File:The meccas of the world; the play of modern life in New York, Paris, Vienna, Madrid and London (1913) (14781395694).jpg

More commonly known as Times Square.
Identifier: meccasofworldpla01cran (find matches)
Title: The meccas of the world; the play of modern life in New York, Paris, Vienna, Madrid and London
Year: 1913 (1910s)
Authors: Cranston, Ruth
Subjects:
Publisher: New York, John Lane company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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s certainly compelled to do a prodigious deal ofthinking about them, whether he will or no. For theyare being torn down and hammered up higher, allover New York, till conversation to be carried on inthe street must needs become a dialogue in monosyl-labic shouts; while walking, in conjunction with theupheavals of new Subway tunnelling, has all theexcitements of traversing an earthquake district. This perpetual transition finds its motive in theenormous business concentrated on the small islandof Manhattan, and the constant increase in officespace demanded thereby. The commerce of the citypersistently moves north, and the residents flee beforeit; leaving their fine old Knickerbocker homes to beconverted into great department stores, publishinghouses, but above all into the omnivorous office-building. The mass of these are hideous—dizzy,squeezed-together abortions of brick and steel—buthere and there among the horrors are to be foundexamples of true if fantastic beauty. The Flatiron
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Underwood & UnderwoodA PATCH OF THE CRAZY-QUILT BROADWAY, FROM 42d STREET IN REHEARSAL 15 Building is one, the Woolworth Building (especiallyin its marvellous illumination by night) another, thenew colonnaded offices of the Grand Central Stationa third. Yet the general impression of New Yorkarchitecture upon the average foreigner is of illimit-able confusion and ugliness. It is because the American in art is a Futurist.He so far scorns the ideal as to have done with imag-ination altogether; substituting for it an invention sotitanic in audacity that to the untrained it appearsgrotesque. In place of the ideal he has set up theone thing greater: truth. And as truth to every manis different (only standard being relatively fixed)how can he hope for concurrence in his masterpiece?The sky-scraper is more than a masterpiece: it is afact. A fact of violence, of grim struggle, and ofvictory; over the earth that is too small, and the windsthat rage in impotence, and the heavens that hereto-

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