforth abbreviated as “BOAOB.”
10. See The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Co., 1914; henceforth abbreviated as MLIC), 52 and H. Addington Bruce, Above the Clouds
and Old New York (privately printed, Woolworth Building Visitors’ Brochure, 1913), 28–30.
11. Eaton’s response upon first seeing the skyscraper city was to perceive his own microscopic
insignificance: “The very mass of it bore down upon me like a weight. Who was I amid these millions?” (NY, 6).
12. Baker, “TMS,” 58. The skyscraper’s distinctive combination of endless variety and hermetic
self-containment was also captured in this 1903 comment: “From the time these men enter their
offices in the morning until they go at night, many of them need not leave the building. Messenger
boys rush in and out with messages. By telegraph, cable, and telephone, they can talk with London,
San Francisco, or Fiftieth Street, as they wish. Supplies are there, the restaurant is there, their barber,
their newspaper, their bank, their insurance company, their own police and detective service, their
own fire department, their broker, their lawyer. It is a complete community in itself” (Goodrich,
“BOAOB,” 2968).
13. Though some discussion of the ruins of the Anasazi Cliff Dwellers had appeared in obscure
publications in the mid-1870s, it was not until 1888 that the largest settlements were discovered by
the archaeological community (see Watson Smith, “Introduction,” in Gustav Nördenskïold, The Cliff
Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, transl. D. Lloyd Morgan (New York: AMS Press, 1893; 1973), xi. The first
widely-circulated print accounts came just as the building of steel-frame skyscrapers accelerated. As
well as Nordenskiöld’s ethnographic study, see Frederick Chapin’s book The Land of the Cliff Dwellers (Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club / W. B. Clarke, 1892).
14. Some accounts of the Cliff Dwellers used ethnocentric or openly racist premises to account
for their technological aptitude, refusing to believe they could be the ancestors of the agrarian Pueblo
peoples who lived in the plains below, insisting that they must instead have been a “lost fragment of
Egyptian civilization,” or even a “white people” of “a prehistoric age” (see Joseph Munk, Arizona
Sketches [New York: Grafton Press, 1905], 171).
15. Munk, Arizona Sketches, 171–75.
16. Anonymous, The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian
Exposition (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Publishing Co, 1893), unpaginated.
17. Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff Dwellers (New York: Harper Brothers, 1893), 1–2. Henceforth
abbreviated as TCD.
18. This model of the skyscraper as an insular microcosm combining futuristic and ancient elements descends from the Cliff Dwellers metaphor down into postmodern science-fiction, most vividly in Ridley Scott’s dystopian Blade Runner, where both the panoptical headquarters of the monolithic Tyrell Corporation and the protagonist’s fortresslike apartment block feature design motifs reminiscent of Egyptian or Amerindian cultures.
19. Anonymous, “The Tall Buildings of New York,” Munsey’s 18 (1898): 848; Charles Phelps
Cushing, “Restraining the Overambitious Skyscraper,” Collier’s 52 (10 January 1914): 13.
20. C. F. Carter, “New Problems of Great Cities,” The Technical World Magazine 8 (1908): 568.
21. Forbes, “The Skyscraper,” 14397.
22. Mildred Stapley, “The City of Towers,” Harper’s 123 (1911): 706.
23. Stapley, “The City of Towers,” 706. The sheer vertical wall, extending to the property line and
rising straight up, was the architectural principle that made lower Manhattan’s cañon streets so dark
and cheerless. Almost two decades of debate culminated in furor over the notoriously monolithic
Equitable Building, which was originally conceived to rise 909 feet straight up. When completed in
1915 it had been reduced to 542 feet, but still occupied virtually its entire one-acre lot all the way to
the top, “casting a noonday shadow four blocks long and six times its own size” (see Sarah Bradford
Landau and Carl Condit, The Rise of the New York Skyscraper 1865–1913 [New Haven: Yale University Press], 394; henceforth abbreviated to RNYS). In 1916, New York enacted zoning restrictions
that restricted such sheer vertical walls in tall buildings and mandated setback designs. Though the
setback debate was often framed in aesthetic, moral, and even medical terms, the driving force be-
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hind these restrictions was economic, as by 1910 it was clear that buildings like the Equitable could
have catastrophic effects on the value of properties in their perpetual shadows, since few wanted to
rent space that offered no direct sunlight and little fresh air.
24. Robert MacCameron, “Artistic Aspects of the Skyscraper,” Current Opinion 54 (1913): 321.
25. Burton J. Hendrick, “Limitations to the Production of Skyscrapers,” Atlantic 90 (1902): 487;
Anonymous, “The Tall Buildings of New York,” 837. Though the skyscraper could not have arisen
without these economic incentives, they do not fully explain the race into the skies, which bespoke a
deep psychic need for physical signs of the United States’ supremacy as a modernized nation. In
pursuing this argument, Ann Douglas ingeniously situates the skyscraper’s “commodification of the
air as a marketable product” within the larger modernist category of “airmindedness,” which includes
plane flight and broadcasting (see Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
[New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995], 434).
26. Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen, The Skyward Trend of Thought: the Metaphysics of the American
Skyscraper (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 7.
27. The Eiffel Tower (1889), almost a thousand feet high, was by far the world’s tallest structure
throughout the period, but was not a building in the same sense, designed to house large numbers of
people living and working that far off the ground.
28. See Nash, Manhattan Skyscrapers, 5 and Landau and Condit, RNYS, 394.
29. In 1930, the Bank of the Manhattan Company Building (now called 40 Wall Street, H. Craig
Severance and Yasuo Matsui, 927 feet), and the Chrysler Building (William Van Alen, 1048 feet)
became the first of another group of modern icons, including of course the Empire State Building
(Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon, 1931, 1250 feet).
30. The Woolworth Building’s custodians claimed that a clear view from the top extended for
twenty-five miles in every direction, and that the building itself could be seen by mariners forty miles
out in the open sea (Anonymous, Cathedral of Commerce: Woolworth Building, New York, [privately
printed, Woolworth Building Visitors’ Brochure, 1918], 8; henceforth abbreviated as COC).
31. The authors of the architectural compendium New York 1960 note that the Singer Tower’s
“opulent double-height, marble-clad lobby . . . had served several generations as a favorite meeting
place,” and call its demolition in 1967 a loss not only to the city’s architecture but to the quality of its
social intercourse (see Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman, New York 1960:
Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial [New York: Monacelli
Press, 1995], 1126).
32. John Nichols, Skyline Queen and the Merchant Prince: The Woolworth Story (New York:
Trident Press, 1973), 89. Henceforth abbreviated as SQMP.
33. Orrick Johns, “Second Avenue,” in The Lyric Year: One Hundred Poems, ed. Ferdinand Earle
(New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 134.
34. Adolf Wolff, “Lines to the Woolworth Building,” The Glebe 1.1 (1913): 29. Henceforth abbreviated as “LTTWB.”
35. The building’s interior designer (no doubt unintentionally) invited this sort of response from
the skeptical with a grotesque corbel in the southeast corner of the lobby that depicted the highest
priest of low lucre, F. W. Woolworth himself, counting nickels and dimes. Wolff’s condemnation of
this monument to filthy lucre was particularly ironic given that, almost uniquely among early skyscrapers, the Woolworth was built and paid for in cash with no mortgage. Thomas van Leeuwen
remarks of this, “The building was conceived . . . as a memorial to the means by which its owner had
assembled his fortune, namely nickels and dimes, the ‘atomic elements’ of capitalism. But it also
represented Woolworth’s preparations for the hereafter: the money was being returned to the public
in the form of a building that was without the sin of usury” (van Leeuwen, The Skyward Trend of
Thought, 67–68). Clearly, Wolff was not impressed with this stratagem.
36. John Reed, “Foundations of a Skyscraper,” in Collected Poems, ed. Corliss Lamont (Westport,
CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1985), 37. Henceforth abbreviated as “FOAS.”
37. Raymond Corder, “The Skyscraper,” The Liberator 4.10 (October 1921): 21, henceforth abbreviated as “TS”; Stirling Bowen, “Skyscraper,” The Liberator 5.11 (November 1924): 13, henceforth “S.”
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38. Arturo Giovannitti, “The Day of War: Madison Square, June 20th,” in Echoes of Revolt: The
Masses, 1911–1917, ed. William L. O’Neill (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1966), 283. Henceforth abbreviated as “DOW.”
39. Harriet Monroe, “Night in State Street,” in You and I (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 8.
40. Sara Teasdale, “From the Woolworth Tower,” in Rivers to the Sea (New York: Macmillan,
1915), 15. Henceforth abbreviated as “FTWT.”
41. Armond Carroll, “From a City Street,” in The Lyric Year: One Hundred Poems, ed. Ferdinand
Earle (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 41.
42. Carroll, “From a City Street,” 41.
43. Horace Holley, “Skyscraper,” in Creation: Post-Impressionist Poems (London: A. C. Fifield,
1914), 22. As we know, skyscrapers often sway in wind, but their relative stability was one of the
features of the new buildings that most astonished people in the 1900s and 1910s. It was claimed that
the Woolworth Building was capable of withstanding hypothetical winds of 200 M.P.H. without structural damage (see COC, 27); in January 1913, three months before its dedication, it did withstand
gusts of 90 miles an hour with no damage (see Landau and Condit, RNYS, 359). Of course, Holley is
wrong too about the skyscraper’s inability to house birds.
44. Holley, “Skyscraper,” 22. William Rose Benét’s “The Singing Skyscrapers” (1918) also offers a
hallucinatory response to the contemporary skyscraper, though Benét’s apocalypse results in a vision
of celestial splendor. Half-awake, half-dreaming, the speaker invokes by name the city’s “tall titanic
towers”— Metropolitan, Flatiron, Singer, Woolworth—and imagines them “Singing in the air” (see
William Rose Benét, “The Singing Skyscraper,” in The Burglar of the Zodiac, [New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1918], 1). These state-of-the-art modern buildings sing of vanished cities of the past,
which live on “Spectrally” in the human collective unconscious (as “Majestic phantom cities that
move above our slumber/Hung aloft in air” [2]), and manifest themselves in the drive to build new
cities, new towers. The poet concludes that all such towers, from Nineveh to New York, are attempts
to put into material form a vision of a “Celestial City/ Blinding in the sky!” (Benét, “The Singing
Skyscraper,” 5). “The Singing Skyscrapers” is a fascinating, if uneven, attempt to update a key mode of
Romantic poetry, the rhapsodic spiritual epiphany, into an ultramodern urban setting.
45. To New Yorkers of the 1910s, the Woolworth Building’s twenty-eight state-of-the-art elevators
were objects of intense fascination: the system was monitored from the lobby by an electric dispatcher mechanism, while each car contained a phone capable of contacting any location in the country, and enough safety cushions that a 7000 pound cargo was once test-dropped in free-fall from the
45th floor to the bottom without spilling a full glass of water in the car (COC, 14–15, 19). These
reassuring facts notwithstanding, Teasdale is mesmerized by the aura of sublimity that the elevator
achieves through its gravity-defying rate of speed. In the 1910s, the two elevators going from the
ground to the observation deck in the Woolworth Building were the fastest in the world, routinely
running at 700 feet per minute (COC, 14).
46. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in Complete Poetry and Prose (New York: Library
of America, 1982), 307–13.
47. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970),
374. Henceforth abbreviated as TWL; numbers refer to lines rather than pages.
48. Elinor Wylie, “Parting Gift,” in Black Armour (New York: George H. Doran, 1923), 68.
49. In addition to the three poems mentioned above and the two discussed in detail below, the
Metropolitan Tower is a central element in Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1920 love lyric “Chanson at
Madison Square” (in Stephen Vincent Benét, Heavens and Earth [New York: Doubleday, Doran &
Co., 1920], 46). And although Robert Frost’s small masterpiece of modern alienation “Acquainted
With the Night” (1928) refers to no specific buildings by name, I propose that many early urbanite
readers would almost certainly have thought of the Metropolitan Tower upon encountering the poem’s
culminating image, “One luminary clock against the sky” at an “unearthly height” (The Poetry of
Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem [New York: Henry Holt, 1969], 255–56). The Metropolitan’s
famous electric-powered clock, its illuminated faces three stories tall on all four sides of the building,
its minute hands weighing 1000 pounds each, was the largest in the world. At more than 350 feet up,
it was certainly the “unearthliest” of all clocks of the era, visible from almost anywhere in the city.
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Some have taken Frost’s luminary clock as a clock, others as the moon. To me it seems clear that both
readings are fully available; clock and moon merge in a modern cityscape so alienating that traditional
natural and modern technological measures of value are equally dysfunctional, proclaiming only their
own lack of meaning, and rendering time itself “neither wrong nor right” (Frost, “Acquainted with
the Night,” 256).
50. Sara Teasdale, “The Metropolitan Tower,” in Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1939),
31. Henceforth abbreviated as “TMT.”
51. A 1914 guidebook describes the illumination of the building’s clock and tower most fully: “As
the evening darkness draws near, at any predetermined hour for which the mechanism may be adjusted, hundreds of electric lights appear back of the dial numerals, all of which are brilliantly illuminated with splendid effect—a feature never produced by any other clock in the world. Simultaneously
with the illumination of the hands and dials, an automatically actuated switch lights up a great electric
octagonal lantern, eight feet in diameter, located at the top of the tower, from which powerful electric
flash-lights, marking the hours in the evening, may be seen for a great distance, far beyond any possible transmission of sound, the time being signalled therefrom as follows: Each of the quarter-hours
is flashed in red and the hours in white light—one red flash for the quarter, two red flashes for the
half, three red flashes for three-quarters, and four red flashes for the even hour—these latter flashes
followed by a number of white flashes marking the hour” (MLIC, 48). As of the spring of 2001, the
refurbished Metropolitan Tower was again offering a nightly light show; but the current effects, which
involve a continuous series of gradual color changes on the top levels of the building, do not create a
flashlight effect, nor do they measure time as the original ones did. The tower’s great illuminated
clock still runs.
52. Louis J. Dublin, A Family of Thirty Million: The Story of the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company (New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 1943), 236.
53. Lola Ridge, “Time-Stone,” in Sun-Up (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920), 51. Henceforth abbreviated as “TSS.”
54. Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West” in Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
(New York: Knopf, 1954), 130.
55. For a leftist poet such as Ridge, this image of topheavy spindle-legged figures unable to support the weight being placed upon them applies to the numbers as well, an instability that would be
dramatized within a few years by the market crash that nearly brought down the entire capitalist
edifice.
56. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1970), 5.
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