acute disillusionment. In agitation it could not have competed with a
sheep-market. In noise it was a muffled silence compared with the fine
racket that enlivens the air outside the Paris Bourse. I saw also an
ordinary day in the Stock Exchange. Faint excitations were afloat in
certain corners, but I honestly deemed the affair tame. A vast litter of
paper on the floor, a vast assemblage of hats pitched on the tops of
telephone-boxes--these phenomena do not amount to a hustle. Earnest
students of hustle should visit Paris or Milan. The fact probably is
that the perfecting of mechanical contrivances in the United States has
killed hustle as a diversion for the eyes and ears. The mechanical side
of the Exchange was wonderful and delightful.

The sky-scrapers that cluster about the lower end of Broadway--their
natural home--were as impressive as I could have desired, but not
architecturally. For they could only be felt, not seen. And even in
situations where the sky-scraper is properly visible, it is, as a rule,
to my mind, architecturally a failure. I regret for my own sake that I
could not be more sympathetic toward the existing sky-scraper as an
architectural entity, because I had assuredly no European prejudice
against the sky-scraper as such. The objection of most people to the
sky-scraper is merely that it is unusual--the instinctive objection of
most people to everything that is original enough to violate tradition!
I, on the contrary, as a convinced modernist, would applaud the
unusualness of the sky-scraper. Nevertheless, I cannot possibly share
the feelings of patriotic New-Yorkers who discover architectural
grandeur in, say, the Flat Iron Building or the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Building. To me they confuse the poetical idea of these
buildings with the buildings themselves. I eagerly admit that the bold,
prow-like notion of the Flat Iron cutting northward is a splendid
notion, an inspiring notion; it thrills. But the building itself is