THE towers of
Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and
limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither
citadels nor
churches, but frankly and beautifully
office-buildings.
The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the
Post Office with its shingle-tortured
mansard, the red brick
minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining
new houses, homes--they seemed--for laughter and
tranquillity.
Over a concrete bridge fled a
limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably illuminated by
champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green and crimson lights. The
New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of polished
steel leaped into the glare.
In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the
Associated Press were closing down. The
telegraph operators wearily raised their
celluloid eye-shades after a night of talking with
Paris and
Peking. Through the building crawled the
scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist spun away. Cues of men with
lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of new
factories, sheets
of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the
Euphrates and across the
veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the
April dawn; the song of
labor in a city built--it seemed--for
giants.
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