American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems

NEWCOMB / american skyscrapers and modernist poems

97

MODERNISM / modernity

VOLUME TEN, NUMBER

ONE, PP 97–125.

© 2003 THE JOHNS

HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Footprint of the Twentieth Century:American Skyscrapers and ModernistPoems

John Timberman Newcomb

American poets became modernist in the 1910s not merelyby embracing a new set of formal techniques, but by immersingthemselves in the milieu of the machine-age metropolis. Poetry’sturn in subject matter has always been neglected because it con-travenes the long-consensual view that modernism was definedby its repudiation of urban-industrial modernity.1 But one of thesalient facts of early modernism is this: beginning suddenlyaround 1911, a vast range of American poets, whose predeces-sors had largely shunned modern subjects, took up the indus-trial city as a challenge, and an opportunity, to reimagine poetry’svalue for the twentieth century. Their willingness to engage withurban modernity may have been crucial to the very continua-tion of poetry in the United States. In the decades since theCivil War, as American life came to be defined more and moreby the impersonal terms of urban experience, custodians of thenation’s verse had stubbornly refused to engage with these actu-alities, creating a crisis in which many predicted poetry wouldsimply wither away as “the rickety dream-child of neurotic aes-theticism.”2 The many verses of the 1910s about skyscrapers,subway travel, movies, vaudeville shows, baseball games, auto-mated lunchrooms, and other aggressively modern subjects, wereresponses to that crisis equally as crucial to modernism’s rejuve-nating capacity as poets’ adoption of free verse or Imagist tech-niques of representation. These verses asserted Americanpoetry’s ability to recreate itself as relevant to modern Americanlife.

John Timberman

Newcomb teaches in

the English Department

at the University of

Illinois, Urbana-

Champaign. He has

published Wallace

Stevens and Literary

Canons (University

Press of Mississippi,

1992) and articles on

Stevens, Millay, Yeats,

MacLeish, and literary

canons. His forthcom-

ing book is entitled

Would Poetry Disappear?:

American Verse and the

Crisis of Modernity.

amf

M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

98 The richest category of this early twentieth-century urban verse is perhaps cityscapepoetry, which employs a variety of representational strategies to evoke the metropoli-tan environment in panoramic visual terms.3 The icon of modernity most potent inAmerican cityscape poetry was the great building, a structure of unprecedented physi-cal scale and grandeur that punctuated the burgeoning industrial metropolis. Mostmodern great buildings possessing this iconic power were venues for commerce, trans-port, or amusement, public not usually in ownership but in spatial accessibility, de-signed to accommodate a large number and variety of occupants, both permanent andtransient. American verse written between 1910 and 1925 exhibits a persistent fasci-nation with several types of modern great buildings—railroad stations, departmentstores, hotels, theaters, sports arenas—but most of all with the skyscraper.

The skyscraper is the central visual symbol of capitalist modernity, as September2001 forcibly reminded us, and has been so for a hundred years. To American poets ofthe early twentieth century, as to painters and photographers, skyscrapers resonatedwith tremendous, if profoundly paradoxical, symbolic and emotional power.4 On theone hand, soaring into the heavens, taking up whole city blocks, housing many thou-sands of people, the skyscraper of a century ago was understood as an exhilaratingharbinger of modernity’s possibilities, “the footprint of the twentieth century,” asMunsey’s remarked in 1899.5 The herculean scale of these new buildings was matchedby their daunting complexity as technological, social, and economic systems, whichrequired precise mastery of “thousands of intricate details” by planners and engineers.6

Machine-age America’s abiding fascination with visual intricacy and structural accessi-bility was expressed in the cunning stylings of such skyscrapers as the Woolworth Build-ing, admired by the architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler for allowing people onthe street pleasing access to the detailing of the uppermost floors in all its “distinctnessand sharpness.”7

But even as their synthesis of enormity, intricacy, and structural accessibility couldbe read as the triumph of system-building, skyscrapers also reminded observers thatprevailing rationalist and individualist models of cultural value were being drasticallyaltered by the imperatives of consolidating industrial capitalism. Skyscrapers prom-ised to redefine the parameters of American modernity along a sprawling scale inwhich the individual, even the exceptional one, mattered less than the forces of thecorporate, the aggregate, the mass. Walter Pritchard Eaton was only one early com-mentator who noted a tight parallel between the growing enormity of buildings andthe 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 theeconomic structure, even as our skyscrapers have shot up on every street.”8 ArthurGoodrich called the drive to the skies an “inexorable force over which its makers haveno control,” while Eaton saw the skyscraper city’s inhabitants as “midgets who havemoulded mountains and who have then been moulded by them, played upon by theenvironment they have created” (NY, 6).9 Many early descriptions used the staggeringnumbers of component parts in skyscrapers to create ritualized litanies of mass statis-tics: 35 million bricks in the Metropolitan Life Tower, and 2462 miles of telegraph and


99telephone wire; enough glass in the Woolworth Building’s exterior windows to create agiant awning extending over all of Madison Square; enough horsepower in theWoolworth’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 intoanother might become, they asserted the relative insignificance of any individual ele-ment—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, “thecostliest monument a man has built to himself,” there was a Metropolitan Life orEquitable Insurance Corporation, using sober actuarial paradigms to calculate thevalue of its skyscraper in rentable office space and public relations impact. And evenWoolworth had made his fortune by selling millions of people hundreds of millions ofcheap tiny things.

Not surprisingly given these tensions between individual and mass, there was apersistent paradox threaded through the futuristic hoopla surrounding early skyscrap-ers. On the one hand, as crowning achievements of rational system-building, theyseemed to convey their inhabitants and observers toward global communication, to-ward efficient management of resources, toward a modern future without boundaries.Yet these very hyperrationalist significations carried an ambiguous charge: skyscraperstook shape out of “an enormous puzzle of interwoven lines and numerals and hiero-glyphics worked out on many broad drawing-boards” (“BOAOB,” 2959). As this imag-ery of hermetic codes and signs suggests, these buildings put new mysteries into play,and their vast scale confounded adequate comprehension of their possible functionsor meanings. This ambiguity gave rise to a mythic-anthropological rhetoric that oftenironically linked the skyscraper to exotic environments of hermetic insularity. The sky-scraper city constituted a powerful challenge to the Enlightenment-capitalist ideal ofrationally planned cities built in low-rise radial shapes, dominated by single-use prop-erties, assuming healthful but not inaccessible boundaries between work and homeenvironments. This older urban ideal seemed to be giving way to an amazingly densevertical model in which the clamoring chaos of the streets was kept at bay by techno-logically advanced, communally configured modular structures, theoretically of un-limited size, so fully meeting their inhabitants’ needs that leaving them might provealtogether unnecessary. What future did it augur for human society that, as Ray StannardBaker 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 revolvingstorm doors at the street entrance?”12 One answer to that question was provided bythe guidebook and travel publisher Moses King, whose postcard “Future New York:The City of Skyscrapers” (1910s) offered a paradigmatic cityscape—staple of laterscience fiction films from Metropolis to The Fifth Element—consisting of buildings sotall 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 withthe Anasazi peoples who had built eyrie-like dwellings high on the mesas of New Mexico,


100

Colorado, Arizona, and Utah at some unknown time in the distant past (later deter-mined to be between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries). In the late 1880s, an-thropologists and mountaineers had begun to explore, photograph, and write aboutthese remarkable places, emphasizing the architectural acumen, tactical ingenuity,and sheer nerve of those who built and lived in them.13 In early accounts these spacesconveyed a strong sense of the uncanny, which was not due merely to their extremespatial inaccessibility. Commentators were also fascinated by the Cliff Dwellers’ un-known origins, and by their seemingly sudden and unmotivated disappearance fromplaces that seemed tactically impregnable even by much later standards.14 Adding fur-ther to the mystery surrounding them was the belief that the Cliff Dwellers’ remainsshowed a puzzling mixture of physiognomies, and their artifacts a marked eclecticismof style and sophistication, both of which implied a greater degree of interchange withthe outside world than their hermetic living spaces seemed to admit.15

In 1893, the Cliff Dwellers were brought vividly into the consciousness of hun-dreds of thousands of machine-age urbanites through an exhibit at the ColumbianExposition in Chicago, featuring a massive composite simulation of a cliff, painted toresemble 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 sky-scraper metropolis was already in the Chicago air even before this exhibit went onpublic view. Also in 1893, the Chicago novelist Henry Blake Fuller published his novel

▲

Fig. 1. Postcard captioned “Future New

York: ‘The City of Skyscrapers.’” Manufac-

tured by Moses King between 1913 and

1918. Author’s collection.


101

The Cliff Dwellers (1893), which cemented the metaphor’s applicability to modernurbanites. Fuller’s novel is one of the earliest attempts to integrate the skyscrapersetting into the genre of social-realist fiction. His most original stroke was a mock-ethnographic introduction presenting the book’s narrative as an analysis of the site of anew culture that needed to be named and understood:

Between the former site of old Fort Dearborn and the present site of our newest Boardof Trade there lies a restricted yet tumultuous territory through which, during the courseof the last fifty years, the rushing streams of commerce have worn many a deep andrugged 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 witheach succeeding year, according as the work of erosion at their bases goes onward—thework of that seething flood of carts, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, cars, messengers, shop-pers, 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 won-derful elevating devices that “ameliorate the daily cliff-climbing for the frail of phy-sique and the pressed for time” (TCD, 4). His narrative captures vividly the skyscraper’sparadoxical combination of variety and insularity, spatial openness and hermetic inac-

▲

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.


102 cessibility. The Clifton’s “tribe” is notably fluid and “heterogeneous,” containing allwalks of life from bankers to janitors, all of whom seem to be recent arrivals fromelsewhere (TCD, 4–5, 12). Of course the building enables state-of-the-art accessibilityto distant places, so that “the warriors” of commerce may “communicate their mes-sages, hostile or friendly, to chiefs more or less remote” (TCD, 5). Yet in gathering itsvast 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 archaeolo-gist, 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 thisincongruous mixture of hypertechnologized urban space with the unknowable, un-canny, and hermetic landscape of the western desert. A writer in Munsey’s in 1898noted that many streets “are already darkened by the huge cliffs of masonry that riseabove 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 wemight expect to embrace the skyscraper, remarked on the menace to health and lifefrom “the crowded warrens of the cliff dwellers towering . . . three hundred feet intothe air on either side of the narrow slits called streets.”20 In 1911, Edgar Allen Forbessynthesized these images and anxieties into a powerful vision of the future skyscrapercity as “a collection of towns and villages under separate roofs,” each “complete untoitself,” its elevators like “street railways running perpendicularly.” The surroundingstreets will be “canyons of a depth varying from 200 to 400 feet, through which thewind will sweep like gales,” and “the sky will be practically blotted out” from this “cityof electric lights on the brightest days,” which is inhabited by businessmen who sel-dom glimpse the sky at all.21 These are but a few of dozens of similar references to cliffand canyon (usually spelled cañon), which became consensual metaphors for the ur-ban spaces, at once rational and mysterious, that were being remade by the rise ofskyscrapers. (Fig. 3) Mildred Stapley noted that the “cañon streets” of lower Manhat-tan were the consequence of intractably contradictory requirements: economic effi-ciency dictated that builders maximize rentable space right up to the property line, yetcode forbade any part of a building to extend into air space that was not over part of itslot.22 The inevitable result was the “sheer vertical wall deviating neither outward norinward.”23 Eaton best captured the paradoxical character of this imagery with this 1915remark: “Through the cañons he has made, Man hustles and bustles, creating moreperplexities than he can solve” (NY, 4).

The practical strictures of skyscraper-building may have perplexed and darkenedthe streets of lower Manhattan, but they also helped beget new aesthetic styles andnotions of beauty. Eaton’s 1915 account of his evolving attachment to the skyscrapercity reveals an important link between its sheer lines, massive forms, and constantlychanging 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 creditsskyscrapers 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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modernist in all but name, that repudiates “symmetry” and “conformity” (NY, 10), andinstead embraces ceaseless variety (NY, 6), “stirring challenge” (NY, 9), “endless sur-prises” (NY, 7), “sudden revelation. . . amid apparent ugliness” (NY, 9), and anythingthat “rouses the eye to keener attention” (NY, 10). These are the very qualities thatdrew the eyes, brushes, and cameras of modernist visual artists to skyscrapers andcityscapes. Indeed, the artist Robert MacCameron concluded in 1913 that the mod-ern city’s new lines and forms augured a twentieth-century aesthetic that would emergeacross 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, andexplore those new notions of beauty, as they used cityscape verse to work toward avigorous modernist aesthetic capable of negotiating, even embracing, the paradoxicalconditions of modernity. In their poems, skyscrapers carry a wide range of emotionalmeanings, and function within a range of political discourses from capitalist intimida-tion to revolutionary praxis. In short, they exhibit the depth, variety, and complexitythat the most resonant symbols of a cultural moment possess. Some verses read theskyscraper city as an image of bleakly depersonalized modernity, others as a locus ofutopian possibility. Most bear the traces of both these responses at once, experiencingthe skyscraper city as contradiction, instability, and challenge. Perceiving the metro-politan grid as an arresting abstract pattern of lights and lines that rivals the creations

▲

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.


104 of nature, they ponder how to balance this detached aesthetic perspective withempathetic connection with others. As they feel the skyscraper city hurtling them intoa future of unimaginable marvels, they question whether the constantly mutating me-tropolis would allow any meaningful relationship with the past. As skyscrapers inspirethem to new metaphors for conceptualizing mass society, they worry that a societydefined by its masses might prove wholly inaccessible to the powers of poetry. As theyperceive the skyscraper’s transformative power, promising access to new levels of ex-perience and understanding, they wonder whether it will take them places humanbeings would want to go.

1 Challenging the Skies

The young American poets who began to write about the modern metropolis in theearly 1910s had grown up while skyscrapers were rising in the nation’s cities. Since1905 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 thecentury, the economic imperative for taller buildings, which one early commentatorcalled “the capitalization of the air,” had become enormous in the densest and mostdesirable commercial areas such as lower Manhattan and the Chicago Loop, as rentshad 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 Broad-way at 284 feet, asserting, as Thomas van Leeuwen notes, the longstanding “materialclaim of the church on the territory between Earth and Heaven”; but by 1880 Trinityhad begun to function as a “mere yardstick for any new skyscraper that was thought fitto carry the name.”26 Through the 1880s, steel-frame technology, which theoreticallyeliminated height restrictions upon architects’ imaginations, were rendered practicalpossibilities by the continuing refinement of the high-speed electric elevator, and thefalling cost and better quality control of steel. The success of the nine-story Home LifeInsurance Company in Chicago (William LeBaron Jenney, 1884), the ten-story Wain-wright Building in St. Louis (Louis Sullivan, 1890–91), and other experiments indi-cated that the steel-clad tower could look good, inspire public wonderment, and makeits owners money. Even so, various factors, including residual skepticism that build-ings several hundred feet high could be physically stable, retarded great increases inheight 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 modernstructure in the artistic and cultural landscape of New York City before 1905, theFuller Building, better known as the Flatiron (D. H. Burnham Co., 1902), was, attwenty-one stories, still under 300 feet high.27 Still, the drive to the skies had begun inearnest, and the visual scale of Manhattan life was being altered from street level tohundreds of feet in the air. In 1890, only six buildings in New York City rose as high asten stories: by 1908 there were 538 such buildings, and by the end of 1912 this numberhad doubled again, to 1048.28


105In the decade after 1905, the emergence of the twentieth-century skyscraper wouldculminate in three lower Manhattan behemoths, each in succession the tallest build-ing in the world, which became magnetic icons of the city for modernist writers, paint-ers, 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-storm-ing years that produced these three skyscrapers can hardly be overestimated as a de-fining moment of urban modernity. Because of the more height-restrictive zoning lawsof the mid-1910s, and the more conservative business climate produced by the GreatWar, these towers stood as the three tallest in the world until after 1920, and the 700-foot barrier was not eclipsed again until 1930.29

Virtually everyone who approached Manhattan from the south or west during thelast thirty-five years of the twentieth century remembers, now painfully, seeing thebland yet unmistakable twin towers of the World Trade Center as the first visible signsof the city. Before 1930, the very tallest buildings were even more prominent signifiersof the metropolis. The Singer, Metropolitan, and Woolworth towers dwarfed almostevery other building in the city by hundreds of feet, and were not obscured by a forestof surrounding skyscrapers until the 1950s. They could be seen from virtually everyprospect in greater New York City.30 An early booklet for the observation deck on the50th 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 haveseen the Metropolitan, Singer, and Woolworth buildings, virtually every day of theirlives.

Commanding this level of visual prominence and novelty, the tallest skyscrapersbecame a form of spectacular popular culture, providing symbolic currency in an erain which points of common understanding were generally perceived to be disappear-ing. For better or worse, they were the modern urban analogues of the small-townchurches 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 civicand national pride—as sites of virtually every type of social interaction, from ruthlesslycommercial to frivolously recreational.31 As such, they laid a forceful claim on anyoneinterested in representing the defining features of urban modernity: painters, photog-raphers, commercial artists; manufacturers of postcards, souvenirs, toys, almost everyimaginable genre of material culture; and poets.

The opening ceremonies of the 792-foot Woolworth Building in 1913 evoked theskyscraper’s complex significance in the cultural landscape of twentieth-century mo-dernity. On the evening of 24 April, hundreds of feet off the ground, a distinguishedgroup of 800 guests gathered including, as well as the expected industrialists and bank-ers, a member of the Wilson cabinet, various foreign diplomats, three lieutenant gov-ernors, and nearly twenty percent of the U. S. Congress from 28 states.32 When every-one was seated, all the building’s exterior and interior lights were extinguished, and


106 exactly at 7:30 PM, President Wilson at the White House pressed a button, igniting allof its 80,000 lights, “enough to illuminate the entire 40-mile waterfront of Manhat-tan,” no doubt as stunning an effect to the crowds watching for miles around as to thedignitaries inside (SQMP, 89–90). This dramatic event conjoined a variety of political,commercial, technological, and aesthetic meanings into a thoroughly ambiguous spec-tacle. On the one hand, it demonstrated that a single skyscraper’s reach extended notonly throughout the metropolitan area but to the seat of national government. Thefact that such a building so confidently, competently worked evoked a modernity ofcomplex interconnected elements that promised to be manageable through the un-ending advance of industrial technologies and organizational skills. On the other hand,mystifying an enormously laborious effort of construction and wiring into a singlemagical instant of illumination, it asked observers to accommodate another possiblemodernity, this one so massive in scale and hermetic in character as to defy individualcomprehension.

Not surprisingly given the association of skyscrapers with such monumental spec-tacle, one group of poetic responses represented them as looming ominously over themore 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 hisprize-winning poem for the 1912 anthology The Lyric Year, “Second Avenue,” OrrickJohns indicts the ever-expanding array of skyscrapers as a “jagged line of mist-en-shrouded 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 anarchistpoet 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” becausenever “has thing so big been made for end so small.”34 Wolff is playing here with thespecific incongruity of a five-and-ten-cent store housing itself in the world’s tallestbuilding; his more general point, of course, is that the Woolworth as an achievement isvitiated because it commemorates only “the priests of lucre” (“LTTWB,” 29).35 Appro-priate, 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 endedwith a fervent but conceptually banal condemnation of the building to the dust: likethe pyramids, “tyrants’ tombs, built by a million slaves,” “ere long/ Thou’lt be the relicof an age gone by” (“LTTWB,” 29). Drawing from late genteel poetry’s fusty reservoirof antiquarian imagery, such castigations of the idolatrous skyscraper espoused theconventional sentiments that poets had been expected to produce for decades. Butthey were not typical of American verse of the 1910s, which more often acknowledgedboth the intimidating potential of these great buildings, and also their allure as cre-ations peculiarly expressive of modernity.

Many other poems, especially those in the radical orbit of The Masses and TheLiberator, tended to read the skyscraper as an emblem of modernity defined by thelimitless possibilities of communal effort. The octave of John Reed’s sonnet “Founda-tions 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


107stench of earth”), but also treats this as a site of human possibility, since out of aninferno of exploitative labor, “men give a vision birth,/ Crawling and dim, men build adreamer’s dream.”36 The poem maintains a valuable balance between the utopian vi-sion 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 thisconvergence with a striking image of the building in the strenuous posture of theworkman who built it: “Naked, a giant’s back, tight-muscled, stark,/ Glimpse of mightyshoulder, etched in steel” (“FOAS,” 38).

Reed’s reference to “the clamor of unknown tongues” (“FOAS,” 38) in theskyscraper’s construction site evokes the heterogeneous ethnic makeup of its workforce,and the class-consciousness that such an enterprise might promote, no doubt in spiteof its developer’s desires. Pursuing this line of thought further, two poems published inThe Liberator celebrate great buildings as empowering icons of radical consciousness,foreshadowing in verbal terms the representational strategies that Lewis Hine woulduse a few years later to photograph the workers constructing the Empire State Build-ing 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 towerinto an emblem of the utopian possibilities of collaborative human effort.37 Corder’spoem begins, “All that steel frame-work bristling in the sun/ Is something we havedone” (“TS,” 21). The physical labor of construction (“We sweated, we plugged, andbuilt 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 skywardtowers/ Is ours—we built it—It is ours!” (“TS,” 21). The poem’s distinctive proletarianvoice 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 prefersto admire the building a bit longer as an object of beauty and a source of pride, acentral constituent in a materialist-modernist aesthetic that valorizes collective humanachievement above natural verities:

But, say, boy, watch them clouds,They seem to stand still while that eye-beam stroudsAcross 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 build-ings or extend the implied motion of machines, Bowen’s sonnet “Skyscraper” suggestshow heavy machinery exponentially magnifies the power of the ordinary worker: “Oneman 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 asa collective body (“S,” 13). Bowen flatly refuses to interpret the building’s massivescale as a parable of hubris, and instead appropriates the imagery of pagan idolatry forthe “clear godless” nature of this human enterprise: “No god can muddle anything we


108 try!” (“S,” 13) The building is indeed “Babel’s modern tower,” since it has drawn to-gether a multiethnic workforce who “confuse the Yankee tongue,” but this is a sourceof affirmation as well, as the skyscraper becomes the magnificent result of their grow-ing class consciousness (“S,” 13).

The skyscraper’s contradictory ability to embody both the depersonalizing mystifi-cations of corporate capitalism, and the limitless possibilities of collective labor, is acutelyarticulated by Arturo Giovannitti’s “The Day of War: Madison Square, June 20th,”published in The Masses for August 1916, in an oppressive atmosphere of patrioticrhetoric and preparedness parades.38 Giovannitti introduces in the first line a “hawk-faced youth with rapacious eyes, standing on a shaky chair” who exhorts an alienatedand scattered crowd, “idle, yawning, many-hungered, beggarly,” to embrace the causeof radical labor (“TDOW,” 283). Studded with images of bellicosity, this young manembodies the hard line of The Masses’ revolutionary persona, as “his red tie flowstempestuously in the wind, the unfurled banner of his heart amidst the musketry of hisyoung words” (“TDOW,” 283). But he also has a human communicativeness and vul-nerability 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 thecrossways, 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 otherversion of war that erupts upon the street, which is all the more intimidating for beingdisjointed and depersonalized: “the blast of a trumpet, its notes ramming like bulletsagainst the white tower./ The soldiers march up the Avenue. The crowd breaks, scat-ters, and runs away, and only six listeners remain” (“TDOW,” 283). Though we getnothing more than this fragmentary glimpse of the military parade, it breaks the spellof 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 acknowl-edges the difficulty of resistance to a capitalist modernity that enforces conformism byisolating people from one another (“TDOW,” 283).

However, this story is not over: as Giovannitti repeats four times in the second halfof the poem, “But he speaks on” (“TDOW,” 283). The boy’s persistence marks hiscause as indomitable, as does the girl who remains transfixed, “her upturned face glowingbefore the brazier of his soul,” proving that his words need not inevitably fall on deafears, 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 inexpug-nable/ Amidst the red omens of war” (“TDOW,” 283). Though Giovannitti never namesthis building, he certainly has in mind the Metropolitan Life Tower, sited on the south-east corner of Madison Square, at 700 feet the area’s tallest building by far, and con-taining on its white walls the largest clock in the world. (Fig. 4) At the beginning of thepoem, the tower may seem just another depersonalized and alienating element of themodern capitalist city. Yet even at that point the building is associated with the speak-ing boy just beneath, as he mimics its height by standing on a chair. When he exhorts


109

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 tomatch the boy’s indomitable speech, and the tower’s great clock strikes twelve: “one byone drop at his feet the twelve tolls of the clock that marks time, the time that knowsand flows on until his day comes” (“TDOW,” 283). By associating the timekeepingtower with the young radicals, Giovannitti proposes a Marxian reading of capitalistmodernity as an era that has generated both greater levels of inhumane exploitation,and also the class consciousness necessary for radical change, whose time is inexorablyapproaching. For him and other leftist poets of the era, the skyscraper tower signifiesnot just alienating and inhumane modernity, but the human race’s ability to createthings. Its great strength, its inexpugnability, even its shape that rebels against suppos-edly eternal verities (“challenges the skies”)—all these qualities make the skyscrapercentral to an iconography of revolutionary modernism.

2 Abyss, Eternity, Threshold

In modernist poems the skyscraper tower often represents rocklike strength, forobvious reasons; yet as a symbol it is remarkably tensile, allowing Giovannitti to re-shape a monument to corporate capitalism into a harbinger of Marxist revolution. Thismalleability of symbolic function is congruent with another of the skyscraper’s para-

▲

Fig. 4. The Metropolitan Life Tower by

day. Postcard manufactured by the

Brooklyn Postcard Company before

1914. Author’s collection.


110 doxical signifying powers: the ability to transform temporal and spatial principles pre-viously perceived as immutable. A host of early modernist writers explored great build-ings 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 moder-nity, noted that in many climatic circumstances skyscrapers extended past the limits ofvisual 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 inmist/ Tangling the earth and sky.”39 Walter Pritchard Eaton likewise perceived theskyscraper’s vastness outstripping identifiable climatic zones, in effect transcendingweather itself: “On foggy days the Singer Building and its sister peaks go up out ofsight into the vapors. Again, on days of heavy atmosphere and lowering rain . . . I haveseen the lower portions of the buildings obliterated, and only their summits reared onnothing into the gray air, a dream city, unbelievable, ethereal, immense” (NY, 21–22).Images of crossing and transformation figure frequently in commentaries upon thesebuildings that made people feel themselves “on the abyss of eternity.”40 One of themost imaginative of these was by Ray Stannard Baker, who described the steel-frameskyscraper as “more a bridge than a building” (“TMS,” 48). In Baker’s vision of a hori-zontal structure somehow also becoming vertical, the supporting steel girders are “bigbridges,” and elevators the vehicles conveying us into some unknown region in theheavens (“TMS,” 56, 48). Eaton too imagined skyscrapers at night as vertical thor-oughfares rising into the air, proposing that the “upward rows of lights” give lowerManhattan “exactly the aspect of a town of many streets running up a great dome-likehill, each little house by the roadside imagined from its square of light” (NY, 22). Theskyscraper’s ability to blur fundamental spatial distinctions between vertical and hori-zontal, 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, theliminal skyscraper catalyzed some poets into hallucinatory visions of nightmare mo-dernity. Armond Carroll’s “From a City Street” (1912) offers a surreal portrait of “har-pies of our modern time,” who perch on the “crags which high uplift/ Their steel-knitskeletons” above “the surfs that surge and shift.”41 The trope of people surging andebbing among the enormous buildings like a restless “surf” can also be read as a pun-ning reference to their serfdom to the forces of modernity tossing them about. Farabove the street, these harpies both “mock the futile restless waves/ That surge ingreat affair below,” and ironically “hail to wide oblivious graves/ The victims of theundertow.”42 The simultaneous mocking and hailing implies that a society gets theimaginative icons it deserves; these harpies, however murky and unsatisfying, are faithfulemblems of the chaotic and depredatory culture that constructed the crags they in-habit. Their mocking is thus appropriate commemoration for that culture’s victims.The apocalyptic resonance of the heaven-storming tower, implicit in Carroll’s skyscraper-Gothic, comes to the fore in Horace Holley’s “Skyscrapers” (1914), which comparesthe skyline to “a forest of strange palms” apparently not subject to natural laws: theydon’t sway in wind, “nor nod sleepy at evening,” nor offer to “nestling birds/ A warm


111and comfortable mossy bough.”43 Unnerved at these contraventions of the natural or-der, the speaker hurls at the skyscrapers the apocalyptic prediction that nature mustultimately reassert its dominion through “a furious tempest” that will “tear your earth-devouring 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 spacecomes from a writer few would even associate with urban modernity, Sara Teasdale,whose work has been unjustifiably miniaturized by high modernism’s interlocking pre-conceptions about gender and genre. Teasdale’s “From the Woolworth Tower,” pub-lished in the 1915 volume Rivers to the Sea but eventually dropped from her collectedworks, consists of seventy-four lines divided into short beginning and ending sectionsframing a longer central meditation. The first section describes a couple enjoying eachother’s company in the city of modern amusements, arriving “vivid with love, eager forgreater beauty,” into the “brilliant and warm” corridors of the Woolworth Building(“FTWT,” 12). The elevator’s “sharp unswerving flight” up to the observation decktransports them from the everyday world into a sublime realm of unseen and uncannyforces (“FTWT,” 12). As they “shoot” through “swirling and angry” air that “howls likea 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 aboveand earth below can no longer be taken for granted.45 The skyscraper’s liminal forceintensifies 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 stillrealizes with some wonder that they have actively chosen to experience it (“Why havewe sought you?”) [“FTWT,” 13]. She speaks here not as a bohemian seeking esotericurban 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 deckattracted 250,000 visitors annually (SQMP, 136). (Figs. 5, 6)

The poem’s second section, describing the view from the tower, negotiates most ofthe key themes of cityscape poetry: the perception of the city as abstract patterns oflights and forms that rival or displace the creations of nature; the desire to balance thisdetached perspective with empathy for others; the anxiety that the scale and imper-sonality of skyscraper modernity may overwhelm the poet’s communicative powers;and the uneasy attempt to situate the modern metropolis into a meaningful relation-ship with past and future. Regaining her perceptual and emotional bearings, the speakerperceives the abstract visual drama of the city’s lights (“A thousand times more numer-ous than the stars”) outlining its dark shapes: “Oh lines and loops of light in unwoundchains/ 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 ofreference for the poetic imagination: “Near us clusters and splashes of living gold/That change far off to bluish steel” (“FTWT,” 13). This painterly abstraction evokesthe poet’s sense of being transported into a liminal city in which the familiar “stridentnoises” 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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▲

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.


113liminal sensitivity make these “whispers” comprehensible as human utterances? Orhave they simply been distanced and aestheticized into the spectacle of the nocturnalcityscape?

The anxiety created by these questions becomes primary in the next verse para-graph, 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 coldfog wrapping us round,” the speaker can muster none of Whitman’s belief in “CrossingBrooklyn Ferry” that human connection might transcend the distance between thepresent moment and other ages.46 She also feels unmoved by the tower as a symbol offuture 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 even-tually “darkness will blot the lights/ And the tower will be laid on the earth,” with onlysea and stars remaining “unchanging” and “unconcerned” (“FTWT,” 15). For Teasdale,the illuminating liminality the tower brings turns out to be bitterly ironic. As a vehiclefor abstracting oneself from the moment-to-moment perceptual plenitude of streetlife for a more meditative perspective, as a threshold to deeper understanding, it hasyielded the appalling conclusion that modernity is merely the clockwork acting-out ofpetty melodrama, followed by implacable apocalypse.

Instead of, say, a sober descent from the building to contrast the exhilarating as-cent, the brief final section retreats from these anguished realizations, and announcesthat despite the “sorrow, futility, defeat” all around, love “has crowned us/ For a mo-ment/ Victors” (“FTWT,” 15). Here Teasdale attempts to complete the theme ofliminality, implying that because the building has allowed the lovers to abstract them-selves from the strident and chaotic textures of the city, to exist “on the abyss of eter-nity,” they have understood the power and the value of their love more deeply thanthey could have done below (“FTWT,” 15). But this wishful affirmation pales next tothe disillusioning force of her earlier realizations, and whatever fleeting victory shefeels is bittersweet at best. Teasdale’s eventual rejection of “From the Woolworth Tower”is understandable given its problematic ending, but is also unfortunate, because thepoem is her most ambitious attempt to integrate the idiom of the rhapsodic love lyricwith urban modernity, a project deserving of serious reconsideration by current his-toricist criticism. The alienated futility she describes here is indeed one aspect of themodernist response to modernity, though not the primary, much less the only one, as


114 ideologies of high modernism often assert. The poem remains illuminating as an emo-tionally raw and ambivalent instance of literary modernism’s horror at depersonalizedmodern mass society, before this was styled into seductive elegance by Eliot and theFugitives, 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 apoca-lyptic storm evokes the “falling towers” of The Waste Land (1922), which are seldomconsidered in relation to the modern skyscraper.47 In the beginning of “What the Thun-der 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 land-scape that has framed the entire poem and lent it a title (TWL, 334, 336). But a fewdozen lines later, we approach an arid “city over the mountains” that “cracks and re-forms and bursts in the violet air,” which leads directly to a litany of human history asa succession of “falling towers/ Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London/ Unreal”(TWL, 372–77). This associative sequence links the waste land’s sterile mountains ofrock 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 violethour, when the eyes and back/ Turn upward from the desk, when the human enginewaits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting” [TWL, 215–17]). Indeed, despite its studied time-lessness that draws upon biblical parables and ancient vegetation rituals, the desertlandscape has possessed attributes of the modern city all along. Most notably, exist-ence in the waste land is typified, as in the city, not by true solitude (“There is not evensolitude in the mountains”), but by an alienation from others that is exacerbated bythere being so many of them, so many “red sullen faces” sneering and snarling “fromdoors 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 incracked earth” (TWL, 369–70) can be seen as analogues of the contemporary crowdsurging over London Bridge, eyes fixed before feet, to arrive at offices “on the finalstroke 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 greatbuildings 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 acceleratinghuman expansion into the sky. The approaching storm at the poem’s end can be inter-preted equally as the harbinger of some cleansing spiritual rejuvenation, or as thecosmic coup de grace upon a self-annihilating culture. Eliot’s ambivalence towardmodernity, 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 largelyvanishes from his work after his conversion to Christianity. Still gripped by it in TheWaste Land, he articulates as forcefully as anyone the wonder and anguish of experi-encing everything that is solid, even and especially our most massive bulwarks againstinstability, cracking, reforming, and bursting in the viole(n)t air of modernity.


1153 The Light That Never Fails

The building in the Manhattan skyline most significant to American poets before1930 was the 700-foot Metropolitan Life Tower, located at 1 Madison Avenue on thesoutheast corner of Madison Square (just across from the Flatiron, the structure thatmeant the most to visual artists). The Metropolitan Tower, an instantly recognizablestructure with several unique visual features, was integral to several poems of the1910s and 1920s that consider the role of poetry in modern urban experience. Thewhite tower that dominates Giovannitti’s cityscape of revolutionary modernity, “TheDay of War: Madison Square, June 20th,” is the Metropolitan in all but name. It alsoinitiates the mystical singing of William Rose Benét’s “The Singing Skyscrapers.” Inthe opening lines of her exquisite lyric “Parting Gift” (1923), Elinor Wylie, gently teas-ing her partner Benét for his fascination with these great structures, uses the Metro-politan as a shorthand reference for worldly grandeur, presuming it to be a character-istic 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 appear-ance and lighting effects that may strike current readers as murky or private. But thisis our lack, not the poems’, since the tower’s nocturnal spectacle, visible from virtuallyeverywhere in the city, must have been known to almost every Manhattanite of theearly twentieth century. Indeed, this imagery is obscure to us precisely because it wasso familiar to the era’s poets and readers, who needed no contextual introduction. Atany rate, these poems use the lights and other attributes of the Metropolitan Tower toarticulate a wide range of emotional states: love, disappointment, yearning for stabil-ity, alienation, skepticism, commitment to social change. This range of possible signi-fications invites us to see the building as an exemplary symbol in a poetic modernismdeeply engaged with modernity.49

The first poet to explore the resonance of this exemplary great building was againSara Teasdale, whose lyric “The Metropolitan Tower” begins an unofficial sequence ofsix 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 YorkCity (Gramercy Park, the Metropolitan Museum, Coney Island, Union Square, andCentral Park); collectively they trace the unhappy progress of a modern love relation-ship. “The Metropolitan Tower” initiates the sequence by recounting “Love’s birth” inthe speaker’s heart during an hour spent walking with a companion at dusk around thethen brand-new skyscraper (“TMT,” 29). The first two of its three stanzas use thetower’s visual sequences and timekeeping function to measure the speaker’s emotion-ally heightened time:


116 We walked together in the duskTo watch the tower grow dimly white,And saw it lift against the skyIts 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 throughthe tower’s sequence of lighting effects.51 (Fig. 7) The first phase of her experiencecorresponds 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 firstfeeling love (“TMT, 29). These feelings swell as the building’s illumination brightensminute by minute, to be culminated by the flashes of the lantern as the “hour” reachesits end, an event the speaker anticipates as eagerly (“at last”) and feels as intensely asshe might the “full” consummation of her love (“TMT,” 29).

But all the while, her oblivious paramour flits from one trivial observation to an-other, leading us to suspect that he must eventually disappoint her. The final stanza of“The Metropolitan Tower” foreshadows the sequence’s bleak ending, wistfully reaf-firming 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 birthWas reckoned from that hour. (“TMT,” 29)

The syntactic and rhythmic parallels of the phrases “the light turn red” and “thetime had come” create a strong sense of rhetorical momentum and culmination, pull-ing 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 imperson-ality or alienation: indeed, it is the only constant in the unstable emotional milieu thespeaker has entered, and only through its steadfast presence and knowable visual se-quences can she chart her own emotional durée.

To the corporate owners of the Metropolitan Tower, this constancy was central toits meaning and value. In 1943 the company’s historian proudly described the tower’sclock, chimes, and lighting beacon, which “flashed for miles over New York City andthe neighboring towns.” This beacon advertised the dependability of MetropolitanLife, and became the basis of one of the company’s self-defining slogans, “The LightThat Never Fails.”52 Another early modernist poem, Lola Ridge’s “Time-Stone,” ex-amines the Metropolitan Tower as a modern measuring device, literally marking thepassage 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


117

beneficence than its corporate biographer. She develops an extraordinarily compressedand resonant critique of the tower’s entanglement in ideologies of patriarchal capital-ism. 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 figuresDancing on spindle legsAn interminable can-can.

Fig. 7. The Metropolitan Life

Tower by night. Postcard

manufactured before 1920.

Author’s collection.▲


118 But I’d rather . . . like the cats in the alley . . . count timeBy the silver whistle of a moonbeamFalling 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 giganticsundial, monumental and timeless in its association with ancient products of humaningenuity. This particular time-stone, however, also possesses a specifically moderncharacter, signified first of all by its panoptical capabilities (“Ubiquitous windows star-ing all ways”), and by its function as enormous searchlight and beacon (“Red eye notch-ing the darkness”). The metaphor of notching—marking a surface with a cut, for thepurpose of measuring, counting, or keeping a record—has both temporal and spatialfunctions 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 illu-minate and arrange the otherwise incoherent space of “the darkness” into finite anddiscrete units. The illumination and arrangement of the night is no mean feat, signify-ing here, as would the “emblazoned zones and fiery poles” of Wallace Stevens’ “TheIdea 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 rationalizingcapacity through her use of “staring,” which implies looking without comprehension,judgment, or emotion. The building’s authority is challenged further through the “slipof 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 inthe passage of human time by recording the advent of midnight, it is confounded bythis timekeeper of a premodern era, which it can only “ogle” fruitlessly. Ridge herebegins a mischievous pursuit of the phallic implications of the tall thin tower—evererect yet never satisfactorily coupled—revealing the anxieties of the patriarchal imagi-nation and the powermongering that emerges from them.

As if overcompensating for its inability to get satisfaction from the moon, the towerembraces and proclaims its own business, in two senses of the word. The skyscraper isall about doing business, of course; but the “fuss” and clutter Ridge associates with itundermine 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 booksthat record the business these workers do. Calling the building a “flight of ledgerbooks” 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 andfinancial, that inhabit it. (Fig. 8) That these flights are “overrun” by the ant-blackfigures again emphasizes the hectic and uncontrolled—ultimately irrational—charac-ter of the building’s business, a critique given further force by Ridge’s imagery of danc-ing. The tower’s “can-can” insistently asserts the can-do rationalism that creates suchbuildings, but this frenetic dance ultimately succeeds mostly in revealing the inad-


119

equacies of that ideology. The ant-black human figures are set dancing by their com-pulsive 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 numeri-cal, are “dancing on spindle legs,” offers little assurance of their ability to sustain theirhectic routine. The spindle is yet another intriguing image in this rich passage. “Spindlelegs” evoke the malnourishment, certainly spiritual but possibly physical as well, of thetower’s human population. Equated with the numeric figures in their ledgers, the hu-mans 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 onwhich stacks of papers are impaled. This is a suggestive shape indeed in a poem abouta very tall, very thin tower with a pointed top. But while the tower may remind us of ahuge spindle, the main impact of this signification is to complete the ironic inversionof its phallic power, since the function of a spindle would be to impale forcibly thepaper figures kept within the tower, and by extension, its human figures as well. Theseimages 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 them-selves 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 shak-ers become the moved and shaken, subtler versions of Eliot’s image in “Prufrock” ofmodern-subject-as-insect, “pinned and wriggling on the wall.”56

▲

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.


120 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 controllingmetaphor of the tower as a measuring and recording device. It is to this conceit thatRidge turns again in the final five lines, unfavorably evaluating the tower in contrast tothe more appealing if less exact method of counting time by the moonbeams that filterbetween the walls of her building. Embracing the nonpatriarchal and marginal valuesrepresented by the moon, the alley cats, and the horizontal curves of her “stoop-shoul-dered walls,” the poet playfully presents the tower as grotesque in its enormity, rigid inits stability, obsessive in its precision, ridiculous as it ticks mechanically away among itscelestial neighbors: ultimately, the emblem of a narrow capitalist patriarchy whoseonly response to sunsets is to “tally” them (“TSS,” 51). The tally, like the notch and thespindle, is a rich term here, again implying both spatial shape and temporal activity. Atally 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 itselfa tally, attempting to notch the night and the sunset, but instead mainly recording theinterminable, empty business of its own ledgers.

In exploring the confluence among assertions of patriarchal power, anxieties of malesexual potency, and ideologies of capitalist aspiration, Ridge has thoroughly ironizedthe skyscraper’s symbolic function. Yet the exuberance and wit of this critique suggeststhat in spite of her critical gaze, she appreciates the tower for challenging and energiz-ing her creative powers. “Time-Stone” epitomizes a modernist poetics that eschews aworld elsewhere to participate wholeheartedly in the world of urban-industrial mo-dernity. 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 Metropoli-tan 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 Americanmodernist poet’s rich and complex engagement with the defining symbolic forms oftwentieth-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 becausethey lack the referential opacity and emotional reserve that high-modernist canonsdemanded. These poems combine a fascination with urban modernity, and a willing-ness to explore innovative modes of verbal representation, with the rhapsodic tonali-ties of nineteenth-century Romanticism. On the other hand, of the neglected poems Idiscuss, the most conventionally modernist in style, Ridge’s “Time-Stone,” seems aswitty, opaque, ironic as any New Critic might wish. Yet because it emerged out of aforceful leftist engagement with modernity, it could not be accommodated within theinterpretive and ideological paradigms of New Criticism. I propose that poetic mod-ernism is, or should be, sufficiently capacious to take all these poems as seriously asthe works of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, or Moore. From seventy years of formalist criti-cism we have inherited impressive interpretive tools for modernist poetry. Now, in apostmodern academic climate that relishes contradiction and eclecticism, suspects


121moroseness, resists master-narratives, and yet demands some degree of sociohistoricalengagement, we need to adapt these tools to recovering the many ways Americanpoets articulated the complex, often contradictory experiences that made modernitywhat it was, and is.

Notes1. 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 cul-tural 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 Econo-mies of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), and Michael Brooks’s Subway City: Ridingthe Trains, Reading New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997) are but a few ofthe excellent contributions to this campaign. But so far only a few pioneering studies have begun toapply historicist methods to modern American poetry, and to show that verse texts, both canonicaland unknown, can offer powerful new insights when we put the modernism back into modernity, andvice versa. See Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics ofCultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and RevolutionaryMemory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (New York: Routledge, 2001), Alan Golding’sFrom 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: Uni-versity of California Press, 1997), Mark van Wienen’s Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of Ameri-can Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Michael Thurston’sMaking Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the Wars (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2001), and Joseph Harrington’s Poetry and the Public: The Social Form ofModern U. S. Poetries (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).

2. Ferris Greenslet, “A Propaganda for Poetry,” Poet-Lore 11 (1899): 52. See also my forthcomingbook Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity for an account of thisanxious 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 CityPoetry and the Rise of Modernism.”

4. A short list of the visual artists who took skyscrapers as subjects between 1900 and 1930 reads asa 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 Bourke-White; 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 inthe modernist visual arts, see Merrill Schleier’s The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890–1931 (NewYork: DaCapo, 1986).

5. Munsey’s (1899), quoted in Eric P. Nash, Manhattan Skyscrapers (New York: Princeton Archi-tectural Press, 1999), 5.

6. Ray Stannard Baker, “The Modern Skyscraper,” Munsey’s 22 (1899): 52; henceforth abbrevi-ated as “TMS.” In 1911, Edgar Allen Forbes noted this combination of enormity and intricacy as “themost marvelous thing about a tall building”: “that it has been made in millions of pieces in differentparts 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 abbreviatedas NY.


122 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 Com-pany Co., 1914; henceforth abbreviated as MLIC), 52 and H. Addington Bruce, Above the Cloudsand 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 microscopicinsignificance: “The very mass of it bore down upon me like a weight. Who was I amid these mil-lions?” (NY, 6).

12. Baker, “TMS,” 58. The skyscraper’s distinctive combination of endless variety and hermeticself-containment was also captured in this 1903 comment: “From the time these men enter theiroffices in the morning until they go at night, many of them need not leave the building. Messengerboys 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, theirown 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 obscurepublications in the mid-1870s, it was not until 1888 that the largest settlements were discovered bythe archaeological community (see Watson Smith, “Introduction,” in Gustav Nördenskïold, The CliffDwellers of the Mesa Verde, transl. D. Lloyd Morgan (New York: AMS Press, 1893; 1973), xi. The firstwidely-circulated print accounts came just as the building of steel-frame skyscrapers accelerated. Aswell as Nordenskiöld’s ethnographic study, see Frederick Chapin’s book The Land of the Cliff Dwell-ers (Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club / W. B. Clarke, 1892).

14. Some accounts of the Cliff Dwellers used ethnocentric or openly racist premises to accountfor their technological aptitude, refusing to believe they could be the ancestors of the agrarian Pueblopeoples who lived in the plains below, insisting that they must instead have been a “lost fragment ofEgyptian civilization,” or even a “white people” of “a prehistoric age” (see Joseph Munk, ArizonaSketches [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 ele-

ments descends from the Cliff Dwellers metaphor down into postmodern science-fiction, most viv-idly in Ridley Scott’s dystopian Blade Runner, where both the panoptical headquarters of the mono-lithic Tyrell Corporation and the protagonist’s fortresslike apartment block feature design motifs remi-niscent of Egyptian or Amerindian cultures.

19. Anonymous, “The Tall Buildings of New York,” Munsey’s 18 (1898): 848; Charles PhelpsCushing, “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 darkand cheerless. Almost two decades of debate culminated in furor over the notoriously monolithicEquitable Building, which was originally conceived to rise 909 feet straight up. When completed in1915 it had been reduced to 542 feet, but still occupied virtually its entire one-acre lot all the way tothe top, “casting a noonday shadow four blocks long and six times its own size” (see Sarah BradfordLandau and Carl Condit, The Rise of the New York Skyscraper 1865–1913 [New Haven: Yale Univer-sity Press], 394; henceforth abbreviated to RNYS). In 1916, New York enacted zoning restrictionsthat restricted such sheer vertical walls in tall buildings and mandated setback designs. Though thesetback debate was often framed in aesthetic, moral, and even medical terms, the driving force be-


123hind these restrictions was economic, as by 1910 it was clear that buildings like the Equitable couldhave catastrophic effects on the value of properties in their perpetual shadows, since few wanted torent 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 arisenwithout these economic incentives, they do not fully explain the race into the skies, which bespoke adeep psychic need for physical signs of the United States’ supremacy as a modernized nation. Inpursuing this argument, Ann Douglas ingeniously situates the skyscraper’s “commodification of theair as a marketable product” within the larger modernist category of “airmindedness,” which includesplane 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 AmericanSkyscraper (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 7.

27. The Eiffel Tower (1889), almost a thousand feet high, was by far the world’s tallest structurethroughout the period, but was not a building in the same sense, designed to house large numbers ofpeople 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 fortwenty-five miles in every direction, and that the building itself could be seen by mariners forty milesout in the open sea (Anonymous, Cathedral of Commerce: Woolworth Building, New York, [privatelyprinted, 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 meetingplace,” and call its demolition in 1967 a loss not only to the city’s architecture but to the quality of itssocial 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: MonacelliPress, 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 abbre-viated as “LTTWB.”

35. The building’s interior designer (no doubt unintentionally) invited this sort of response fromthe skeptical with a grotesque corbel in the southeast corner of the lobby that depicted the highestpriest of low lucre, F. W. Woolworth himself, counting nickels and dimes. Wolff’s condemnation ofthis monument to filthy lucre was particularly ironic given that, almost uniquely among early sky-scrapers, the Woolworth was built and paid for in cash with no mortgage. Thomas van Leeuwenremarks of this, “The building was conceived . . . as a memorial to the means by which its owner hadassembled his fortune, namely nickels and dimes, the ‘atomic elements’ of capitalism. But it alsorepresented Woolworth’s preparations for the hereafter: the money was being returned to the publicin the form of a building that was without the sin of usury” (van Leeuwen, The Skyward Trend ofThought, 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 ab-breviated as “TS”; Stirling Bowen, “Skyscraper,” The Liberator 5.11 (November 1924): 13, hence-forth “S.”


124 38. Arturo Giovannitti, “The Day of War: Madison Square, June 20th,” in Echoes of Revolt: TheMasses, 1911–1917, ed. William L. O’Neill (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1966), 283. Henceforth abbrevi-ated 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 thefeatures of the new buildings that most astonished people in the 1900s and 1910s. It was claimed thatthe Woolworth Building was capable of withstanding hypothetical winds of 200 M.P.H. without struc-tural damage (see COC, 27); in January 1913, three months before its dedication, it did withstandgusts of 90 miles an hour with no damage (see Landau and Condit, RNYS, 359). Of course, Holley iswrong too about the skyscraper’s inability to house birds.

44. Holley, “Skyscraper,” 22. William Rose Benét’s “The Singing Skyscrapers” (1918) also offers ahallucinatory response to the contemporary skyscraper, though Benét’s apocalypse results in a visionof celestial splendor. Half-awake, half-dreaming, the speaker invokes by name the city’s “tall titanictowers”— Metropolitan, Flatiron, Singer, Woolworth—and imagines them “Singing in the air” (seeWilliam Rose Benét, “The Singing Skyscraper,” in The Burglar of the Zodiac, [New Haven: YaleUniversity 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 thatmove above our slumber/Hung aloft in air” [2]), and manifest themselves in the drive to build newcities, new towers. The poet concludes that all such towers, from Nineveh to New York, are attemptsto put into material form a vision of a “Celestial City/ Blinding in the sky!” (Benét, “The SingingSkyscraper,” 5). “The Singing Skyscrapers” is a fascinating, if uneven, attempt to update a key mode ofRomantic 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 elevatorswere objects of intense fascination: the system was monitored from the lobby by an electric dis-patcher mechanism, while each car contained a phone capable of contacting any location in the coun-try, and enough safety cushions that a 7000 pound cargo was once test-dropped in free-fall from the45th floor to the bottom without spilling a full glass of water in the car (COC, 14–15, 19). Thesereassuring facts notwithstanding, Teasdale is mesmerized by the aura of sublimity that the elevatorachieves through its gravity-defying rate of speed. In the 1910s, the two elevators going from theground to the observation deck in the Woolworth Building were the fastest in the world, routinelyrunning at 700 feet per minute (COC, 14).

46. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in Complete Poetry and Prose (New York: Libraryof 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 atMadison 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 “AcquaintedWith the Night” (1928) refers to no specific buildings by name, I propose that many early urbanitereaders would almost certainly have thought of the Metropolitan Tower upon encountering the poem’sculminating image, “One luminary clock against the sky” at an “unearthly height” (The Poetry ofRobert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem [New York: Henry Holt, 1969], 255–56). The Metropolitan’sfamous 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.


125Some have taken Frost’s luminary clock as a clock, others as the moon. To me it seems clear that bothreadings are fully available; clock and moon merge in a modern cityscape so alienating that traditionalnatural and modern technological measures of value are equally dysfunctional, proclaiming only theirown lack of meaning, and rendering time itself “neither wrong nor right” (Frost, “Acquainted withthe 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: “Asthe evening darkness draws near, at any predetermined hour for which the mechanism may be ad-justed, hundreds of electric lights appear back of the dial numerals, all of which are brilliantly illumi-nated with splendid effect—a feature never produced by any other clock in the world. Simultaneouslywith the illumination of the hands and dials, an automatically actuated switch lights up a great electricoctagonal lantern, eight feet in diameter, located at the top of the tower, from which powerful electricflash-lights, marking the hours in the evening, may be seen for a great distance, far beyond any pos-sible transmission of sound, the time being signalled therefrom as follows: Each of the quarter-hoursis flashed in red and the hours in white light—one red flash for the quarter, two red flashes for thehalf, three red flashes for three-quarters, and four red flashes for the even hour—these latter flashesfollowed by a number of white flashes marking the hour” (MLIC, 48). As of the spring of 2001, therefurbished Metropolitan Tower was again offering a nightly light show; but the current effects, whichinvolve a continuous series of gradual color changes on the top levels of the building, do not create aflashlight effect, nor do they measure time as the original ones did. The tower’s great illuminatedclock still runs.

52. Louis J. Dublin, A Family of Thirty Million: The Story of the Metropolitan Life InsuranceCompany (New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 1943), 236.

53. Lola Ridge, “Time-Stone,” in Sun-Up (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920), 51. Henceforth ab-breviated 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 sup-port the weight being placed upon them applies to the numbers as well, an instability that would bedramatized within a few years by the market crash that nearly brought down the entire capitalistedifice.

56. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York:Harcourt Brace, 1970), 5.

American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems

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