In any case, a great deal of the poetry of New York is due to the
sky-scraper. At dusk the effect of the massed sky-scrapers illuminated
from within, as seen from any high building up-town, is prodigiously
beautiful, and it is unique in the cities of this world. The early night
effect of the whole town, topped by the aforesaid Metropolitan tower,
seen from the New Jersey shore, is stupendous, and resembles some
enchanted city of the next world rather than of this. And the fact that
a very prominent item in the perspective is a fiery representation of a
frothing glass of beer inconceivably large--well, this fact too has its
importance.

But in the sky-scrapers there is a deeper romanticism than that which
disengages itself from them externally. You must enter them in order to
appreciate them, in order to respond fully to their complex appeal.
Outside, they often have the air of being nothing in particular; at best
the façade is far too modest in its revelation of the interior. You can
quite easily walk by a sky-scraper on Broadway without noticing it. But
you cannot actually go into the least of them and not be impressed. You
are in a palace. You are among marbles and porphyries. You breathe
easily in vast and brilliant foyers that never see daylight. And then
you come to those mysterious palisaded shafts with which the building
and every other building in New York is secretly honeycombed, and the
palisade is opened and an elevator snatches you up. I think of American
cities as enormous agglomerations in whose inmost dark recesses
innumerable elevators are constantly ascending and descending, like the
angels of the ladder....

[Illustration: THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF LOWER NEW YORK AT NIGHT]