Stephen Elliott
IDC 4001H
March 11 2014
I stand motionless at the median, subsumed by a shadow colossal. Under the cooling gaze of steel girders; the brash indifference of rusting rivets, I feel infinitesimally meaningless. Insignificant. I am but a flake of oxidation cast from the highest point of the empire state.
Each day I walk from Penn Station down the rapidly aging glory of Broadway towards 26th. Before hitching a right at the park, I take a moment each morning to look on enviously at the legendary Flatiron building, standing stone-faced and stoic in the center of it all. I wonder if it can see me, if it can see any of us. Does it feels the feet peddling at its base, the heat of awestruck eyes climbing up and down its heights?
The point of skyscrapers is not to be admired or to evince a sense of wonder and amazement. It is to brazenly plunge a permanent middle finger into the clouds and point at God on his throne and say, “one girder more and we’ll be by your side”. The steel wonders are constructed to be in a sense the omnipotent guardians of New Yorkers, to rule over the lesser beings scurrying in its shadows. The trend in skyscraper construction has approached sleeker, more modern constructions. The One57 tower looks like a landing spacecraft, whereas the old Empire State Building can hardly shake the word “conscription” from its visage. One Madison, a series of modular pods hoisted by a bronze spine, is layered like the classes of society it represents. The gap between pods almost begs to define the separation between tax brackets, and in fact one can look at each pod as the empty space between two open brackets.
As buildings slim down and chic up, the point remains the same: dominate the landscape. It is a phenomenon born in New York and cultivated worldwide, that man does not overshadow his achievements; his achievements look over him.
The point has always been to reach heaven, and as we modernize and develop the sky, once deemed unconquerable, we widen the rift between the rich and the poor. The rich can reach heaven, sit by god’s side, and stare down upon the infinitesimal stranded on the streets below. When I stare at the Flatiron building, I see a throne soon to be emptied. And that seems to be the real trend in New York, a perpetual recycling of power, leaping from one spire to the next. Perhaps our goal is not to build a ladder to heaven, but a set of stairs.
