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Updated: May 24, 2025
And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke. The English and the American types of humour are in one way directly contrary. The most American sort of fun involves a soaring imagination, piling one house on another in a tower like that of a sky-scraper.
Tim Gorman met us at the bottom of the steps which lead to the station. He was carrying his cash register in his arms. We hurried across Broadway and passed through the doors of a huge sky-scraper building. I thought we were entering Ascher's office. We were not.
The young man was smoking a cigarette in a long amber cigarette-holder. I never had seen one so long. He examined the end of his cigarette-holder, and, apparently surprised and relieved at finding a cigarette there, again smiled contentedly. The lovely lady pointed at the marble shaft rising above Madison Square. "That is the tallest sky-scraper," she said, "in New York."
Americans make fun of their own institutions; and their own journalism is full of such fanciful conjectures. The tall building is itself artistically akin to the tall story. The very word sky-scraper is an admirable example of an American lie. But I can testify quite as eagerly to the solid and sensible advantages of the symmetrical hotel.
The heavens were filled with hurtling rocks; solid masses of granite ten feet square were thrown a hundred feet away; rocks weighing a ton were hurled still farther, as if they were no more than stones flung by the hand of a giant; chunks that would have crashed from the roof to the basement of a sky-scraper dropped a third and nearly a half a mile away.
A thing must be true, or it is not beautiful, any more than a painted wanton is beautiful, any more than a sky-scraper is beautiful that is intrinsically and structurally light and that has a false massiveness of pillars plastered on outside. The true sky-scraper is beautiful and this is the reluctant admission of a man who dislikes humanity-festering cities.
It is like a scenic reproduction of itself, like a London Tower on the stage; and if ever, in a moment of Anglo-Saxon expansion, the County Council should think of selling it to Chicago, to be set up somewhere between the Illinois Central and the Lake, New York need not hopelessly envy her the purchase: New York could easily build a London Tower that would look worthier of its memories than the real one, without even making it a sky-scraper.
And you must be sure to write often to your mother; there's nothing you can depend on like a mother's love, my boy." Ray: "Say, look here, Carl, I want to hear something about all this aviation. How does it feel to fly, anyway? I'd be scared to death; it's funny, I can't look off the top of a sky-scraper without feeling as though I wanted to jump. Gosh!
He was an observer, and he knew it, too, and some day, when he was big enough, he was going to be a reporter, sure. And in the meantime he studied the procession of life as it streamed up and down eighteen sky-scraper floors in his elevator car. He slid the door open for her sympathetically and watched her trip determinedly out into the street.
Barbaric folk prize gold and make much use of silver. But the consumption of iron is the badge of civilization. Iron rails, iron steamboats, iron buildings! And who was there thirty years ago who foresaw the modern sky-scraper, any more than a hundred years ago men foretold the iron steamship!
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