New York City Skyline, about 1915

How fragile the negative that holds this image of the New York City skyline. How fragile, indeed, is all of human creation. Our eyes travel over the slight curve of the Brooklyn Bridge, suspended above the East River, to the jagged saw-edge of a city cutting into our thoughts these days. From left to right, south to north, the more prominent skyscrapers can be identified: the Bankers Trust (1912), the Equitable (1915), the Singer (1908), the City Investing (1908), the Park Row (1898), the Woolworth (1913), and the Municipal (1914). The skyline is a monogram for the names, the livelihoods, the lives that animate the city, given shape simply by the varied heights of great buildings--forty-one stories, twenty-nine, fifty-five, and so on to the horizon. But the peaks of the monogram mean nothing without the squat surrounding forms and the shadowy streets. Skyscrapers have always been just the tips of energetic activities that engage us on many levels, from subterranean tunnels to street vendors, from tiny shops to enormous lobbies, from City Hall Park to waterfront wharves. Linked by transportation, sanitation, lighting, ventilation, safety, and service systems, buildings form part of a web, and the systems that serve them also shape them. The systems we devise sometimes seem so large that we become their servants rather than their overseers. Historians, squinting to get the long view, can remind our fellow citizens that, in fact, brick by brick, wire by wire, chart by chart, we altered this world and can, sometimes, reshape it. We can celebrate or condemn the changes we have made, but question and analyze them we must.