the metropolitan life in ruins

The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1909-19Author(s): Nick YablonSource: American Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 308-347Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068197 .

Accessed: 17/11/2013 19:03

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toAmerican Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 151.229.160.33 on Sun, 17 Nov 2013 19:03:59 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068197?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Figure 1. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's Home Office and Tower (Le Brun & Sons, 1908). Source: The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 1908), opposite 5.



The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fictional Speculations

in New York, 1909-19

NICK YABLON

University of Iowa

Plowing through the woods, climbing over fallen columns and shattered building-stones, flushing a covey of loud-winged partridges, parting the bushes that grew thickly along the base of the wall, he now found himself in what had long ago been Twenty-Third Street.

George Allan England, "The Last New Yorkers" (1911)

In the decade following its completion in 1909, New York's once-tallest

building, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, suffered a series of unfortunate mishaps. In rapid succession it was exposed to poisonous gases, submerged under twenty thousand feet of water, struck by the tail of a comet, and transported back in time to the pre-Columbian era. Each time, the building somehow emerged intact. Stripped of its stone facade, reduced to a frame of rusted steel, vacated by its white-collar occupants, or even besieged by a horde of monstrous subhumans, it nonetheless remained standing in apparent perpetuity as an effective monument to the metropolis that now lay silent and desolate around it. It was in the science fiction narratives of these years that modern New York first came to be widely represented as a landscape of sublime

Nick Yablon's research and teaching focus on the experiential impact of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cities, seeking to trace how the advent of urban modernity witnessed new ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling. His current book manuscript, based on a dissertation completed in the department of history at the University of Chicago in 2002 is provisionally titled American Ruins: An Archaeology of Urban Modernity, 1830-1920. He was NEH-AAS post-doctoral research fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is currently an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Iowa.

American Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2 (June 2004) © 2004 American Studies Association

309



3 1 0 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

ruins, with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower perhaps the most sublime of all.1

The mise-en-scene of a ruined Manhattan both reinforces and challenges certain assertions - articulated within various American studies contexts - about the transitory and unstable nature of that city's built environment. In recent years, a consensus of literary, urban, architectural, and cultural historians has drawn attention to the way in which the New York cityscape was subjected to intensified forces of economic and spatial upheaval before and after the turn of the century.2 Looking beyond the rhetoric of progress that celebrated feats of construction, they have instead turned to the backward-looking narratives of expatriates like Henry James for evidence of a sentiment of nostalgic regret for what was lost in the process of city building. In The American Scene (1907), James, returning to New York after a twenty- year absence and finding it altered almost beyond recognition, came to identify it as the epitome of a "provisional city," in which older buildings and traditions cannot possibly survive. The continual cycles of construction and demolition in the financial district and the inexorable displacement of mansions by manufacturing lofts up Fifth Avenue, echoing the equally rapid demographic turnover in the immigrant neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, were together believed to be erasing all traces of "pastness" from the surface of the city. Market forces, both for James and for more recent critics, are thus imagined as producing a perpetual present, from which vestiges of other periods, such as those witnessed in "traditional" European cities, are simply expunged. New York's older architectural landmarks seemed unlikely to last a generation, let alone a millennium.3

The perception that this new round of activity in the real estate market was transforming buildings into disposable objects was not confined to nostalgic and Eurocentric visitors such as James, or to conservative architects and preservationists such as Ralph Adams Cram. It was an impression that also appeared, in various guises and interpretations, across a range of political, social, and cultural contexts. At the outset of the twentieth century such observations were made from two seemingly incongruous perspectives: that of Progressivist critics (such as Lincoln Steffens) writing about new trends in office building for the muckraking journals and that of popular science fiction authors (above all, George Allan England) writing about urban catastrophe for the new pulp magazines and cheap novels. These authors -



METROPOLITAN LIFE 3 1 1

assumed to be diametrically opposed in terms of their respective readership, subject matter, and sophistication - nonetheless shared a common preoccupation with the volatility of the built landscape in an age of speculative finance and corporate capitalism. This article will explore the ways in which apocalyptic imagery thus resonated across the cultural boundaries between urban criticism and popular fiction.

Expanding the range of voices in this urban discourse allows us, in turn, to perceive that the older mansions and churches whose disappear- ance or obsolescence James nostalgically lamented were by no means the only edifices deemed vulnerable to forces of disposal and renewal. There was also an increasing preoccupation with the truncated life expectancy of the office building by the 1910s, a decade in which some of the earliest skyscrapers (from the 1880s and 1890s) were already beginning to be demolished to make way for ever taller and (hopefully) more profitable buildings. Absorbed by these scenes of spectacular demolition, critics began to question whether the new commercial structures would last any longer than those they replaced. Laws of obsolescence appeared to govern the landscape of the emerging corporate skyline as much as they did the low-rise neighborhoods of the nineteenth-century city. It was as if "New" and "Old New York" alike were vulnerable to the neutral forces of displacement and renewal.4

Even as they drew attention to the ephemerality and ahistoricity of the built landscape, however, the texts that will be examined here did not foreclose the possibility of imagining lasting ruins. Whether the

city had been struck by natural disasters, technological catastrophes, or foreign invasions, and whether its population had regressed to barbar- ism or abandoned the city altogether, one thing remained largely constant in these fictions: namely, the verticality, if not always the structural integrity, of certain architectural landmarks. Even after the surrounding landscape had returned to a state of nature, the ruined

skyscraper would still exhibit some degree of permanence. In this

respect, it would exemplify what the sociologist Georg Simmel, writing in Berlin at this very time, perceived to be characteristic of traditional ruins: their realization of a fragile yet harmonious compromise (or reconciliation) between the disintegrating effects of natural decay and the lingering spirit of man-made forms, or, to use his terms, the "downward" thrust of Natur and the "upward" thrust of Geist.5 Reimagined as ruins that possessed this ability to register the effects of

antagonistic forces, New York's skyscrapers served as objects through




which to contemplate the conflicted relationship between the second nature of a capitalist economy and the cultural facade of the built landscape. Prior to a fully elaborated theory of capitalist urbanization (the phrase "creative destruction" would not be coined until 1942 and would not be applied to the urban landscape until the 1970s and 1980s), contemporaries - including both progressive critics and science fiction authors - articulated their lived sense of the physical, temporal, and experiential changes that accompanied the intensification of the real estate market during these years by means of a variety of fictional tropes, narratives, and images of ruin.6

Together, the recurrent scenes in which a critic or narrator would look back from the (immediate or distant) future over the remains of the present indicate a distinctive sense of temporality perhaps best characterized in terms of the mood of the "future anterior." As the tense of what will have been, the future anterior offered the prospect of contemplating the city from the horizon of some kind of aftermath. Writers who resisted the past perfect of nostalgic criticism found in this speculative temporality an alternative vantage point from which to make sense of the complex and obscure conditions of early-twentieth- century urban life. By imagining a city in a state of future ruin, when normal processes and structures will have been turned inside out, they sought to expose its hidden racial, gender, and economic configurations. To read their various texts through the lens of the future anterior, for what they might reveal about the temporal experiences and fantasies that emerged out of the maelstrom of capitalist urbanization, is thus to bracket those questions of space and spatiality that have dominated recent discussions of urban modernitv.7

Real Estate, or "the Doctrine of the Scrap Heap"

In 1909 the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company celebrated two coinciding events: its rise to the status of largest life insurer in the world and its completion of a tower that was the tallest in the nation (fig. I).8 Designed by the architectural firm Napoleon Le Brun & Sons as an appendage to the ten-story Home Office, completed sixteen years earlier, the tower became the first building to reach fifty stories - the first, exulted the Architectural Record, to break through "another stratum of ether."9 Its size was celebrated in trade journals as the outcome of the latest technological developments: advanced steel-cage




construction, wind bracing, fire- and rust-proofing, and electric-traction elevators.10

While the tower's vertical lines looked forward to the freestanding tower skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, its de facto campanile form and the Italianate motifs engraved on its facade of white Tuckahoe marble unmistakably referred back to the archaic model of the famous Campanile in Venice's Piazza San Marco. The humanist rhetoric of Renaissance architecture, some architectural historians have argued, was an obvious choice for companies with ambitions of public service and "noblesse oblige."11 Yet its opulence could also serve the propagan- dists purposes of those who were critical of the life insurance industry. Only months before the tower was conceived, that industry had been struck by arguably the most damaging legal investigation in its history. The Armstrong investigation of 1905-6 had brought charges of bribery, fraud, and unlawful takeovers against the three leading insurance

companies: Equitable, Mutual, and New York Life.12 While Metropoli- tan Life would be acquitted, the court proceedings shed light on many of the aggressive policies and schemes that insurance companies in

general had employed to lure ethnic and working-class customers away from their neighborhood cooperative societies and local mutual benefit associations.13 Under this harsh light, the recently constructed insurance palazzos, with their ornate exteriors and lavish interiors, offered themselves as easy targets for their critics (fig. 2). Ambrose Bierce, for one, was offended not only by the fact that insurance amounted to a kind of gambling, one in which the odds were stacked in favor of the

player who owned the table, but also by insurance companies' tendency to flaunt and "parade" their "enormous winnings" - perhaps in the form of spectacular buildings - as an "inducement to play against their

game." In "Ashes of the Beacon," a Bierce satire narrated by an Edward Gibbon of the future, one of the first acts will have been the violent demolition of these structures: "The smoldering resentment of years [of insurance abuses] burst into flames, and within a week all that was left of insurance in [Ancient] America was the record of a monstrous and cruel delusion written in the blood of its promoters."14

At the same time that it heralded the inception of a "new" era in insurance practices and construction technologies, the opening of the

Metropolitan Tower also marked the culmination of a fifteen-year phase of real-estate investment in New York, one that had begun somewhat inauspiciously in the aftermath of the Panic of May 1893.




Figure 2. The Marble Court, Madison Avenue Entrance of 1893 Home Office Building. Source: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (1908), opposite 34.

The fact that building activity had resumed in New York against a backdrop of severe depression in other sectors of the economy prompted journalist Lincoln Steffens to investigate the relationship between tall office buildings and investment capital. As a Progressivist reformer (and soon-to-be-designated "muckraker"), Steffens had already begun to identify a model and a vocabulary with which to critique the conduct of "big business" with respect to fraudulent schemes, political corrup- tion, sanitary conditions, and labor exploitation.15 Rather than map that critical model and vocabulary onto the terrain of real-estate speculation, he sought to understand the process of office building as a rational and collaborative response to a complex dilemma. Writing in Scribner's in 1897, he explained that the resurgent activities of real estate men, architects, and construction companies could not be attributed to a natural demand for office space. More than simply telling some "great story of material progress" about the steady "increase in wealth, [and]




the growing power of capital," New York's "broken sky-lin[e]" also evoked the multifarious "problems" that arose when capital (recently overinvested in the production of commodities) was subsequently transferred into the unpredictable realm of the built environment.16 These problems were in part technical - how to erect taller buildings and how to give tenants easy access to those higher floors - problems that were impressively solved by the collective "expertise" that developed and perfected steel-cage construction techniques and faster pas- senger elevators (40-44, 48). But in the very solution of these technical problems, Steffens observed, there also emerged even more testing financial problems. As the height of office buildings rose, so too did the property values in the business districts in which they were located (44, 48). The size of those buildings, and the indeterminacy of their future value and demand, presented further obstacles in deploying them as financial assets. Confronted with this economic conundrum, Steffens noted, real estate companies were now "incorporating" so as to convert the brute materiality of steel and masonry into the more flexible (and alienable) medium of stocks and bonds (46).

This latest cycle in the construction industry, Steffens might have added, was also significant in that other types of investors, including insurance companies, were also being drawn into the game of real estate. It was in 1893, the very year of the Panic, that Metropolitan Life fully entered the property market. Its newly created Real Estate Division took advantage of the numerous foreclosures of that year to

acquire as many as six hundred properties in New York, which it would then rent, mortgage, or sell on. So quickly did these investments grow that by 1898 an additional Bond and Mortgage Division had to be established, and by 1905 it would possess $38 million in mortgage loans and $17.5 million in real estate assets.17 Metropolitan Life's new interest in buildings as financial investments eventually extended to its own headquarters. Unlike its earlier Home Offices, the 1909 tower was largely a speculative project. Besides its practical value in housing a

rapidly growing workforce (now numbering twenty-eight hundred) and its symbolic value as an advertisement for the company, it would also function as an important source of economic revenue. By remaining in the 1893 Home Office and renting out as much as 40 percent of the

adjacent tower to smaller companies, the directors hoped to convince their customers and critics that the building would pay for itself. It may be an "advertisement," assured one director, but it was one "that costs




us [or rather the policyholders] nothing." In fact, he confidently predicted that it would "earn seven per cent on its cost."18

Although Steffens acknowledged that a company may profit indi- rectly from a skyscraper's promotional value, he might have questioned such confident predictions about the profits to be obtained directly from rent itself (38, 55). Writing ten years earlier, he reflected on the challenges those new office towers faced in recouping their costs, let alone turning a profit. Once the exorbitant costs of construction labor, of taxes and insurance policies, of maintaining and servicing the building, and of replacing obsolete mechanical equipment had been deducted, the average office building would end up paying "not much more than a gilt-edged bond" (61, 40). 19 Given this potential unprofitability, the superfluous ornaments that skyscraper architects were then beginning to incorporate into their buildings appeared to be all the more misguided. Clock towers, cupolas, balconies, observation platforms, and pyramidal steeples (all of which would adorn the

Metropolitan Tower) were, according to several like-minded critics, essentially nonrentable and thus "wasted" spaces.20 The narrowness of some of these towers, covering only a fraction of the total lot, together with their expensive marble facades and expansive lobbies - the Metro-

politan again being a subsequent example - similarly subtracted from their final profits. Economic facts, compounded by aesthetic "extrava-

gance," noted Steffens and others, thus ensured that each office

building would "ear[n] less and less each year" (54, 61). Thus far, in Steffens's view, the managerial cadre appeared to be

equal to the task of producing skyscrapers that temporarily deflected the challenges of cost-effectiveness. But ultimately they would never be able to stem the rapid increase in the value of the land beneath those structures. Steffens concluded that these heroic efforts to turn architecture into another form of fictitious capital, while evidence of the great character and resourcefulness of capitalists, would inevitably come up against the "inexorable laws of the market" (61). However skillfully the real estate experts balance the leasing price and square footage against the price of the lot, with "an accuracy of calculation that is almost scientific"; however carefully architects balance ornament against rentable space; and however ingeniously the engineers solve the technical limitations of tall buildings, the "permanent financial question [would always be] revived in altered proportions" (61, 48). In the final account, Steffens deduced, there was only one way in which to




offset the depreciation of one's properties: namely, to keep investing in "newer and higher structures" (61). This, in turn, called for more and more tenants. And the only guaranteed way of generating those potential tenants was by demolishing existing building stock: "The competition is almost desperate in some cities where there has been overbuilding in hard times. In New York the stress is such that it is said the only source of tenants is in the continuance of the process, as the tearing down of more old buildings for the next year's crop of new buildings, supplies the tenants for this May's openings" (59). Setting out to rationalize the activity of city building, Steffens unwittingly discerned an irreconcilable and destructive contradiction at the core of New York's developing skyline: its apparent entrapment within a "perpetual motion quest" (46).

Even after the upturn of the general economy around 1898, Steffens would have found further evidence of the disruptive volatility of the New York real estate market, which continued to be punctuated by periodic slumps. The period 1893 to 1918, retrospectively characterized by recent economists as a single cycle in the building economy, was in fact experienced as a succession of sharp and unpredictable fluctuations and oscillations: a series of mini-cycles lasting not twenty or thirty years, but two or three.21 And with each cycle, the life span of the skyscraper appeared to grow shorter. If an injection of capital into the built landscape had been necessary to kick-start the engine of capital accumulation, now only by opening the throttle - in other words, by increasing the rate of demolition and reconstruction - could the engine be kept running. New tax laws would confirm and abet this process by recognizing tall office buildings as "wasting assets" prone to

rapid "economic depreciation," and consequently providing "subsidies, tax breaks and other official inducements" to build and rebuild.22 Thus lubricated with the oil of credit, subsidies, and tax breaks, the skyscraper appeared to function as a vital but unstable component in a

larger economy of planned obsolescence - a pursuit, to use Steffens's own mechanical metaphor, of "perpetual motion." Indeed, some commentators even expected the 1909 tower itself to be a merely provisional structure, to be substituted ultimately for something newer, larger, and more cost-effective. As "the oldest inhabitant" of New York

predicted in a contemporary cartoon, it seemed inevitable that they would "pull down the Metropolitan Tower and make room for a skyscraper" (fig. 3).23




Figure 3. Cartoon clipping, date and publication details unknown, Tower Scrap- book, 1907-20, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Archives, New York.

The fate of several of New York's other skyscrapers would also have served as a constant reminder to the directors of the ephemerality of even the largest and most impressive buildings. In the years after the Metropolitan Life Tower was completed, the contradiction noted by Steffens was rendered poignantly visible in the spectacular razing of structures that had only just been constructed: the Gillender Building (built 1897, demolished 1910) and the Tower Building (1888-1914), to name but two.24 It was not only their sheer size that demanded new technologies and techniques of demolition but also the greater temporal urgency of the process; time taken to demolish an old building was effectively rent lost on the new one. The work of demolition, according to one architectural history of New York, had thus "become a science by 1910," requiring the construction of a wooden exoskeleton, the suspension of a heavy steel netting, and the hiring of as many as 140 men organized in day and night shifts.25 Architects even began to consider the eventual demolition of a skyscraper in their plans for its



METROPOLITAN LIFE 319

construction, making use of building materials that could be rapidly, as well as economically and efficiently, dismantled and reused.26

In the completed portion of his projected book on Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin briefly raises the question of the impact of large-scale demolition on the temporal imagination. "Along with the growth of the big cities," he writes, "there developed the means of razing them to the ground. What visions of the future are evoked by this?"27 The razing of the Gillender Building in 1910 directly provided Scientific American with just such an opportunity to ponder the future of New York's more recent architectural monuments. An archaeological dig among its remains revealed little evidence of metal fatigue or rust. Indeed, in

purely structural terms, the durability of the steel skeleton, and its insulation from erosion and decay under a layer of exterior cladding, meant that it was theoretically conceivable that "the visitor to New York five hundred or a thousand years hence [would] find the skyscrapers of

today in perfect condition." But the practical reality was that the life

span of skyscrapers now seemed to be governed entirely by the economic "doctrine of the 'scrap heap.'" As soon as "there is more

profit in 'scrapping' an existing machine, plant, or building, and

replacing it by another more efficient or of greater capacity" - so this

logic went - it is considered "a matter of sound business policy to send that machine to the 'junk heap' or turn the 'wrecking gang' loose upon that building." If such a doctrine were taken to its logical conclusion, the magazine concluded, then the future ruin of the entire city, as

depicted by "certain imaginative magazine writers," did not seem all that unlikely.28

Liquidity

Scientific American did not need to name the "imaginative magazine writers" who articulated these scenarios; it was enough simply to invoke the trope of the "future ruin" so extensively did their stories saturate the urban culture of the period, and especially the pages of Frank Munsey's pulp magazines. By acquiring his own printing and

distributing facilities, utilizing cheap "wood pulp" paper, minimizing the number of illustrations, and maximizing the number of low-budget advertisements, Munsey was able at the turn of the century to offer his

monthly magazines at the standard price of ten cents (the same cost as the standard weekly premium for a Metropolitan Life industrial



320 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

insurance policy but significantly less than the price of the more established middlebrow magazines such as Collier's, Harper's, Scribner's, and Cosmopolitan).29 The 192-page format of his magazines enabled them to comprise a range of popular subgenres, from pseudoscientific narratives of disaster, invasion, and evolution to low- tech narratives of crime investigation and colonial adventure (Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan being Munsey's most successful discovery). Meanwhile, small enough (at seven by ten inches) to be folded and inserted into an overcoat pocket, they could be purchased from local street-corner vendors and read on el trains, streetcars, and subways, thus becoming part of the fabric of everyday urban life. Their flourish- ing circulation enabled Munsey to locate his editorial offices in the prestigious Flatiron Building, on the southern edge of Madison Square, thereby affording unobstructed views of the Metropolitan Life Tower, while further affirming the metropolitan identity of this new publishing phenomenon.30

One particularly popular story serialized in Munsey's Cavalier Magazine in 1911 was The Second Deluge (fig. 4).31 Written by a scientific journalist for the New York Sun, Garrett P. Serviss, The Second Deluge narrated a global disaster - the earth's collision with a "watery nebula" - from the local standpoint of New York. The impact of the "biblical" flood that ensued was not fully realized until the twenty-fourth and penultimate episode, when the survivors construct a diving bell to explore their "necropolis" in the depths of "Her Ocean Tomb." The first ruin that they discover turns out, not coincidentally, to be the Metropolitan Tower. "The searchlight [of the diving bell], penetrating far through the clear water beneath [it], fell in a circle round a most remarkable object - tall, gaunt, and spectral, with huge black ribs. 'Why, it's the Metropolitan tower, still standing!' cried Amos Blank. 'Who would have believed it possible?'" (368). Before mooring their diving bell to the "beams of the tower" (369), the leader of the survivors, Cosmo Versal, explains how the edifice had remained so upright under the weight of twenty thousand feet of water: "Although it was built so long ago [in the era of skyscrapers], it was made immensely strong, and well braced, and ... it has been favored by the very density of that which now surrounds it, and which tends to buoy it up and hold it steady. But you observe that it has been stripped of the covering of stone" (368).

Such flood fantasies were especially prevalent in the early years of science fiction. But resituated alongside the economic debates outlined



METROPOLITAN LIFE 32 1

Figure 4. Illustration from Garrett P. Serviss, Second Deluge (1912), serialized in Amazing Stories, 1926-7, Foundation Archive of Science Fiction, University of Liverpool, England.

above, they might be read as representations of the actual flow of capital across the urban landscape. In nonfiction accounts of the building of New York, the natural - and especially the "oceanic" - sublime was already becoming one of the principal modes for register- ing the immensity and intensity of development and demolition. In "The Remaking of New York," a nonfiction article published in 1912 in Munsey Magazine (the flagship of the magazine fleet), Hugh Thomp- son used the oceanic metaphor to describe the way in which New York, lacking a "city plan such as attended the birth of Washington [D.C.]," has consequently "followed the flow of trade currents." Since the early nineteenth century, its development has thus been "like the ocean. It rises and falls with certain regularity, but once in a while a mighty storm arises and sweeps everything before it. New York has been struck again and again by these upheavals, which have changed the whole face




of the city map." The outcome of this latest upheaval, Thompson concludes (borrowing his words from an earlier commentator), was that New York was already becoming once again "a city of modern ruins, a perfect Baalbec of a day's growth and a day's dilapidation."32 Urban development, conceived here as a tide of capital on which stocks and assets are floated, is thus considered not simply as a force for renewal and regeneration but also as a harbinger of premature, and perhaps picturesque, ruin. Manhattan appeared already to be on the verge of becoming "antique," its ruins foreshadowed as well as erased with every act of demolition and reconstruction.

The association between the periodic overflowing of oceans and the periodic overflowing of capital is articulated more explicitly in Thomas Vivian and Grena Bennett's "The Tilting Island," published in a rival magazine, Everybody's, in 1909. In this story, the gradual sinking of the downtown portion of Manhattan into the harbor, until "the tallest tower . . . [disappeared] below the sea," is presented as the convergence of subterranean and man-made forces, of physical geology and capitalist geography. Witnessing the disaster at first hand, the Columbia geology professor Heinrich Herman insists on a measured deduction of its

precise causes. However vast this catastrophe may appear, he cannot attribute it entirely to a single natural cause, namely the fault line in the

geological crust of the island. A more immediate cause is in fact to be found in the recent construction boom in the downtown district: namely, the sheer burden of urban capital - the weight of the "twenty stories of steel, thirty stories, forty stories . . . [which] we have massed on [one] end" of the island, and which have compounded this hitherto undiscovered fault line: "Ah, they could not have believed it - our ancestors! Like Babel we have built. Who thought that we little things could have made an island, a whole island tilt? . . . That is the hand of man on the edge of the plate. Do you see now?"33

Far from being a purely literary fancy, the specter of sinking islands was also invoked in contemporary debates about the skyscraper. In a 1909 newspaper article, the conservative architect Daniel Wiles cited the example of the Metropolitan Life Tower, along with the evidence of

geologists, to warn that if such towers continued to be constructed "over the fragile strata of rock upon which the city is built[,] the whole would give way to the strain and an awful catastrophe would result" -

an outcome humorously depicted in a cartoon published on the cover of

Life magazine in 1902, depicting the sinking of the entire island of Manhattan (fig. 5).34 As a strict limit was already imposed on the load




Figure 5. "Sightseeing in 1920." Cover of Life Magazine 39, no. 1006 (February 6, 1902): 101. Caption: "That depression down there is where New York City stood. But with all its skyscrapers and underground tunnels it suddenly sank one day and they haven't been able to find it since."

per square foot of individual buildings (if not yet on their overall height), these premonitions might have been intended as more general allegories about the sheer accumulation of capital invested in the city's physical infrastructure as a whole. Fiction and nonfiction texts alike thus employed exaggerated imagery to convey the scale and impact of urban processes - rendering them equivalent to, or even greater than, catastrophic processes of nature. The liquidity of capital, its apparent tendency to overaccumulate and spill over onto the terrain of urban construction, was imagined as a force comparable to that of tidal waves, floods, and earthquakes. Through such rhetoric and imagery, Progressive Era writers thus presented these economic forces as entirely intelligible, if not exactly controllable.

Reordering the City

While "Tilting Island" and Second Deluge (along with the Wiles article and the Life cartoon) focus on the various causes (economic,




astronomical, or geological) of urban destruction, in many "scientific romances" the catastrophe is underdetermined, remaining largely obscure to its characters. In these fictions the catastrophe serves merely as a pretext for radically reimagining the various phenomena of contemporary urban life, an opportunity to turn its racial, socioeconomic, and gender relations upside down.

Indeed, in the case of Darkness and Dawn (1914), arguably the very prototype for this mode of future anteriority, and certainly the most influential postapocalyptic epic to be published in Munsey's various magazines, the destruction of the city has occurred prior to the

inception of the narrative itself. This 103-episode epic - written by the socialist activist and former New York insurance clerk George Allan England, serialized in Munsey's Cavalier and Scrap Book in 1911 under the title "The Last New Yorkers: A Weird Story of Love and Adventure in the Ruins of a Fallen Metropolis," and syndicated in various newspapers in 1912 - opens with the hero and heroine, the consultant engineer Allan Stern and his stenographer, Beatrice, awak- ening from centuries of suspended animation on the forty-eighth floor of the Metropolitan Life Tower.35 Climbing up to the "observation-

platform" (13) and "peer[ing]" out "over the vast expanses of the city," they surmise that they are the only survivors of some nameless catastrophe, some immense "world-ruin."

Nowhere . . . was any slightest sign of life to be discerned. Nowhere a thread of smoke arose; nowhere a sound echoed upward.

Dead lay the city, between its rivers, whereon now no sail glinted in the

sunlight, no tug puffed vehemently with plumy jets of steam, no liner idled at anchor or nosed its slow course out to sea. (19-20)

It was a landscape, the narrator continued, in which the "future, if any such there may be, must rise from the ashes of a crumbling past" (65).

Thrown into this deep future, this postapocalyptic "mausoleum of civilization" (19), Allan and Beatrice struggle in subsequent episodes not only to survive but also to comprehend its utter transformation: the

silencing of its usual noises, the concealment of its streets and

neighborhoods by the enveloping forest, the erasure of Central Park itself (as it is no longer possible to tell exactly "where it begins or ends" [20]), along with the absence of any clue as to what might have brought about its downfall. Even Madison Square has been altered almost beyond recognition. They would have remembered the square as a vital




site of sociability during the Progressive Era; according to recent urban historians, it had "serv[ed] briefly as [a] public center" for theater, concerts, and victory parades, before being supplanted in the 1910s by Times Square.36 It had also emerged as a commercial hub for midtown shoppers, with the opening of department stores and shopping arcades, including the marble arcade located on the ground floor of Metropoli- tan Life's own Home Office building (fig. 6). Those crowds have now all been cleared away, along with any trace of the public displays and market activity that once flourished there, as the square has long since been reclaimed by nature (fig. 7). Indeed, so many centuries have

elapsed since nature "reasserted [its] dominance" (42-43) that some of the consumer "durables" of that earlier age would appear to have far exceeded their sell-by date. Various fragments of luxury merchandise recovered from the decaying catacombs of the Metropolitan's arcade crumble to dust at the touch of Allan's finger (32-37), an exaggerated instance of the increasingly planned obsolescence of commodities.

Only the essentials - such as a few bottles of water, jars of food, and assorted leather goods - have remained intact. These latter items, preserving an imperishable remainder of use value, allow him to forge an economy of creative reuse, perhaps intended by the author (an activist and candidate for the Socialist Party at that time) as an alternative to the conspicuous waste and materialist excesses of consumer capitalism. "Use," not exchange, is Allan's "first consideration now" (67).37

While Allan is engaged on his heroic forays for equipment and

supplies among the uncanny commercial spaces of the "fallen metropolis," Beatrice has assumed a rather different role. Eager, "like the true woman she was," to make "a real home out of the barren desolation of the fifth floor offices" (66), she rarely accompanies him, instead

devoting herself to the indoor chores that defined domestic woman- hood: garment making, cooking, and cleaning.38 Despite the serious- ness of their situation, Allan at least knows that the "housekeeping treasures" he brings back to the tower - "jars of edibles," "coffee and salt," "cups and plates and a still serviceable lamp" - will delight her

(61-62). The contrasts between her former and present lives are

striking. Prior to the apocalypse, as a stenographer in the tower she would have gained some degree of economic, cultural, and sexual freedom; indeed, Metropolitan Life led the way in recruiting from the ranks of lower-middle-class, nonimmigrant, unmarried women, who




Figure 6. Marble arcade of Metropolitan Life Insurance Home Office Building, <4four hundred feet, extending from Madison Avenue to Fourth Avenue." Source: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (1908), opposite 34.

Figure 7. Allan and Beatrice in Madison Park, hunted by pack of wolves. The ruin of the Metropolitan Life Tower is in the background. Illustration from George Allan England, Darkness and Dawn, opposite 204.




came to be known as the "Metropolitan Belles." Outnumbering the company's male employees by 1900, these file clerks, telephone operators, and stenographers were earning wages that granted them, if not complete independence, at least the provisional and immediate freedoms of shopping and theatergoing.39 But once cast out from the "nexus of ... society" by the ensuing catastrophe (65), and confronted with the daily challenges of survival, Beatrice is obliged to return to the gendered division of labor and the sexual imperative of premarital chastity that had prevailed among the middle classes of the nineteenth century. Just as he would have to rely on her for domestic sustenance, so too would she need "his protection as never since the world began had woman needed man," and thus "all consciousness of their former relationship - employer and employed" had entirely "vanished" (17) (fig. 8).

While noting that "evidently feminism is a back number in 2920," the literary critic of the socialist New Review excused England's "curiou[s] . . . sentiments on sex relationships" as merely a digression from, or dilution of, the text's otherwise commendable "political convictions."40 But in England's narrative they are in fact intimately connected, triangulated through a third category, that of race. Only by revitalizing and revealing their "true" gender traits will they be able to

vanquish the "Horde" - that monstrous offspring of centuries of misce-

genation and degeneration among the nonwhite and ape populations that had also survived the catastrophe and were now besieging them in the Metropolitan Life Tower. Overturning the gains made by early- twentieth-century feminists thus becomes the first step toward eluding the threatened extinction of the Anglo-Saxon race and, ultimately, in the final episodes, building a socialist Utopia.41

The containment of sexual and racial threats was thus fundamental both to England's utopian-socialist vision and to his success as a pulp fiction author.42 But such reactionary "solutions" did not discourage certain other authors from reappropriating the postapocalyptic narrative toward more radical ends, thereby articulating a utopian-socialist vision of the future that transcended hierarchies of class, race, and gender simultaneously. In W. E. B. Du Bois's contemporaneous short story "The Comet," the cosmic catastrophe that strikes New York - indis-

criminately exterminating black and white, blue- and white-collar, male and female alike - has the effect of revealing not the latent racial traits of its two surviving heroes, but rather the arbitrariness and artificiality




Figure 8. In the ruins of the Metropolitan Opera House, Allan and Beatrice discover a vault containing a phonograph player and a recording of a marriage ceremony. Beatrice has by now largely been reduced to the role of passive observer. Illustration from England, Darkness and Dawn, frontispiece.

of the very notion of racial difference itself.43 Prior to the collision with the comet's tail, Jim, a black messenger for a Wall Street bank, had been subjected to a regime of exploitation and exclusion. But as the only male inhabitant to survive the collision, on account of his assignment to the bank's underground vaults, he reemerges to find himself in possession of the entire city, free to wander up Fifth Avenue and enter the "gorgeous, ghost-haunted halls" of a "famous hostelry" that "yesterday . . . would not have served me" (258). When he encounters the only other survivor, Julia, the privileged white daughter of a Metropolitan Life insurance executive, racial (and class) assump- tions are gradually cast aside. She does not even notice "that he was a Negro," nor does he think "of her as white" (259). Julia thus overcomes her fears of black "manhood," despite a brief moment of anxiety triggered by the sight of a telephone earpiece, whose phallic shape, "wide and black, pimpled with usage," initially "terrifie[s]" her (263).




Finally, lacking the sexual patience of England's Allan and Beatrice, Jim and Julia immediately ascend to the roof of the Metropolitan Tower, a site associated in the 1910s with illicit promiscuity.44 Standing up there under the "dream[y] . . . twilight," she could no longer consider him "a thing apart, a creature below, a strange outcast of another clime and blood," but instead "saw him glorified ... her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God and great All-Father of the race to be" (267, 269) - while she herself has become "primal woman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life" (269). Before they can consummate their brief postapocalyptic courtship, however - or rather while they are consummating it (given the allusive references to how Jim shoots off "rocket after rocket into the unanswering darkness" and how the surge of "the swift elevators shooting upward . . . made the great tower tremble" [269, 271]) - they are interrupted by the arrival of rescuers from outside the city, including Julia's father and suitor, an incipient lynch mob, and finally Jim's own wife carrying their dead child. The

catastrophe turns out to have been confined to New York City, and the vision of a world without racial and class distinctions to have been chimerical.

Published in 1920 as the final chapter of Darkwater, "The Comet" resonates with many of the themes articulated throughout that collec- tion, in its fiction, poetic, and nonfiction chapters. Jim's memory of the intricate network of racial discrimination that had barred him from certain hotels and restaurants before the disaster dramatizes Du Bois's

sociological observation in the preceding chapter regarding the "Veil" -

"tenuous, intangible," yet real - that descends over the city, separating Harlem, the "dark city of fifty thousand," from the remainder of the city (245, 244). Jim's commandeering of a Ford to drive along Central Park in search of survivors similarly calls to mind Du Bois's earlier recollection of a white man in that park who was visibly enraged by the mere sight of "black folk [riding] by in a motor car" (33). Even the

apocalyptic phrases with which Jim and Julia embrace each other echo Du Bois's own declarations of faith elsewhere in the book: the repeated messianic references to the figure of a "Black Christ," to the coming millennium of human "brotherhood," and to the role of "primal woman" in ushering in that new era. These various black messiahs of Darkwater inevitably find themselves denied, rejected, or even lynched.45 Yet ultimately Du Bois's purpose is less to outline some postmillennial vision of racial transcendence than to expose the injustices of the




present. Thus, what is foregrounded in "The Comet" is Jim and Julia's dramatic realization that seemingly fixed racial distinctions could disappear in an instant - indeed, that the very survival of humanity requires the violation of that most entrenched of racial proscriptions: interracial sex.

The choice of the Metropolitan Tower as the site of this short-lived yet powerful scene of secular "Revelation" is similarly overdetermined. As a socialist as well as Pan-Africanist, Du Bois may have intended the headquarters of one of the leading companies in the city to stand in for the larger economic order of urbanized capitalism, which perpetuates distinctions between "black and white," as between "rich and poor" (121). More specifically, he might have been targeting Metropolitan Life itself, for its de facto discrimination against African American customers, whom it restricted to substandard policies.46 But Du Bois's preceding chapter also acknowledges his awe for the sublime "beauty of the Manhattan skyline," and in particular the "vast grace of that Cathedral of the Purchased and Purchasing Poor, topping the world and pointing higher" (243-44).47 Indeed, at the moment of Jim and Julia's union, the tower assumes an almost mystical and metaphysical power. No longer a place of business, it becomes a divine vessel through which they are able to channel the cosmic forces impelling them toward their apparent postracial destiny. Ultimately, whatever its precise motivation, Du Bois's selection of the Metropolitan for his scene of racial transcendence suggests an awareness of, and perhaps a deliberate inversion of, the racial politics of the dominant science fiction authors of the Munsey era.48 Just as it takes a deluge to make Garrett Serviss's protagonists realize the monumental solidity of a skyscraper, and a geological disaster for George Allan England's to appreciate the universal significance of their innate racial traits, so too does it take the force of a comet to engender an epiphany in Du Bois's white heroine. Nothing less than a terrestrial collision, Du Bois ironically implies, would be sufficient to strip away the veil of racial (as well as economic and sexual) domination from modern urban life.

Anterior Futures

Fictions of displacement into the future anterior provided an occasion for overturning not only social relations of gender and race but also patterns of time and duration. The status quo ante, in which the life




span of skyscrapers appeared to have become even briefer than that of the houses and churches they replaced, will now have been inverted. It is significant that in the deep future of England's Darkness and Dawn only the tallest, most speculative buildings have survived. From Allan and Beatrice's panoramic viewpoint atop the tower, those "lolling mast[s] of steel," representing the skeletons of ancient skyscrapers, were the sole discernible objects "thrust[ing] up from the desolation" of foliage and detritus (20). While "almost all" of the residential buildings uptown had "crumbled in upon themselves," it is those much taller commercial structures located downtown and midtown - the Park Row, the Singer, and the Woolworth, and of course the Metropolitan Life itself - that have surprisingly withstood the forces of corrosion (20). In

spite of the widespread calculations of the shortened life expectancy of office buildings, it was those very structures that had remained standing, albeit in varying degrees of ruin.

The unexpected afterlife of the skyscraper in the postapocalypse would have introduced a kind of deviation - or "warp" - in the temporal flux that had apparently characterized urban modernity. For critics and commentators of the period, as well as more recent historians, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appeared to mark the moment when time itself, traditionally grounded in the natural rhythms of the sun and seasons, was radically uprooted. Its source of authority transplanted from the natural to the mechanical, time henceforth consisted of standardized and abstract units that could be synchronized, measured, allocated, and exchanged. With the introduction of "railroad zones" in 1883, this emergent notion of time could theoretically be

imposed across the continent, and with the completion of the Pacific

telegraph in 1903, it could be imposed across the globe.49 But it was within the modern city, and more specifically in the advanced clock

systems installed in modern office buildings like the Metropolitan Life Tower, that the mechanization of time was manifested with particular intensity and immediacy. The Metropolitan's "slave clock," in addition to disciplining its own male and female employees through the various

gongs and bells resounding through its interior, was also connected to the "largest four-dial tower clock in the world" and wired to a "special transmitter" that enabled the searchlight to flash "minute impulses" in "exact synchronism," thereby broadcasting the "fast-fleeting minutes of life" to "over one-sixteenth of the entire population of the United States," according to the company's own commemorative publication.50




From the city's "prison[s]" to the "open sea," one aspiring poet wrote, this "Clock in the Air" was an inescapable presence in the lives of New Yorkers. It was, another reported, "almost synonymous with time itself." Still others referred to "Metropolitan time," as one would "railroad time," "daylight savings time," or "Western Union time."51 But one did not even have to look in the direction of Madison Square to sense the intensification of temporal experience; it was rendered concrete in the very physical fabric of the city as a whole. Steffens's comments about the growing pressure to accelerate the turnover of capital would be reiterated with increasing regularity by visitors from abroad. The French novelist Paul Morand would note how New York's "buildings have no past and no future either," while some of its "districts alter their appearance in one season. . . . Everything goes fast."52 With rounds of construction and reconstruction growing ever more frequent, the significance of architecture could no longer be found in the traditional notion of a "life cycle," whereby buildings might be allowed to evolve gradually from gestation through maturity to old age.53 Time - unmoored from such premodern certainties and reduced to mechanical chimes, flashing searchlights, and recurrent demolitions - appeared to rush forward "in advance of itself."54

The question in effect raised by "scientific romances" concerned what kind of temporal order would supplant this "homogeneous empty time" of capitalist modernity. Whereas the Utopian novels of the period magically overcame the contradictions of the present by transporting their readers into timeless cities of the future, and the cataclysmic novel resolved those contradictions in lurid scenes of urban destruction, the science fiction of future ruin articulated a third possibility, a more complex kind of temporal outcome.55 Here, under the pressure of the accelerating pace of urban life, and the intensified rate of building turnover, time would not culminate in perfection or destruction, but rather would begin to unravel out of control.56 The continuous thread that linked the past, present, and future would become untied, allowing time to run off in multiple directions. It is in an attempt to convey this unsettling juxtaposition of futurity and antiquity (which cannot quite be reduced to such current terms of urban and cultural criticism as David Harvey's "time-space compression," Stephen Kern's collapse of the past into a "synchronous present," or Fredric Jameson's "crisis of historicity") that I resort here to the tense or mood of the "future anterior."57 In the future anterior, time would run simultaneously




forward and backward, as if the city was becoming at once modern and archaic, an object of both anticipation and retrospection, a site for futurology and archaeology. Time itself thus appears to be pulled in opposite directions. The violent force of this temporal strain is rendered disturbingly palpable to Allan and Beatrice when they hear one of the "half-ton hands" of the Metropolitan clock becoming dislodged from the tower and plummeting into the street below. The "vast, gaping canon of blackness" carved out by the clock hand, "a yawning gash forty feet long and ten or twelve broad, with roughly jagged edges, leading down into unfathomed depths below," might be read as marking the dislocation of time in the postapocalyptic city (85).

It was not only in Darkness and Dawn that the clock of the

Metropolitan Life expressed a sense that time was somehow getting out of hand. New York's daily newspapers were also circulating rumors of its cataclysmic effects. According to one, a crowd of pedestrians at street level were almost killed by masonry falling from the clock face. Another reported collisions in the street, caused as distracted locals looked up to admire the newly installed timepiece.58 In Murray Leinster's "Runaway Skyscraper," published in Munsey's Argosy in 1919, an even stranger temporal catastrophe befalls the famous clock. Two Metropolitan Life employees, again an engineer and his stenographer, Arthur and Estelle, realize something is amiss when the dials of its clock begin to revolve counterclockwise: "The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backward. It was not a graceful proceeding. The hands had been moving onward in their customary deliberate fashion, slowly and thoughtfully, but sud-

denly the people in the offices near the clock's face heard an ominous

creaking and groaning. There was a slight hardly discernible shiver

through the tower, and then something gave with a crash. The big hands on the clock began to move backward."59 As this "unwinding" of time

gathers pace, Arthur, Estelle, and the other employees begin to witness the increasingly rapid unbuilding of the city. First, the crowds thin out and electric lights expire, and then- just like the "flickering" of a

"motion-picture" - the cityscape is progressively dismantled, "story by story," layer by layer, until the Metropolitan is surrounded by a forest

populated by pre-Columbian Native Americans (fig. 9). In response to the temporal disorder in which they find themselves, the occupants of the tower set about dismantling class relations too. Corporate hierarchies are repudiated, as the blue-collar workers in the tower now

emerge as the most competent leaders.




Figure 9. Illustration from Murray Leinster, "The Runaway Skyscraper," The Argosy (February 22, 1919).

Leinster's "motion-picture" metaphor alludes here to the practice, common from the turn of the century, of manipulating the speed and direction of a film in an attempt to conjure certain special temporal effects. The particular challenges of representing urban themes such as skyscraper construction provided early actuality filmmakers with a perfect opportunity to experiment with these new screen practices. One practice involved the introduction of a time lapse, a predetermined interval of time inserted between frames. When projected at the normal rate (then, usually fifteen frames per second), a time-lapse film could thereby exaggerate the speed with which a construction crew could erect a new building. A by-product of this cinematic trick of accelerating time was an exacerbation of the already jerky movements of traffic and pedestrians that happened to enter the frame: that "flickering" impression to which Leinster was referring. In April 1901 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company applied the time-lapse technique to a scene not of construction, but of demolition. The razing of the well-




known Star Theater on Broadway and Thirteenth Street, a project that took approximately thirty days in real time, was condensed into an eighty-second film that was widely exhibited that year (fig. 10). Audiences, moreover, did not have to wait for the dust to settle, and construction crews to arrive, to witness the spectacle of rebuilding. Another common technique improvised during this period, albeit one performed by projectionists rather than by cinematographers, was to reverse the direction of the film, thereby transforming depictions of destruction into anticipations of (re)construction - or vice versa. This kind of playful inversion of normal temporal processes, made famous by the Lumiere brothers in their 1895 film Demolition d'un mur, continued to fascinate spectators in American nickelodeons.60 Further- more, the two techniques tended to go hand in hand. The catalog issued

by American Mutoscope and Biograph stipulated that exhibitors of its

time-lapse film should reverse the direction once they reached the end, thus the title "Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theater."61

It is this combination of time-lapse and backward projection that Leinster transposes into the realm of science fiction, in the process creating a landscape of deconstructed buildings. But in "Runaway Skyscraper," an additional layer of temporal complexity is introduced

by the fact that while the remainder of the city is rapidly dismantled, the Metropolitan Life Tower itself remains intact, and indeed the actions of its occupants continue to take place in real time. While some science fiction critics have read this as a flaw on Leinster's part, this simultaneous bidirectionality of time is in fact fully consistent with the notion of future anteriority. Time itself can be made to appear - both in the cinema and in the city at large - to run forward and backward

simultaneously, according to the contradictory temporal logic (or illogic) of the future anterior. Ultimately, for film audiences and science fiction readers alike, the attraction of such unfamiliar visions lay in the enchantment of seeing one's own city in a strange new light, of

perceiving in a few instants urban processes usually protracted over

longer periods. In other words, the future anterior implied another way of looking, not only at social relations of gender and race but also at the

temporal dimensions of the built environment itself. If "Runaway Skyscraper" imagines a future displaced into the distant

past, Darkness and Dawn, in contrast, displaces the past into the distant future. The epoch in which Allan and Beatrice awake is marked not by radical new developments (secret weapons or technological discover-




Figure 10. "Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theater" (F. S. Armitage, 1902), American Mutoscope & Biograph Company (Source: Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., [LC 1874]; stills extracted and mounted by author).

ies), but by the persistence of architectural relics from an earlier period. Not all of New York will have been wiped out, washed away, or overgrown; there will still remain, as Allan himself remarks, the "works of man," glorious "even in their overthrow" (60). All ruins, by definition, resist the simple temporalities of the present or perfect tense. As relics of the past persisting into the present, they have convention- ally been defined (at least from the eighteenth century onward) as paradoxical configurations of ongoing decline and growth, decomposi- tion and recomposition, erosion and accretion, and thus the moment one intervenes to preserve them, they cease to be "ruins" per se. The Metropolitan Tower, as a site of gradual disintegration (illustrated in the episode of its falling clock hand) and also blossoming vegetation




(signified by the foliage that encrusts its limestone), exemplifies this unstable equilibrium.62 Like a Gothic or classical ruin, it enfolds within itself - to use Simmel's terms - both the inexorable corrosion of the "human will" to architectural verticality by the downward force of physics and also the emergence - through that very reconfiguration of spirit and nature - of a "new whole ... a [distinct] unity."63 But its status as a future ruin stretches (or twists) this temporal tension further. To be projected into the future only to discover that buildings one has only just seen completed will by now have become ancient ruins is to have one's very notion of the gradual linear unfolding of time dis-

rupted. It is expressions of temporal confusion such as these, I have

argued here, that were analogous and related to descriptions of the confused temporality of urban construction and demolition during the same period. "With the upheaval of the market economy," Benjamin wrote of the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, but with implications for our understandings of the culture of architecture in early-twentieth- century New York, "we begin to recognize the monuments of the

bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled."64 Just as Benjamin endeavored to make sense of the premature ruins of

the arcades, so too do the protagonists of postapocalyptic narratives who discover the remains of modern skyscrapers. These architectural relics, which generally constitute the central subject of those narratives, require sophisticated hermeneutic skills on the part of the explorers or survivors who encounter them and who attempt to reconstruct their

meaning and uses. The fragments of these buildings appear not only to have remained standing for centuries but also to have preserved the secrets of the ancient civilization that had originally erected them. Not all characters, to be sure, are as skillful as Allan and Beatrice at

decoding those secrets. Taken out of context, New York's ruins are

regularly and humorously misinterpreted - imagined to be something other than what they are, or were - an effect that might be termed "hermeneutic estrangement." The primitive gangs who inhabit

postapocalyptic New York in Van Tassel Sutphen's Doomsman (1906) misconstrue its ruins: the Flatiron Building is taken to be a sacred

temple, while an abandoned electrical plant is confused with a "reli-

gious shrine."65 Inscriptions and epigraphs on monuments, often par- tially erased or historically obscure, lead to similarly mystified conclu- sions. Nevertheless, the activity of scrutinizing and discerning the hidden or recalcitrant meanings of a ruin, of reconstructing the totality




of a culture from its remaining fragments, is aided by certain clues. In Darkness and Dawn, it is the discovery of an underground crypt of a neo-Gothic cathedral just outside the city, a kind of "time capsule" in which all the secrets of early-twentieth-century metropolitan culture have been perfectly preserved (480; fig. 8). In The Doomsman, the hermeneutic task is facilitated by the chance discovery not only of some of the great books of the former civilization ("the serried shelves of books . . . and dusty tomes [in which] were hidden the ... secrets of the mighty past") but also by more banal, everyday artifacts.66 Like the skyscrapers themselves, these are presented as archaeological curiosi- ties that might reveal some essential or lost "truth" about American urbanism.

In order for them to constitute this crucial link to the ancient past, structures such as the Metropolitan Life Tower will by necessity have withstood the test of time. That is, they will have transcended their origins as commonplace business buildings - overcome their prior status (described by Steffens) as provisional and expendable investments, to be demolished and replaced in the interests of accelerating the turnover of capital - and finally acquired an aura of imperishability as well as fragility, persistence as well as transience. Previously prevented from growing old, they will now have accrued a past, a patina of age. And as such they could function not only as accidental "time capsules" preserving the historical and everyday traces of capitalist urbanism but also as legitimate and appropriate monuments to the culture as a whole. Despite the earlier prejudices of John Ruskin (among other theorists of the ruin) against structures of steel, iron, and glass - materials that do not "properly" register the effects of time - these skyscrapers could no longer be excluded from the "Lamp of Memory "67 Writing in Scribner's in 1909, the leading architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler went as far as to invoke Ruskin himself in an attempt to explain how, if the era of corporate capitalism were to come to an end, the office buildings it had produced would stand as testimony to it. Future historians might find economic meaning in those surviving structures, as contemporary Ruskinians find spiritual meaning in the ruined Gothic cathedrals of the thirteenth century: "These 'skeletons' of our building, after the veneer of masonry had fallen from them, and they were left to assert themselves in their original crudity and starkness, before returning altogether to oxide of iron, might still be, in the majestic Ruskinian phrase, 'the only witnesses that remained to us of the faith and fear of




nations,' the faith in the dollar toward which they so plainly aspired, the fear of 'the hell of not making money.'"68

Not only an aesthetically minded critic such as Schuyler but even a pragmatic critic like Lincoln Steffens could concede the enduring power of the skyscraper as ruin. In the essay with which we began, Steffens briefly digressed from the practical issues of skyscraper building to suggest, in a science fiction vein, that the new office building "will remain, bearing in its form and plan the traces of its uses" - indeed, ultimately, those traces "may be finally the only remnants of the other creations of modern business enterprise, the only legible chapter of the common tale" (38).

Transformed into an archaic ruin, the skyscraper thus embodied a certain doubleness: its tragic relegation to the status of disposable commodity and yet its ironic triumph in outlasting and thereby memorializing the era of capitalist modernity. At the same time that it resonated with Henry James's critique of the destructive upheavals wrought by the real estate market, it also betrayed a fascination with how such commercial structures might in fact survive as monuments, with all that they might reveal to future generations about the culture and economy that had built them. By invoking the capacity of a ruin to maintain a stable equilibrium between the forces of disintegration and cohesion, such depictions thus conjured up the possibility of New York

finally acquiring a history and a sense of historicity.

NOTES

Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the Humanities Center, Johns

Hopkins University; the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University; the Gotham Center's Conference on New York City History, CUNY; the Program of American Studies at Wayne State University; and the Mass Culture and Social History workshops at the University of Chicago. I would like to thank the following for responding to those earlier drafts or presentations: Neil Harris, Bill Brown, Amy Dru Stanley, Neil Hertz, Nigel Wheatley, Max Page, Carol Willis, Brian Zimmerman, Sabine Haenni, Tom Mix Hill, Paula Amad, Marita Sturken, and the anonymous readers for American Quarterly. Erica Hannickel and Eric Johnson

provided invaluable research assistance in the final stages. Finally, I would like to

acknowledge the archival assistance provided by Andy Sawyer at the Foundation Archive of Science Fiction, University of Liverpool, England (abbreviated hereafter as

FASF), and Daniel May at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Archives, New York (hereafter MLICA).




1 . Earlier writers who did imagine the desolation of New York tended to narrate the events leading up to its destruction rather than explore its postapocalyptic aftermath: see, for example, Edmund Ruffin, Anticipations of the Future, to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1860); Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (1890; Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960); and Joaquin Miller, The Destruction of Gotham (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1886). One exception was John Ames Mitchell, The Last American: A Fragment from the Journal of Khan- li (New York: Frederick A. Stokes and Brother, 1889). For a more detailed study of these texts, see my dissertation, "Cities in Ruin: Urban Apocalyptic in American Culture, 1790-1920" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2002), 125-74.

2. Max Page discusses the initiatives of New York's older elites in establishing civic museums and advocating preservation as responses to the dehistoricizing effects of real estate in The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Ann Douglas similarly situates the cultural flux and creativity of 1920s New York against the backdrop of the real estate boom of that decade in Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), esp. 434-61. David Scobey shows how the spatial solutions of Gilded Age urban planning, advocated by both genteel reformers and machine politicians, were prompted by the way in which the real estate market "annihilated both space and time, dissolving all traces of locality and legacy in a sublime flux, creating a landscape that was at once monumental and provisional, centralized but endlessly dislocated" {Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002], 87). American historians, geographers, and critics have identified a similar quality of "placelessness" in other cities and periods, such as postwar Los Angeles; see Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London: Verso, 1997) and Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

3. Henry James, The American Scene (1907; Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1994), 60- 61, 63. In Creative Destruction of Manhattan, Max Page argues that James's concerns about the dissolution of the past in the cauldron of construction were shared by growing numbers of civic-minded elites during the early decades of the century. Their conclusion was that the only kind of "history" that could coexist with the irresistible force of the real estate market was a musealized version superimposed on the surface of the city by an emergent coalition of historical preservationists, museum archivists, and tree-planting advocates. Left to its own devices, in other words, the New York landscape would apparently have become a place entirely stripped of any residues of time. See also the discussion of The American Scene in Kevin McNamara, Urban Verbs: Arts and Discourses of the American City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 14-55 et passim.

4. "Old and New New York" was the title of a 1910 Alfred Stieglitz photograph. 5. Georg Simmel, "The Ruin" (1911), in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and

Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 261. 6. The term "creative destruction" was coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter

by 1942 to refer to capitalism's capacity to "incessantly" reproduce itself by clearing away older ideas, technologies, and businesses and thereby making way for newer ones; see Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), 81-86. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s, in particular in the work of Marshall Berman and David Harvey, that the term came to refer more specifically to the rending of the urban fabric itself. See Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The




Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983); Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), chaps. 1, 5, 6, 8; originally published in two volumes: Consciousness and the Urban Experience and The Urbanization of Capital (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). In more recent years the concept has become somewhat blurred, as it has been employed as a catchall term loosely applied to divergent historical and national contexts, from Baron Haussmann's Paris to Robert Moses's New York, often without attending fully to the differences in economic and political conditions among cities, or else posited as an inherent trait of certain cities (typically New York), without attending to the often-

prolonged hiatuses in construction there. In this article, I will forego that term, instead

bringing into play the various phrases - such as the "perpetual motion quest," the "doctrine of the scrap heap," or the "substitution of new machines for old machines" -

that were employed by writers at the time. 7. Edward Soja, building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, has especially sought to

encourage this spatial turn, in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), and Thirdspace: Journeys to Los

Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). 8. It was in terms of insurance in force that Metropolitan Life was the nation s

largest; see "More Assurance in Force than Any Other Company in the World," advertisement in Assurance Convention Number (1912), MLICA, box H-ll (Adver- tisements, 1900-1920); and Louis I. Dublin, A Family of Thirty Million: The Story of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (New York: Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., 1943), 55.

9. "Skyscraping Up to Date," Architectural Record 23 (January 1908): 74-75. 10. See, for example, "The Metropolitan Tower," American Architect 96 (October

1909): 125-29, and "A Campanile Seven Hundred Feet High," Scientific American, May 1908, 310. For a more recent discussion of the architectural and technical solutions introduced by the Metropolitan Life Tower, see Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913 (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1996), 361-66. 11. Kenneth Turney Gibbs, Business Architectural Imagery in America, 1870-1930

(Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984), chap. 7, "A Philanthropic Image for Business Architecture."

12. Prompted by a series of muckraking articles in the New York World, the

"Armstrong Committee" of the New York Senate and Assembly was concerned both with these kinds of illegal practices and with the sheer size of the "Big Three" insurance corporations; see Morton Keller, The Life Insurance Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 245-64.

13. Metropolitan Life did not implement a tontine policy (one that paid high dividends to policy holders, provided they were still alive at the end of a stated period), but it did employ various other strategies to tempt new immigrant workers away from their local fraternal organizations, for example, sending out company "agents" who would make weekly door-to-door calls, affect sympathy for their problems, and

generally simulate the familiarity of their former insurers. On the history and structure of those prior immigrant organizations, the mutual-benefit associations and the

landsmanshaft societies, see Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), 112-15.

14. Ambrose Bierce, "Ashes of the Beacon: An Historical Monograph Written in 4930," San Francisco Examiner, February 26, 1905, reprinted in Bierce, The Fall of the

Republic and Other Political Satires, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Knoxville:




University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 20; there was some overlap between this article and Bierce's "Insurance in Ancient America" (Cosmopolitan Magazine, September 1906). Bierce's hostility toward the insurance industry in fact predated the Armstrong investigation; see his prose articles on insurance abuses: "Prattle," Examiner, February 17, 1889, and "Passing Show," Examiner and New York Journal, October 28, 1900, reprinted in Fall of the Republic, as "The Insurance Folly," and "Insurance and Crime," respectively, 182-84, 184-85.

15. The verb muckrake was not coined until 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt referred to these investigative journalists in a speech to the Gridiron Club, Washington, D.C.

16. Lincoln Steflens, The Modern Business Building, Scrwner s Magazine 22 (July 1897): 37, 61, 46 (hereafter cited in text). From his extensive statistical research, Mannuel Gottlieb has pinpointed 1 893 as marking the beginning of this upturn in New York's construction industry, in other words, a full five years before the recovery of the national construction industry (and the business economy as a whole), in Long Swings in Urban Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 165.

17. Dublin, Family of Thirty Million, 315, 316. 18. Haley Fiske, "Some Items about the Tower, address delivered to the Triennial

Convention of 1909-10, Box H9, Home Office-Tower Folder, 1909-23, MLICA. 19. Steffens's reference here to a "gilt-edged bond" is misleading: gilt-edged bonds

were issued by companies that had proved their profitability and were thus safe investments. Nevertheless, his point appears to be that something as large as an office building might in fact turn out to yield little more than a single bond certificate.

20. The Metropolitan Tower, with its "thirtieth-story loggia" and its "terminating peak," was considered to be flying in the face of warnings that "space given over to such purely ornamental features . . . would bring no money returns" (Mildred Stapley, "The City of Towers," Harper's Monthly, October 191 1, 702). For other denunciations of architectural "waste" during this period, see George Hill, "The Economy of the Office Building," Architectural Record 15 (April 1904): 312-27, and H. A. Caparn, "The Riddle of the Tall Building," Craftsman 10 (April-September 1906): 476-88; for an overview of the debate, see Gibbs, Business Architectural Imagery, 131-33.

21. Economists and statisticians have attempted for some time to map these long cycles in economic and urban development; the data from turn-of-century New York does not, however, entirely fit their model. Manuel Gottlieb's insistence that investment in construction in the United States has followed twenty-year "swings" (such as the period 1893-1918 in New York's construction history) remains at odds with the "wide range of recorded durations"; some of these smaller cycles are so brief ("less than three years") that he is obliged to disregard them as "[indistinguishable from (short) business cycles"; see Gottlieb, Long Swings in Urban Development, 12-13, 59. Similarly, Brinley Thomas's detection of "long cycles" in American building activity, in Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic Economy, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), is belied by his own chart, which reveals that building activity in the U.S. between 1893 and 1918 in fact saw as many as eight peaks and troughs (176, fig. 37). The architectural historian Carol Willis, by contrast, has drawn attention to the sharp fluctuation in the New York real estate market during these years, as a backdrop to the initiative of a zoning law (eventually enacted in 1916) that might regulate those excesses: "After record activity in conveyances and construction in 1905 and 1906, construction dropped sharply during the financial panic of 1907. Another banner year, in 1909, saw the largest number of building plans ever filed in the borough of Manhattan, yet this burst was followed by [record] decline" (Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago [New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995], 68).




22. Neil Harris, Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 125-26; the expression "wasting assets" is from Earl A. Saliers, Depreciation: Principles and Applications (1915; New York: Ronald, 1923), quoted ibid., 182-83 n. 12.

23. Cartoon in Tower Scrapbook, 1907-20, MLICA, unpaginated. 24. The demolition of the Tower Building elicited considerable attention in the

press: see, for example, "Taking Down a Skyscraper," Literary Digest 41 (August 13, 1910): 235; "Wrecking the Gillender Building, New York," Engineering Record, June 11, 1910, 755-56; and "Wrecking a Skyscraper," Architectural Record 28 (July- December 1910): 76. The law of "perpetual motion" also demanded more rapid techniques of construction: see Montgomery Schuyler, "The Evolution of the Sky- scraper," Scribner's Magazine, September 1909, 257-71; the demolition of the Tower Building, completed in forty-five days, was the "occasion" for Schuyler' s essay (257).

25. Landau and Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 250. 26. Steffens traces this trend back to the aftermath of the Chicago Fire of 1871, when

American architects began to "erect structures so cheap that they could be torn down without much loss" (46).

27. Walter Benjamin, "The Pans of the Second Empire in Baudelaire (1938), in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), 85. Compared with the innovations in demolition in New York by 1910, Haussmann's tools were relatively primitive. Benjamin writes: "He had revolutionized the physiognomy of the city with the most modest means imaginable: spades, pickaxes, crowbars, and the like. What measure of destruction had been caused by even these limited instruments" (85).

28. "New Skyscrapers for Old," Scientific American, May 21, 1910, 414. See also "Wrecking a Skyscraper" (cited above), similarly written in response to the Gillender's demolition: "a tendency to boastfulness [about the height of New York's skyscrapers] is held in due restraint by the consciousness of the economic waste in tearing down a comparatively new structure of such proportions, and as firm as a rock still. Yet this waste is only that, exaggerated in form, which accompanies all progress - the substitution of new machines for old machines" (76).

29. The Argosy, Cavalier and Scrapbook, All-Story Magazine, and other pulp titles in Munsey's empire, were all priced at 10 cents, although the Argosy was later raised to 15 cents. They also remained monthly magazines, with the exception of Cavalier and Scrapbook, which became the first weekly pulp in 1912. In some of these pulps, more than half of the 192 pages were filled with advertisements. For Munsey's description of his own business methods, see Frank A. Munsey, The Story of the Founding and Development of the Munsey Publishing-House, a Quarter of a Century Old: The Story of the Argosy, Our First Publication, and Incidentally the Story of Munsey's Magazine (New York: De Vinne Press, 1907). Before finally responding in 1893 to Munsey's challenge by lowering its prices, Cosmopolitan sold for twenty-five cents.

30. For circulation figures, and further discussion of the authors and subgenres appearing in these magazines, see Sam Moskowitz, ed., Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912- 1920 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970). Moskowitz claims there that the oldest of Munsey's all-fiction magazines, the Argosy, launched in 1896, had gained a readership approaching five hundred thousand by 1907, while the Cavalier and Scrapbook had reached about seventy-five thousand within five years of its launching in 1908 (329).




31. Garrett P. Serviss, "The Second Deluge," Cavalier Magazine (1911); page numbers cited in text refer to the more accessible edition, The Second Deluge (1912; Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1974).

32. Hugh Thompson, "The Remaking of New York," Munsey's Magazine, Septem- ber 1912, 900, 894, 901, 893 (emphasis added).

33. Thomas J. Vivian and Grena J. Bennett, "Tilting Island," Everybody's Magazine, September 1909, 380-88.

34. Daniel P. Wiles, "Fearful Catastrophe If Mile-High Edifice Is Built: Famous Expert Tells Why Magnates Must Not Construct Dizzy Skyscrapers," unidentified newspaper clipping, Tower Scrapbook, 1907-20, MLICA.

35. George Allan England, "The Last New Yorkers: A Weird Story of Love and Adventure amid the Ruins of a Fallen Metropolis," Cavalier and Scrap Book (191 1- 12). New York Evening Mail reprinted the story, beginning March 4, 1912. Darkness and Dawn (Boston: Small, Maynard and Co., 1914) sold for $1.35 and consisted of three parts: "The Vacant World," "Beyond the Great Oblivion," and "The Afterglow." Page numbers cited in text refer to the reprint of the book edition (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1974).

36. William R. Taylor, "Launching a Commercial Culture: Newspaper, Magazine, and Popular Novel as Urban Baedekers," in In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 71-72.

37. England became involved in left-wing politics during his convalescence at the turn of the century; giving up his day job as an insurance clerk, he joined the Socialist Party, wrote socialist pamphlets such as Get Together! (New York: Wilshire Book Co., 1908), and eventually received the party's nomination as candidate for governor of Maine in 1912.

38. Beatrice did sometimes participate in less traditional activities: "The housekeeping by no means took up all the girl's time. Often she went out with him on what he called his 'pirating expeditions'" (71); she also exhibits more "masculine" traits in the fight with the Horde (135^5).

39. By 1915 the stenographers (or "Miss Remingtons," after the typewriters they used) earned an average weekly wage of $11. For wage figures, see Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1 19. On the significant but limited gains made by the first generation of women office clerks in companies like Metropolitan Life, see, in addition to Zunz's Making America Corporate, Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); and Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 94-128.

40. Felix Grendon, "A Thousand Years from Now," New Review 2 (1914): 232-33. 41. Later, in the second volume, as Allan flies over New York, the sight of the

remainder of the Horde provokes him to meditate on the failure of the eugenics movement: "Up welled a deep-seated love for the memory of the race of men and women as they once had been - the people of the other days. Stern almost seemed to behold them again, those tall, athletic, straight-limbed men; those lithe, deep-breasted women, fair-skinned and with luxuriant hair; all alike now plunged for a thousand years in the abyss of death and of eternal oblivion" (bk. 1, chap. 21).

42. For illuminating discussions of race, gender, and eugenics in the pulp fiction of this period, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 217-32; and Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects,




Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 42-72. Critics of apocalyptic fiction, however, have tended to read it through the lens of race alone, thereby obscuring the multiple concerns of its authors. In Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), for instance, Mike Davis claims that since the late nineteenth century the popular literature of Los Angeles has been deeply permeated by paranoid fantasies of racial incursions and genocidal purification (273-356). Without downplaying the influence of racism itself, I wish to suggest that this genre (at least in its early twentieth-century New York moment) was fluid enough to permit racial issues to be articulated with various other concerns and that it was even open to adaptation by critics of racism, as the following discussion of Du Bois demonstrates.

43. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Comet," in Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920; New York: Dover, 1969), 253-73 (hereafter cited in text). The slightly earlier sighting of Halley's Comet (the tail of which was observed from the roofs of New York hotels and skyscrapers in May 1910), together with the opening of the Metropolitan Life Tower in 1909, might allow us to speculate that "The Comet" (like several other chapters of Darkwater) was written several years prior to its publication. Du Bois may also have been responding to the newspaper reports about the public's apocalyptic fears regarding the potentially fatal toxic effects of the comet; these superstitious fears were particularly ascribed to female "hysterics" and to "ignorant" blacks; see "Chicago Is Terrified: Women Are Stopping Up Doors and Windows to Keep Out Cyanogen," New York Times, May 17, 1910, and a report about the "negroes" of Asheville, N.C. being in "a state of frenzy . . . believing that the end of the world was at hand . . . [and declaring that] there would be no more paydays," New York Times, May 18, 1910.

44. On the appropriation of the apex of the tower as a site of illicit interaction between Metropolitan Life's male and female employees during this period, see Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1 20, 121.

45. Compare, for example, Julia s vision of Jim as her Brother Humanity incarnate with the opening "Credo" of Darkwater, affirming that "all men, black and brown and white, are brothers" (3). Du Bois's feminism encompassed procreation and sexuality as well as economic independence (see esp. 164-65). For the figure of the "black Messiah," see especially "Riddle of the Sphinx," "The Second Coming," and "Jesus Christ in Texas" (53-55, 105-8, 123-33). Arnold Rampersad views these references to a "black Christ" as an essentially propagandistic device, rather than a theological claim (The Art and Imagination ofW. E. B. Du Bois [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976], 180-81). On the centrality of this messianic trope within black nationalism, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982), esp. 142-54. And on the intersection of Du Bois's socialism, feminism, and Pan-Africanism, see Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

46. Even though Metropolitan Life accepted African American policy holders (other insurance companies, such as John Hancock Financial Services, discouraged its agents from soliciting African American customers until as late as 1960), it effectively reinscribed racial discrimination by dividing its industrial policies into "standard" and "substandard" classes. African Americans tended to have access only to the latter and thus paid a higher premium while receiving fewer benefits. In 2002 Metropolitan Life finally agreed to a settlement compensating minorities for policies they held from 1901 to 1972. See "MetLife Reaches Settlements on Alleged Race-Based Policies," Business Review, August 30, 2002; see also "In Black and White: Old Memos Lay Bare




MetLife's Use of Race to Screen Customers," Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2001, Al, A10.

47. This may be a reference to the Woolworth Tower (completed in 1913). 48. In asserting the influence on Du Bois of German literature and philosophy

(especially Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel) and opera (Wagner), critics may have overlooked a more local and popular source in the Munsey magazines. For a reference to the messianic "Of the Coming of John" (from Souls of Black Folk) as inspired by Wagner's Lohengrin and Goethe, Heine, Schiller, and Hegel's writings, see Stuart Hall, "Tearing Down the Veil," Guardian (U.K.), February 22, 2003.

49. See Michael O'Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), esp. 55-98.

50. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company: Its History, Its Present Position in the Insurance World, Its Home Office Building, and Its Work Carried on Therein (New York, 1908), 47-48, 45-46.

51. John Curtis Underwood, "The Clock in the Air" (n.d.), in The Book of New York Verse, ed. Hamilton Fish Armstrong (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917), 363; "The Metropolitan Clock- It's in the Movies," Home Office 9 (April 1920): 1, in box H10, MLICA; "Metropolitan: A Beacon to Hills," New York Sun, February 1922, in box H10. See also Sara Teasdale's "The Metropolitan Tower," one of several songs and poems preserved in MLICA, in which the Metropolitan's clock marks the inception of a romance.

52. "Certains quartiers modifient leur aspect en une saison: 'je m'absente pour une fin de semaine,' me dit une dame, 'et, en rentrant, je ne reconnais plus ma rue'" (Paul Morand, New-York [Paris, 19301, 276).

53. On the notion of building life cycles, see Harris, Building Lives, 5, 59-60, 1 12- 13, 163-65.

54. The phrase "in advance of itself is used by Georges Gurvitch to describe the "sense of time" characteristic of periods of intense financial speculation; see his Spectrum of Social Time, trans, and ed. Myrtle Korenbaum (Dordrecht, 1964), also discussed in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 223-25.

55. The most widely read Utopian novel was of course Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888; Harmonds worth: Penguin, 19821: its counterpart in the subgenre of the cataclysmic novel would be Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (1890; Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer- sity, 1960). The critical literature on both Utopian and cataclysmic fiction in turn-of- the-century America is voluminous; for a survey, see Kenneth Roemer, The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univer- sity Press, 1976), and Fredric Cople Jaher, Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885-1918 (New York: Macmillan, 1964), respectively.

56. This third understanding of time (which might be called postapocalyptic time) complicates and ultimately undermines O'Malley's argument about a simple two-way choice between modern "artificial" time and premodern "natural time."

57. "Time-space compression" is employed by Harvey to characterize the successive rounds of spatial and temporal restructuring in Western society throughout modernity as well as postmodernity {Condition of Postmodernity, 240, 284-307). Increasing synchronicity, according to Stephen Kern, was a feature characteristic of the turn of the twentieth century; see The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1 1-15, et passim. The "crisis of historicity" is Fredric Jameson's term for the flattening of temporality under the representational logic of




late-twentieth-century multinational capitalism, in "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92.

58. "Biggest Clock in the World," New York World, February 17, 1908 (n.p.); "Tower Clock Is Wound Up; Persons in Madison Square Strain Their Necks in Looking Up at New Timepiece," unidentified newspaper clipping, n.d.; see also "Gazes Skyward; Loses His Memory: Man Who Looked Up At Skyscraper Unable to Find Home . . . ," unidentified newspaper clipping, n.d.; all articles in Tower Scrapbook, MLICA.

59. Murray Leinster, "The Runaway Skyscraper," Argosy (February 22, 1919), FASF; page numbers cited in text refer to the reprinted version in The Best of Amazing [Stories], ed. Joseph Ross (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 47.

60. One of the earliest experiments in backward projection was at the Wonderland Theater in Rochester, New York, in 1897, advertised in the local newspaper as "a curious novelty and one which everyone who has seen the Cinematographe will be desirous to witness," in Post-Express, February 20, 1897, 14, quoted in George C. Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film (Greenwich, Conn.: Little, Brown, 1973), 18.

61. American Mutoscope and Biograph Catalogue, c. 1902 (emphasis added); I would like to thank Tom Gunning for showing me this source and thereby confirming that Star Theater was indeed projected in reverse.

62. "Even upon the huge, squared stones which here and there lay in disorder, and which Stern knew must have fallen from the tower, the moss grew very thick; and more than one such block had been rent by frost and growing things" {Darkness and Dawn, 42-43).

63. Simmel, "The Ruin," 261. 64. Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (Expose of 1935), in

Charles Baudelaire, 176 (emphasis added); in the more recent translation of the 1935

expose, the word destabilizing has been substituted for upheaval (The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002], 13).

65. Van Tassel Sutphen, The Doomsman (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906), FASF, reprinted, with a new introduction by Thomas D. Clareson (Boston: Gregg Press, 1975), 124-35; see also the review of The Doomsman, "Nightmare Prophecy," New York Times, June 30, 1906, 419.

66. Sutphen, Doomsman, 71; see also 149. With the aid ot these relics, little by little," the hero is "able to reconstruct, in imagination, at least, the lost civilization of the ancient world" (83). The books include The Descent of Man and Pilgrim's Progress.

67. John Ruskin, "The Lamp of Memory," in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849; New York: Dover Publications, 1989), 176-98. In a very different context, Albert Speer famously proscribed concrete and iron in the construction of the monumental architecture of the Third Reich, preferring the "ruin value" of stone; see Alexander Scobie, Hitler's State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990).

68. Schuyler, "Evolution of the Skyscraper," 259.



the metropolitan life in ruins

Documents