WATCHING Manhattan as the boat comes near its shore, one seems to come under the spell of its incalculable weight, its stupendous mass of iron, brick and stone. It is oppressive, ominous. One feels the past, the present and the future; and the tremendous forces which must have worked together to produce this titanic offspring, to have spawned this mountain of precipices. One feels the hidden activity, the pitiless struggle going on beneath; yet a few puffs of smoke are all that betray the smouldering of the mighty fires. One lets one’s mind sink into the vast depths between, to see little humanity running here and there like ants amid the tangle of wires, tunnels and pipes. Little humanity that built it all.
In the past, church spires rose majestic above the surrounding city. Now they are lost. The buildings of commerce, creeping high and higher, have struggled upward, climbing upon one another’s backs, and mounting each on the shoulder of each, in their ceaseless effort to be the tallest among their fellows. And just as it is among men and the rulers of men, as surely as one has gained the supremacy, has come another to surpass him, swinging upward yet another fifty, one hundred, or two hundred feet, and from their thousand brazen throats has boomed again the cry, “Long live the king!”
Eight hundred feet towers the monarch of to-day. He is called “Woolworth,” and twelve thousand men live daily in his strength. His head is of gold but his feet are of clay, and who will be king to-morrow?
And wondering, one looks up and up, above the mightiest of these kings, and yet above the very summit of his crown, and there one sees—the sunset.
XIII
THE METROPOLITAN TOWER
THE Home Office of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. is in the “Metropolitan Life Building.” It covers the whole block between Madison and Fourth Avenues and from Twenty-third to Twenty-fourth streets: some twenty-five acres. Its forty-odd-story tower dominates the whole of Madison Square and dwarfs its neighbors of a meagre twenty stories. Above the level of their roofs the face of a giant clock covers three stories of its front and stares unwinking at the thousands in the park. To old women and to newsboys, to strong men and to wasters, to honest and to sick, to those who read the columns under “Help Wanted—Male,” and to those who have gone far beyond doing so, to the restless and the lonely among the crowds, waiting for that thing to “turn up” that never, never does; to all these this ponderous clock points the passing of the minutes, hours, days,—of life itself: this clock, relentless as the sun, upon the Life Insurance tower.
