Skyscraper Analysis

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun andhas a soul.

Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people intoit and they mingle among its twenty floors and arepoured out again back to the streets, prairies andvalleys.

It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in andout all day that give the building a soul of dreamsand thoughts and memories.

(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would carefor the building or speak its name or ask a policemanthe way to it?)Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters andparcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in andsewage out.

Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of mengrappling plans of business and questions of womenin plots of love.Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of theearth and hold the building to a turning planet.

Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out andhold together the stone walls and floors.Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of themortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape anarchitect voted.

Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,and the press of time running into centuries, playon the building inside and out and use it.Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laidin graves where the wind whistles a wild songwithout words

And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipesand tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.

Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier beggingat back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-layer who went to state's prison for shooting anotherman while drunk.

(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at theend of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul hasgone into the stones of the building.)On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of namesand each name standing for a face written acrosswith a dead child, a passionate lover, a drivingambition for a million dollar business or a lobster'sease of life.Behind the signs on the doors they work and the wallstell nothing from room to room.

Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters fromcorporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,and tons of letters go bundled from the building to allends of the earth.

Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul ofthe building just the same as the master-men whorule the building.Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floorempties its men and women who go away and eatand come back to work.

Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens andall jobs go slower as the people feel day closing onthem.

One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformedelevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubberswork, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and waterand mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,and machine grime of the day.

Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words tellingmiles of houses and people where to buy a thing formoney. The sign speaks till midnight.Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silenceholds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floorand try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hippockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Moneyis stacked in them.

A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lightsof barges butting their way across a harbor, nets ofred and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a spanof glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs ofcrosses and clusters over the sleeping city.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the starsand has a soul.

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