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chapter 7 Footprints of the Twentieth Century American Skyscrapers, Modern Poems The most potent icons of modernity in the early twentieth-century city were great buildings, structures of unprecedented scale and grandeur that punctuated the skyline and symbolized the metropolitan ethos. Unlike the grandest structures of the Gilded Age, which were mainly private houses for the super-rich, the iconic buildings after 1900 were venues for business , transport, or amusement—public not necessarily in ownership but in function and spatial accessibility, designed to accommodate a large number and variety of occupants, both permanent and transient.Twentieth-century analogues to the small-town churches and schoolhouses around which the lives of most Americans had once revolved, these great structures served citydwellers as clocks and compass-needles, as gathering places and repositories of civic pride.1 Housing every sort of interaction from the ruthlessly commercial to the frivolously recreational, carrying a vast range of symbolic meanings, skyscrapers and other great buildings laid forceful claim on anyone seeking to represent urban modernity: painters, photographers, sculptors, commercial artists; manufacturers of postcards, souvenirs, toys, every imaginable genre of material culture—and the many Americans who began writing city poems in the early 1910s.2 Challenging the Skies No less than visual artists, American poets of the 1910s were fascinated with several types of modern great building—railroad station, department store, hotel, theater, sports arena—but most of all with the skyscraper office tower, which for more than a century has been the most spectacular visual symbol of urban modernity. Between 1885 and 1910, during the childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of the Americans who created the New Newcomb_How_text.indd 180 12/15/11 4:06 PM Verse, a breathtaking acceleration in building height transformed the visual scale of metropolitan life from street level to hundreds of feet in the air.The tallest structure in Manhattan for many decades was the 284-foot spire of Trinity Church (built 1846) on lower Broadway, whose primacy had once asserted“the material claim of the church on the territory between Earth and Heaven,” as Thomas van Leeuwen puts it.3 But by 1890, Trinity had begun to function as a “mere yardstick for any new skyscraper that was thought fit to carry the name.”4 The economic imperative that one commentator in 1902 called “the capitalization of the air” had come to dominate the most desirable commercial areas, such as lower Manhattan and the Chicago Loop, in which rents were “prohibitive” and the purchase of land “impossible.”5 The combination of two breakthrough technologies—steel-frame construction made practical by the falling cost and rising quality control of steel, and the high-speed electric elevator—brought the era of the all-masonry skyscraper to an end in 1893 with the completion of the massive Monadnock Building in Chicago, which rose only 197 feet. Successful early experiments such as the nine-story Home Life Insurance Company Building in Chicago (William LeBaron Jenney, 1884) and the ten-story Wainwright Building in St. Louis (Louis Sullivan, 1890–91) had shown that the steel-frame tower could look good, inspire public wonderment, and make its owners money.6 After 1890, the residents of larger American cities observed with wonder as voracious buildings colonized their airspace.The world’s tallest inhabited structure in 1900, the Park Row Building in lower Manhattan (R. H. Robertson , 1899), rose 383 feet (thirty stories), while the most distinctive building in the artistic landscape of New York City before 1905, the Fuller Building, better known as the Flatiron (D. H. Burnham Co.), was completed in 1902 at twenty-one stories, just under three hundred feet high.7 The dimensions of these pre-1905 skyscrapers sound paltry by later standards, but the drive to the skies was irrevocably under way.This first major phase of skyscraper construction culminated with three lower-Manhattan behemoths, each in succession the tallest building in the world, which became magnetic icons of the city for writers, painters, and photographers: the Singer Tower (612 feet, Ernest Flagg; completed 1908, demolished 1967), the Metropolitan Life Tower (700 feet, Napoleon LeBrun and Sons; 1909), and the Woolworth Building (792 feet, Cass Gilbert; 1913). In this decade before 1914, as new buildings were shooting up hundreds of feet higher than existing ones, commentators foresaw cities densely packed with towers a thousand, or even two thousand, feet high.8 As it turned out, these heaven-storming years marked the zenith of people’s belief in modernity as boundless progress and...

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