I
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.
