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And now, as the distance between the shores gradually became narrower, the travellers saw the value of the long tapering spars the captain ran up, to bear each a couple of square-sails sky-scrapers he called them.
But it is in New York that we see the argument most clearly, because we see the thing thus towering into its own turrets and breaking into its own fireworks. I disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of the modern city with its sky-scrapers and sky-signs. I mean that which laments the loss of beauty and its sacrifice to utility. It seems to me the very reverse of the truth.
American in blood and political principles; but not willing to narrow my life down to the resources of any one country. I was born in New York, in fact, but of course before the era of sky-scrapers, multitudinous noises, and perpetual building operations." "I thought there was something of an English accent in your speech now and then." "Very probably.
Destitute of any natural beauty, handicapped by its cramped geographical position between two rivers, made unsightly by gigantic sky-scrapers and that noisy monstrosity the Elevated Railroad, having no intellectual interests, no art interests, no interest in anything not immediately connected with dollars, it was a city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a city to LIVE in.
For I have often noticed since that in the early morning, and again for a little about sunset, the sky-scrapers are no longer merely the means and local convenience for men to pursue their purposes, but acquire that characteristic of the great buildings of the world, an existence and meaning of their own.
You could read all their literature from the pyramids down to the present sky-scrapers and you wouldn't get enough practical wisdom to drive a dump-cart." "That's just it," I answered. "I'm not hankering for a dump-cart.
The early morning sky was still pink. The waters of the vast harbor were whitened by blocks and sheets of ice. The great city, drawn delicately on the pink in white and pearl, marched its fantastic ranges of "sky-scrapers" an army of giants down to the water's edge.
The whole structure must have sunk at the same time, or it, too, would have disintegrated, as the other buildings had appeared to disintegrate. Mentally, Arthur likened the submergence of the tower in the oceans of time to an elevator sinking past the different floors of an office building. All about the building the other sky-scrapers of New York had seemed to vanish.
That was one of the few times in America when I did not miss the poetry of the past. The poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal, and enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers," so splendid in the landscape now, did not exist in 1883; but I find it difficult to divide my early impressions from my later ones.
"Why d'you want to see that?" said the small sergeant with a black mustache and rings round his eyes like a monkey. "Why, man, don't you know that everything begins from the Eiffel Tower? If it weren't for the Eiffel Tower, there wouldn't be any sky-scrapers...." "How about the Flatiron Building and Brooklyn Bridge?
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