Perhaps if I had reached New York from the sea the skyscrapers would
have struck me more violently. But I had already seen a few in San
Francisco (and wondered at and admired the courage which could build so
high after the earthquake of 1906), and more in Chicago, all ugly; so
that when I came to New York and found that the latest architects were
not only building high, but imposing beauty on these mammoth structures,
surprise was mingled with delight. No matter how many more millions of
dollars are expended on that strange medley of ancient forms which go
to make up New York's new Cathedral, where Romanesque and Gothic seem
already to be ready for their divorce, the Woolworth Building will be
New York's true fane. Mr. Cass Gilbert, the designer of that graceful
immensity, not only gave commerce its most notable monument (to date),
but removed for ever the slur upon skyscrapers. The Woolworth Building
does not scrape the sky; it greets it, salutes it with a _beau geste_.
And I would say something similar of the Bush Building, with its
alabaster chapel in the air which becomes translucent at night; and
the Madison Square Tower (whose clock face, I noticed, has the amazing
diameter of three storeys); and the Burroughs Welcome Building on 41st
Street, with its lovely perpendicular lines; and that immense cube of
masonry on Park Avenue which bursts into flower, so to speak, at the top
in the shape of a very beautiful loggia. But even if these adornments
become, as I hope, the rule, one could not resent the ordinary
structural elephantiasis a moment after realising New York's physical
conditions. A growing city built on a narrow peninsula is unable to
expand laterally and must, therefore, soar. The problem was how to make
it soar with dignity, and the problem has been solved.
In the old days when brown stone was the only builders' medium New York
must have been a drab city indeed; or so I gather from the few ancient
typical residences that remain. There are a few that are new, too, but
for the most part the modern house is of white stone. Gayest of all is,
I suppose, that vermilion-roofed florist's on Fifth Avenue.
One has to ascend the Woolworth Building to appreciate at a blow with
what discretion the original settlers of New York made their choice. It
is interesting, too, to watch Broadway--which, for all I know, is the
longest street in the world--starting at one's feet on its lawless
journey to Albany: lawless because it is almost the only sinuous
thing in this city of parallelograms and has the effrontery to cross
diagonally both Fifth Avenue and Sixth. Before leaving the Woolworth
Building, I would say that there seemed to me something rather comically
paradoxical in being charged 50 cents for access to the top of a
structure which was erected to celebrate the triumph of a commercial
genius whose boast it was to have made his fortune out of articles sold
at a rate never higher than 10 cents.
Having dallied sufficiently on the summit--there are a trifle of
fifty-eight floors, but an express lift makes nothing of them--I
continued the implacable career of the tripper by watching for a while
the deafening kerb market, which presented on that morning an odd
appearance, more like Yarmouth beach than a financial centre, for there
had been rain, and all the street operators were in sou'westers and
sea-boots. There can be spasms of similar excitement in London, in
the neighbourhood of Capel Court, but we have nothing that compares so
closely with this crowd as Tattersall's Ring at Epsom just before the
Derby.