The Metropolitan Life in Ruins

The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1909-19
Author(s): Nick Yablon

Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 308-347
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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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 MetropolitanLife in Ruins:

Architecturaland 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 thatgrew thickly along the base of the wall, he now found himself in
what had long ago been Twenty-ThirdStreet.
George Allan England,"The Last New Yorkers"(1911)
In the decade following
its completion in 1909, New York's once-tallest
building, the MetropolitanLife InsuranceTower, suffered a series of

unfortunatemishaps. In rapid succession it was exposed to poisonous
gases, submergedunder twenty thousandfeet of water, struckby the
tail of a comet, and transportedback in time to the pre-Columbianera.
Each time, the building somehow emerged intact. Strippedof 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 apparentperpetuityas an effective
monumentto the metropolisthat now lay silent and desolate aroundit.
It was in the science fiction narrativesof these years that modernNew
York first came to be widely representedas a landscape of sublime
Nick Yablon's researchand teaching focus on the experientialimpact of nineteenthand early twentieth-centuryAmericancities, seeking to trace how the advent of urban
modernity witnessed new ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling. His current book
manuscript,based on a dissertationcompleted in the departmentof history at the
Universityof Chicago in 2002 is provisionallytitledAmericanRuins:An Archaeology
of UrbanModernity,1830-1920. He was NEH-AAS post-doctoralresearchfellow at
the American AntiquarianSociety in Worcester,Massachusetts,and is currentlyan
assistantprofessorof Americanstudies at the University of Iowa.
AmericanQuarterly,Vol. 56, No. 2 (June2004) 2004 AmericanStudiesAssociation
309

3 10
AMERICAN QUARTERLY
ruins, with the MetropolitanLife InsuranceTower 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- aboutthe transitoryand unstablenatureof thatcity's
built environment. In recent years, a consensus of literary, urban,
architectural,and culturalhistorianshas drawnattentionto the way in
which the New York cityscape was subjected to intensified forces of
economic and spatialupheavalbefore and afterthe turnof the century.2
Looking beyond the rhetoric of progress that celebrated feats of
construction,they have instead turnedto the backward-lookingnarratives of expatriateslike Henry James for evidence of a sentiment of
nostalgic regretfor what was lost in the process of city building.In The
AmericanScene (1907), James, returningto New Yorkafter a twentyyear absence and finding it alteredalmost beyond recognition,came to
identify it as the epitome of a "provisional city," in which older
buildings and traditionscannot possibly survive. The continualcycles
of constructionand demolition in the financial district and the inexorable displacement of mansions by manufacturinglofts up Fifth
Avenue, echoing the equally rapiddemographicturnoverin the immigrantneighborhoodsof the Lower East Side, were togetherbelieved to
be erasing all traces of "pastness"from the surfaceof the city. Market
forces, both for James and for more recentcritics, are thus imaginedas
producing a perpetualpresent, from which vestiges of other periods,
such as those witnessed in "traditional"Europeancities, are simply
expunged. New York's older architecturallandmarksseemed unlikely
to last a generation,let alone a millennium.3
The perception that this new round of activity in the real estate
market was transformingbuildings into disposable objects was not
confined to nostalgic and Eurocentricvisitors 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 rangeof political, social, and culturalcontexts.
At the outset of the twentieth century such observationswere made
from two seemingly incongruous perspectives: that of Progressivist
critics (such as Lincoln Steffens) writing about new trends in office
buildingfor the muckrakingjournalsand thatof popularscience fiction
authors(above all, George Allan England) writing about urbancatastrophefor the new pulp magazines and cheap novels. These authors-

METROPOLITAN LIFE
3 11
assumed to be diametrically opposed in terms of their respective

readership,subject matter, and sophistication- nonetheless shared a
common preoccupationwith the volatility of the built landscapein an
age of speculative finance and corporatecapitalism. This article will
explore the ways in which apocalypticimagery thus resonatedacross
the culturalboundariesbetween urbancriticism and popularfiction.
Expandingthe range of voices in this urbandiscourse allows us, in
turn,to perceivethatthe oldermansionsandchurcheswhose disappearance or obsolescence James nostalgically lamentedwere by no means
the only edifices deemed vulnerableto forces of disposal and renewal.
There was also an increasing preoccupationwith the truncatedlife
expectancyof the office buildingby the 1910s, a decade in which some
of the earliest skyscrapers(from the 1880s and 1890s) were already
beginningto be demolishedto make way for ever tallerand (hopefully)
more profitable buildings. Absorbed by these scenes of spectacular
demolition, critics began to question whether the new commercial
structureswould last any longer than those they replaced. Laws of
obsolescence appeared to govern the landscape of the emerging
corporateskyline as much as they did the low-rise neighborhoodsof the
nineteenth-centurycity. It was as if "New" and "Old New York"alike
were vulnerableto the neutralforces of displacementand renewal.4
Even as they drew attentionto the ephemeralityand ahistoricityof
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 struckby naturaldisasters,technologicalcatastrophes,or
foreign invasions, and whetherits populationhad regressedto barbarism or abandoned the city altogether, one thing remained largely
constant in these fictions: namely, the verticality, if not always the
structuralintegrity,of certain architecturallandmarks.Even after the
surroundinglandscape had returnedto a state of nature, the ruined
skyscraperwould still exhibit some degree of permanence. In this
respect,it would exemplify whatthe sociologist Georg Simmel, writing
in Berlin at this very time, perceivedto be characteristicof traditional
ruins: their realization of a fragile yet harmonious compromise (or
reconciliation)between the disintegratingeffects of naturaldecay 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
Reimaginedas ruinsthatpossessed this ability to registerthe effects of
antagonisticforces, New York'sskyscrapersserved as objects through

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AMERICAN QUARTERLY
which to contemplatethe conflicted relationshipbetween the second

nature of a capitalist economy and the cultural facade of the built
landscape.Priorto a fully elaboratedtheory of capitalisturbanization
(the phrase "creativedestruction"would not be coined until 1942 and
would not be appliedto the urbanlandscapeuntil the 1970s and 1980s),
- includingboth progressivecritics and science fiction
contemporaries
authors- articulatedtheir lived sense of the physical, temporal, and
experientialchanges that accompaniedthe intensificationof the real
estate market during these years by means of a variety of fictional
tropes, narratives,and images of ruin.6
Together,the recurrentscenes in which a critic or narratorwould
look back from the (immediateor distant)futureover the remainsof the
presentindicate a distinctivesense of temporalityperhapsbest characterized in terms of the mood of the "futureanterior."As the tense of
what will have been, the future anterior offered the prospect of
contemplatingthe city from the horizon of some kind of aftermath.
Writerswho resistedthe past perfectof nostalgiccriticismfound in this
speculative temporality an alternativevantage point from which to
make sense of the complex and obscure conditions of early-twentiethcenturyurbanlife. By imagining a city in a state of futureruin, when
normalprocesses and structureswill have been turnedinside out, they
sought to expose its hidden racial, gender, and economic configurations. To read their varioustexts throughthe lens of the futureanterior,
for whatthey might revealaboutthe temporalexperiencesandfantasies
that emergedout of the maelstromof capitalisturbanization,is thus to
bracket those questions of space and spatiality that have dominated
recent discussions of urbanmodernitv.7
Real Estate, or "the Doctrine of the Scrap Heap"
In 1909 the MetropolitanLife InsuranceCompany celebratedtwo
coincidingevents:its rise to the statusof largestlife insurerin the world
and its completion of a tower that was the tallest in the nation (fig. I).8
Designed by the architecturalfirm 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."9Its size was celebrated in trade journals as the
outcome of the latest technologicaldevelopments:advancedsteel-cage

METROPOLITAN LIFE
3 13
construction,wind bracing,fire- andrust-proofing,andelectric-traction

elevators.10
While the tower's vertical lines looked forwardto the freestanding
tower skyscrapersof the 1920s and 1930s, its de facto campanileform
and the Italianatemotifs engraved on its facade of white Tuckahoe
marbleunmistakablyreferredback to the archaicmodel of the famous
Campanile in Venice's Piazza San Marco. The humanist rhetoric of
Renaissance architecture,some architecturalhistorians have argued,
was an obvious choice for companies with ambitionsof public service
Yet its opulence could also serve the propaganand "noblesseoblige."11
dists purposesof those who were criticalof the life insuranceindustry.
Only months before the tower was conceived, that industryhad been
struckby arguablythe most damaginglegal investigationin its history.
The Armstronginvestigationof 1905-6 had broughtchargesof bribery,
fraud, and unlawful takeovers against the three leading insurance
companies:Equitable,Mutual,and New YorkLife.12While Metropolitan Life would be acquitted,the court proceedingsshed light on many
of the aggressive policies and schemes that insurance companies in
generalhad employedto lure ethnic and working-classcustomersaway
from theirneighborhoodcooperativesocieties and local mutualbenefit
associations.13Under this harsh light, the recently constructedinsurance palazzos, with their ornateexteriors and lavish interiors,offered
themselves as easy targetsfor theircritics (fig. 2). AmbroseBierce, for
one, was offended not only by the fact that insuranceamountedto a
kind of gambling, one in which the odds were stacked in favor of the
playerwho owned the table,but also by insurancecompanies'tendency
to flaunt and "parade"their "enormous winnings"- perhaps in the
form of spectacularbuildings- as an "inducementto play againsttheir
game."In "Ashesof the Beacon,"a Bierce satirenarratedby an Edward
Gibbon of the future, one of the first acts will have been the violent
demolitionof these structures:"Thesmolderingresentmentof years [of
insuranceabuses]burstinto flames, and within a week all that was left
of insurancein [Ancient]America was the record of a monstrousand
cruel delusion writtenin the blood of its promoters."14
At the same time that it heraldedthe inception of a "new" era in
insurancepractices and constructiontechnologies, the opening of the
MetropolitanTower also marked the culmination of a fifteen-year
phase of real-estate investment in New York, one that had begun
somewhat inauspiciouslyin the aftermathof the Panic of May 1893.

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AMERICAN QUARTERLY
Figure 2. The Marble Court, Madison Avenue Entrance of 1893 Home Office
Building. Source: MetropolitanLife Insurance Company (1908), opposite 34.
The fact that building activity had resumed in New York against a
backdropof severedepressionin othersectorsof the economy prompted
journalistLincoln Steffens to investigate the relationshipbetween tall
office buildings and investment capital. As a Progressivist reformer
(and soon-to-be-designated"muckraker"),Steffens had alreadybegun
to identify a model and a vocabularywith which to critiquethe conduct
of "big business"with respect to fraudulentschemes, political corruption, sanitaryconditions, and laborexploitation.15Ratherthanmap that
critical model and vocabularyonto the terrainof real-estate speculation, he sought to understandthe process of office buildingas a rational
andcollaborativeresponseto a complex dilemma.Writingin Scribner's
in 1897, he explained that the resurgentactivities of real estate men,
architects, and construction companies could not be attributedto a
naturaldemandfor office space. More than simply telling some "great
story of materialprogress"about the steady "increasein wealth, [and]

METROPOLITAN LIFE
3 15
the growing power of capital,"New York's "brokensky-lin[e]" also

evoked the multifarious"problems"that arose when capital (recently
overinvested in the production of commodities) was subsequently
transferredinto the unpredictablerealm of the built environment.16
These problems were in part technical- how to erect taller buildings
and how to give tenantseasy access to those higher floors- problems
that were impressivelysolved by the collective "expertise"that developed and perfected steel-cage constructiontechniques and faster passengerelevators(40-44, 48). But in the very solutionof these technical
problems, Steffens observed, there also emerged even more testing
financial problems.As the height of office buildingsrose, so too did the
propertyvalues in the business districtsin which they were located (44,
48). The size of those buildings, and the indeterminacyof their future
value and demand, presented furtherobstacles in deploying them as
financial assets. Confrontedwith this economic conundrum,Steffens
noted, real estate companieswere now "incorporating"so as to convert
the brute materialityof steel and masonryinto the more flexible (and
alienable)medium of stocks and bonds (46).
This latest cycle in the constructionindustry,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, thatMetropolitanLife
fully entered the property market. Its newly created Real Estate
Division took advantageof the numerousforeclosures of that year to
acquireas many as six hundredpropertiesin New York,which it would
then rent, mortgage,or sell on. So quickly did these investmentsgrow
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.17MetropolitanLife's new
interestin buildingsas financialinvestmentseventuallyextendedto its
own headquarters.Unlike its earlierHome Offices, the 1909 tower was
largely a speculative project. Besides its practical value in housing a
rapidlygrowingworkforce(now numberingtwenty-eighthundred)and
its symbolic value as an advertisementfor the company,it would also
functionas an importantsource of economic revenue.By remainingin
the 1893 Home Office and renting out as much as 40 percent of the
adjacenttower to smaller companies, the directorshoped to convince
theircustomersand critics thatthe buildingwould pay for itself. It may
assuredone director,but it was one "thatcosts
be an "advertisement,"

3 16
AMERICAN QUARTERLY
us [or rather the policyholders] nothing." In fact, he confidently

predictedthat it would "earnseven per cent on its cost."18
Although Steffens acknowledged that a company may profit indirectly from a skyscraper'spromotionalvalue, he might have questioned
such confidentpredictionsaboutthe profitsto be obtaineddirectlyfrom
rent itself (38, 55). Writing ten years earlier, he reflected on the
challenges those new office towers faced in recouping their costs, let
alone turninga profit. Once the exorbitantcosts of constructionlabor,
of taxes and insurance policies, of maintaining and servicing the
building, and of replacing obsolete mechanical equipment had been
deducted,the averageoffice building would end up paying "not much
more than a gilt-edged bond" (61, 40). 19 Given this potential
unprofitability,the superfluous ornaments that skyscraperarchitects
were then beginning to incorporateinto their buildings appearedto be
all the more misguided. Clock towers, cupolas, balconies, observation
platforms, and pyramidal steeples (all of which would adorn the
MetropolitanTower) were, according to several like-minded critics,
essentially nonrentableand thus "wasted"spaces.20The narrownessof
some of these towers, covering only a fractionof the total lot, together
with theirexpensivemarblefacades andexpansivelobbies- the Metropolitan again being a subsequentexample- similarly subtractedfrom
their final profits. Economic facts, compoundedby aesthetic "extravagance," 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 managerialcadre appearedto be
equal to the task of producingskyscrapersthat temporarilydeflected
the challengesof cost-effectiveness.But ultimatelythey would neverbe
able to stem the rapid increase in the value of the land beneath those
structures.Steffens concludedthatthese heroic efforts to turnarchitecture into anotherform of fictitious capital, while evidence of the great
characterand resourcefulnessof capitalists,would inevitablycome up
againstthe "inexorablelaws of the market"(61). Howeverskillfully the
real estate expertsbalancethe leasing price and squarefootage 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 "permanentfinancial question [would always be] revived in alteredproportions"(61, 48). In the
final account, Steffens deduced, there was only one way in which to

METROPOLITAN LIFE
3 17
offset the depreciationof one's properties:namely,to keep investingin

"newerand 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 desperatein some cities where there has been
overbuildingin hardtimes. In New Yorkthe stress is such thatit is said
the only source of tenants is in the continuanceof 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
discernedan irreconcilableand destructivecontradictionat the core of
New York's developing skyline: its apparent entrapment within a
"perpetualmotion quest"(46).
Even afterthe upturnof the general economy around1898, Steffens
would have found furtherevidence of the disruptivevolatility of the
New York real estate market, which continued to be punctuatedby
periodic slumps. The period 1893 to 1918, retrospectivelycharacterized by recent economists as a single cycle in the building economy,
was in fact experienced as a succession of sharp and unpredictable
fluctuationsand oscillations:a series of mini-cycles lasting not twenty
or thirtyyears, but two or three.21And with each cycle, the life span of
the skyscraperappearedto 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
- could
words, by increasingthe rate of demolition and reconstruction
the engine be kept running.New tax laws would confirmand abet this
processby recognizingtall office buildingsas "wastingassets"proneto
rapid"economicdepreciation,"and consequentlyproviding"subsidies,
tax breaksand other official inducements"to build and rebuild.22Thus
lubricatedwith the oil of credit, subsidies, and tax breaks, the skyscraperappearedto function as a vital but unstable component in a
largereconomy of planned obsolescence- a pursuit,to use Steffens's
own mechanicalmetaphor,of "perpetualmotion."Indeed, some commentatorseven expected the 1909 tower itself to be a merely provisional structure,to be substituted ultimately for something newer,
larger,and more cost-effective.As "theoldest inhabitant"of New York
predicted in a contemporarycartoon, it seemed inevitable that they
would "pull down the MetropolitanTower and make room for a skyscraper"(fig. 3).23

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AMERICAN QUARTERLY
Figure 3. Cartoon clipping, date and publication details unknown, Tower Scrapbook, 1907-20, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Archives, New York.
The fate of severalof New York'sother skyscraperswould also have

served as a constant reminderto the directorsof the ephemeralityof
even the largest and most impressive buildings. In the years after the
MetropolitanLife Tower was completed, the contradictionnoted by
Steffens was renderedpoignantly visible in the spectacularrazing of
structuresthat had only just been constructed:the Gillender Building
(built 1897, demolished 1910) and the TowerBuilding (1888-1914), to
name but two.24It was not only their sheer size that demanded new
technologiesand techniquesof demolitionbut also the greatertemporal
urgency of the process; time taken to demolish an old building was
effectively rentlost on the new one. The work of demolition,according
to one architecturalhistory 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.25Architects even began to
consider the eventual demolition of a skyscraperin their plans for its

METROPOLITAN LIFE
319
construction,makinguse of buildingmaterialsthatcould be rapidly,as

well as economically and efficiently, dismantledand reused.26
In the completedportionof his projectedbook on CharlesBaudelaire,
WalterBenjaminbriefly raises the questionof the impactof large-scale
demolitionon the temporalimagination."Alongwith the growthof the
big cities,"he writes, "theredevelopedthe means of razingthem to the
ground.Whatvisions of the futureare evoked by this?"27The razingof
the Gillender Building in 1910 directly provided ScientificAmerican
with just such an opportunityto ponderthe futureof New York'smore
recent architecturalmonuments. An archaeological dig among its
remains revealed little evidence of metal fatigue or rust. Indeed, in
purely structuralterms, the durability of the steel skeleton, and its
insulationfrom erosion and decay under a layer of exteriorcladding,
meantthatit was theoreticallyconceivablethat"thevisitorto New York
five hundredor a thousandyears hence [would] find the skyscrapersof
today in perfect condition."But the practicalreality was that the life
span of skyscrapers now seemed to be governed entirely by the
economic "doctrineof the 'scrap heap.'"As soon as "there is more
profit in 'scrapping' an existing machine, plant, or building, and
replacingit by anothermore efficient or of greatercapacity"- so this
logic went- it is considered"a matterof soundbusiness policy to send
that machineto the 'junkheap' or turnthe 'wreckinggang' loose upon
that building."If such a doctrinewere taken to its logical conclusion,
the magazine concluded, then the future ruin of the entire city, as
depicted by "certainimaginativemagazine writers,"did not seem all
that unlikely.28
Liquidity
ScientificAmericandid not need to name the "imaginativemagazine
writers" who articulatedthese scenarios; it was enough simply to
invoke the trope of the "futureruin" so extensively did their stories
saturatethe urban culture of the period, and especially the pages of
FrankMunsey's pulp magazines. By acquiringhis own printing and
distributingfacilities, utilizing cheap "wood pulp" paper, minimizing
the numberof illustrations,and maximizingthe numberof low-budget
advertisements,Munsey was able at the turnof the centuryto offer his
monthlymagazinesat the standardprice of ten cents (the same cost as
the standard weekly premium for a Metropolitan Life industrial

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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).29The 192-page format of his magazines enabled them to comprise a range of popular subgenres, from
pseudoscientificnarrativesof disaster,invasion, and evolution to lowtech narrativesof crime investigation and colonial adventure(Edgar
Rice Burroughs'sTarzanbeing 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 purchasedfrom local
street-cornervendors and read on el trains, streetcars,and subways,
thus becoming partof the fabricof everydayurbanlife. Their flourishing circulation enabled Munsey to locate his editorial offices in the
prestigiousFlatironBuilding, on the southernedge of MadisonSquare,
thereby affordingunobstructedviews of the MetropolitanLife Tower,
while furtheraffirmingthe metropolitanidentityof this new publishing
phenomenon.30
One particularly popular story serialized in Munsey's Cavalier
Magazine in 1911 was The Second Deluge (fig. 4).31Written by a
scientific journalist for the New YorkSun, Garrett P. Serviss, The
Second Deluge narrateda global disaster- the earth'scollision with a
"waterynebula"- from the local standpointof New York.The impact
of the "biblical" flood that ensued was not fully realized until the
twenty-fourthand penultimateepisode, when the survivorsconstructa
diving bell to explore their "necropolis"in the depths of "Her Ocean
Tomb."The first ruinthatthey discoverturnsout, not coincidentally,to
be the Metropolitan Tower. "The searchlight [of the diving bell],
penetratingfarthroughthe clear waterbeneath[it], fell in a circle round
a most remarkableobject- tall, gaunt, and spectral, with huge black
ribs. 'Why, it's the Metropolitantower, 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
uprightunderthe weight of twenty thousandfeet of water:"Althoughit
was built so long ago [in the era of skyscrapers], it was made
immensely strong,and well braced,and ... it has been favoredby the
very density of thatwhich now surroundsit, and which tends to buoy it
up and hold it steady. But you observe that it has been strippedof the
covering of stone" (368).
Such flood fantasies were especially prevalentin the early years of
science fiction. But resituatedalongside the economic debatesoutlined

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 representationsof 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 alreadybecoming one of the principalmodes for registering the immensity and intensity of development and demolition. In
"TheRemakingof New York,"a nonfictionarticlepublishedin 1912 in
MunseyMagazine (the flagship of the magazine fleet), Hugh Thompson used the oceanic metaphorto describethe way in which New York,
lacking a "city plan such as attendedthe birth of Washington[D.C.],"
has consequently"followed theflow of tradecurrents."Since the early
nineteenthcentury,its development has thus been "like the ocean. It
rises and falls with certain regularity,but once in a while a mighty
stormarises and sweeps everythingbefore it. New Yorkhas been struck
again and againby these upheavals,which have changedthe whole face

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AMERICAN QUARTERLY
of the city map." The outcome of this latest upheaval, Thompson

concludes(borrowinghis wordsfrom an earliercommentator),was that
New Yorkwas alreadybecoming once again "a city of modernruins, a
Urban
perfect Baalbec of a day's growth and a day's dilapidation."32
development,conceived here as a tide of capital on which stocks and
assets are floated, is thus considerednot simply as a force for renewal
and regenerationbut also as a harbingerof premature,and perhaps
picturesque,ruin. Manhattanappearedalready to be on the verge of
becoming "antique,"its ruins foreshadowed as well as erased with
every act of demolition and reconstruction.
The associationbetween the periodic overflowingof oceans and the
periodicoverflowingof capitalis articulatedmore explicitly in Thomas
Vivian and Grena Bennett's "The Tilting Island,"published in a rival
magazine,Everybody's,in 1909. In this story,the gradualsinkingof the
downtownportionof Manhattaninto the harbor,until "thetallest tower
. . . [disappeared]below the sea," is presentedas the convergence of
subterraneanand man-madeforces, of physical geology and capitalist
geography.Witnessingthe disasterat first hand, the Columbiageology
professor Heinrich Herman insists on a measured deduction of its
precise causes. However vast this catastrophemay appear,he cannot
attributeit entirelyto a single naturalcause, namely the fault line in the
geological crust of the island. A more immediatecause is in fact to be
found in the recent construction boom in the downtown district:
namely, the sheer burdenof urbancapital- the weight of the "twenty
stories of steel, thirtystories, forty stories . . . [which] we have massed
on [one] end" of the island, and which have compoundedthis hitherto
undiscovered fault line: "Ah, they could not have believed it- our
ancestors!Like Babel we have built. Who thoughtthat 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
Farfrom being a purely literaryfancy, the specterof sinking islands
was also invoked in contemporarydebates about the skyscraper.In a
1909 newspaperarticle, the conservativearchitectDaniel Wiles cited
the exampleof the MetropolitanLife Tower,along with the evidence of
geologists, to warn that if such towers continued to be constructed
"overthe fragile strataof rock upon which the city is built[,] the whole
would give way to the strainand an awful catastrophewould result"an outcomehumorouslydepictedin a cartoonpublishedon the cover of
Life magazine in 1902, depicting the sinking of the entire island of
Manhattan(fig. 5).34As a strict limit was alreadyimposed on the load

METROPOLITAN LIFE
323
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 premonitionsmight have been intendedas more general
allegories aboutthe sheer accumulationof capital invested in the city's
physical infrastructureas a whole. Fiction and nonfiction texts alike
thus employed exaggeratedimagery to convey the scale and impact of
urbanprocesses- renderingthem equivalent to, or even greaterthan,
catastrophicprocesses of nature.The liquidity of capital, its apparent
tendency to overaccumulateand spill over onto the terrainof 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.
Reorderingthe City
While "Tilting Island" and Second Deluge (along with the Wiles
article and the Life cartoon) focus on the various causes (economic,

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astronomical,or geological) of urbandestruction,in many "scientific

romances"the catastropheis underdetermined,remaininglargely obscureto its characters.In these fictions the catastropheserves merely as
a pretextfor radicallyreimaginingthe various phenomenaof contemporaryurbanlife, an opportunityto turnits racial, socioeconomic, and
gender relationsupside down.
Indeed,in the case of Darknessand Dawn (1914), arguablythe very
prototype for this mode of future anteriority,and certainly the most
influential postapocalypticepic to be published in Munsey's various
magazines, the destruction of the city has occurred prior to the
inceptionof the narrativeitself. This 103-episodeepic- writtenby the
socialist activist and former New York insuranceclerk 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
consultantengineerAllan Stern and his stenographer,Beatrice, awakening from centuriesof suspendedanimationon the forty-eighthfloor
of the MetropolitanLife Tower.35Climbing up to the "observationplatform"(13) and "peer[ing]"out "overthe 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 vehementlywith plumyjets of steam,no liner idled at
anchoror nosed its slow course out to sea. (19-20)
It was a landscape,the narratorcontinued,in which the "future,if any

such there may be, must rise from the ashes of a crumblingpast"(65).
Thrown into this deep future, this postapocalyptic"mausoleumof
civilization"(19), Allan and Beatrice struggle in subsequentepisodes
not only to survivebut also to comprehendits uttertransformation:the
silencing of its usual noises, the concealment of its streets and
neighborhoodsby the enveloping forest, the erasure of Central Park
itself (as it is no longerpossible to tell exactly "whereit begins or ends"
[20]), along with the absenceof any clue as to what might have brought
about its downfall. Even Madison Square has been altered almost
beyondrecognition.They would have rememberedthe squareas a vital

METROPOLITAN LIFE
325
site of sociabilityduringthe ProgressiveEra;accordingto recenturban

historians, it had "serv[ed] briefly as [a] public center" for theater,
concerts, and victory parades,before being supplantedin the 1910s by
Times Square.36It had also emerged as a commercialhub for midtown
shoppers,with the opening of departmentstores and shoppingarcades,
includingthe marblearcadelocated on the groundfloor of Metropolitan 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
marketactivity that once flourishedthere, as the squarehas 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 appearto have far
exceeded their sell-by date. Variousfragmentsof luxury merchandise
recoveredfrom the decaying catacombs of the Metropolitan'sarcade
crumbleto 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,
preservingan imperishableremainderof 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
alternativeto the conspicuous waste and materialistexcesses of consumer capitalism. "Use,"not exchange, is Allan's "firstconsideration
now" (67).37
While Allan is engaged on his heroic forays for equipment and
suppliesamongthe uncannycommercialspaces of the "fallenmetropolis," Beatrice has assumed a ratherdifferentrole. Eager, "like the true
woman she was,"to make "a real home out of the barrendesolation of
the fifth floor offices" (66), she rarely accompanies him, instead
devoting herself to the indoor chores that defined domestic womanhood: garmentmaking, cooking, and cleaning.38Despite the seriousness of their situation, Allan at least knows that the "housekeeping
treasures"he brings back to the tower- "jarsof 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 stenographerin the tower she
would have gained some degree of economic, cultural, and sexual
freedom;indeed, MetropolitanLife led the way in recruitingfrom the
ranks of lower-middle-class,nonimmigrant,unmarriedwomen, who

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Figure 6. Marble arcade of Metropolitan Life Insurance Home Office Building,

<4fourhundred feet, extending from Madison Avenue to Fourth Avenue." Source:
MetropolitanLife 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.

METROPOLITAN LIFE
327
came to be known as the "MetropolitanBelles." Outnumberingthe

company's male employees by 1900, these file clerks, telephone
operators,and stenographerswere earningwages that grantedthem, if
not complete independence, at least the provisional and immediate
freedoms of shopping and theatergoing.39But once cast out from the
"nexusof ... society" by the ensuing catastrophe(65), and confronted
with the daily challenges of survival,Beatriceis obliged to returnto the
gendered division of labor and the sexual imperative of premarital
chastity that had prevailedamong 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 protectionas 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 "evidentlyfeminism is a back numberin 2920,"
the literary critic of the socialist New Review excused England's
"curiou[s]. . . sentimentson sex relationships"as merely a digression
from, or dilution of, the text's otherwise commendable "political
convictions."40But in England's narrativethey are in fact intimately
connected,triangulatedthrougha thirdcategory,that of race. Only by
revitalizingand revealingtheir "true"gender traitswill they be able to
- thatmonstrousoffspringof centuriesof miscevanquishthe "Horde"
genation and degenerationamong the nonwhite and ape populations
thathad also survivedthe catastropheand were now besieging them in
the MetropolitanLife Tower. Overturningthe gains made by earlytwentieth-centuryfeminists thus becomes the first step towardeluding
the threatenedextinction of the Anglo-Saxon race and, ultimately,in
the final episodes, building a socialist Utopia.41
The containmentof sexual and racial threatswas thus fundamental
both to England'sutopian-socialistvision and to his success as a pulp
fiction author.42But such reactionary"solutions"did not discourage
the postapocalypticnarrative
certainotherauthorsfromreappropriating
towardmoreradicalends, therebyarticulatinga utopian-socialistvision
of the future that transcendedhierarchiesof class, race, and gender
simultaneously.In W. E. B. Du Bois's contemporaneousshort story
"The Comet," the cosmic catastrophethat strikes New York- indiscriminatelyexterminatingblack and white, blue- and white-collar,male
and female alike- has the effect of revealingnot the latentracial traits
of its two survivingheroes, but ratherthe arbitrarinessand artificiality

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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 racialdifferenceitself.43Priorto 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 undergroundvaults, he reemerges to find
himself in possession of the entire city, free to wanderup Fifth Avenue
and enter the "gorgeous, ghost-hauntedhalls" of a "famous hostelry"
that "yesterday . . . would not have served me" (258). When he
encountersthe only other survivor,Julia, the privilegedwhite daughter
of a MetropolitanLife insuranceexecutive, racial (and class) assumptions are graduallycast aside. She does not even notice "thathe was a
Negro,"nor does he think "of her as white"(259). Juliathus overcomes
her fears of black "manhood,"despite a brief moment of anxiety
triggeredby the sight of a telephone earpiece, whose phallic shape,
"wide and black, pimpled with usage,"initially "terrifie[s]"her (263).

METROPOLITAN LIFE
329
Finally, lacking the sexual patience of England'sAllan and Beatrice,

Jim and Julia immediately ascend to the roof of the Metropolitan
Tower,a site associatedin the 1910s with illicit promiscuity.44
Standing
up thereunderthe "dream[y]. . . twilight,"she could no longerconsider
him "a thing apart,a creaturebelow, a strangeoutcastof anotherclime
and blood,"but instead "saw him glorified ... her BrotherHumanity
incarnate,Son of God and great All-Fatherof the race to be" (267,
269)- while she herself has become "primalwoman;mighty motherof
all men to come and Bride of Life" (269). Before they can consummate
theirbrief postapocalypticcourtship,however- or ratherwhile they are
consummatingit (given the allusive references to how Jim shoots off
"rocketafterrocket into the unansweringdarkness"and how the surge
of "the swift elevators shooting upward . . . made the great tower
tremble"[269, 271])- they are interruptedby the arrivalof rescuers
from outside the city, including Julia's father and suitor, an incipient
lynch mob, and finally Jim's own wife carryingtheir dead child. The
catastropheturnsout to have been confined to New YorkCity, and the
vision of a world without racial and class distinctions to have been
chimerical.
Publishedin 1920 as the final chapterof Darkwater,"The Comet"
resonateswith many of the themes articulatedthroughoutthat collection, in its fiction, poetic, and nonfictionchapters.Jim's memoryof the
intricate network of racial discriminationthat had barred him from
certainhotels and restaurantsbefore the disasterdramatizesDu Bois's
sociological observationin the precedingchapterregardingthe "Veil"
the
"tenuous,intangible,"yet real that descends over
city, separating
Harlem,the "darkcity of fifty thousand,"from the remainderof the city
(245, 244). Jim's commandeeringof a Fordto drive along CentralPark
in search of survivors similarly calls to mind Du Bois's earlier
recollectionof a white man in thatparkwho was visibly enragedby the
mere sight of "black folk [riding] by in a motor car" (33). Even the
apocalypticphraseswith which Jim and Juliaembraceeach otherecho
Du Bois's own declarationsof 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 usheringin that new era. These variousblack messiahs of
Darkwaterinevitablyfindthemselvesdenied,rejected,or even lynched.45
Yet ultimatelyDu Bois's purposeis less to outline some postmillennial
vision of racial transcendencethan to expose the injustices of the

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present.Thus, what is foregroundedin "TheComet"is Jim and Julia's

dramatic realization that seemingly fixed racial distinctions could
disappear in an instant- indeed, that the very survival of humanity
requiresthe violation of that most entrenchedof racial proscriptions:
interracialsex.
The choice of the MetropolitanTower as the site of this short-lived
yet powerfulscene of secular"Revelation"is similarlyoverdetermined.
As a socialist as well as Pan-Africanist,Du Bois may have intendedthe
headquartersof one of the leading companiesin the city to standin for
the largereconomic order of urbanizedcapitalism, which perpetuates
distinctions between "black and white," as between "rich and poor"
(121). More specifically, he might have been targetingMetropolitan
Life itself, for its de facto discriminationagainst African American
customers,whom it restrictedto substandardpolicies.46But Du Bois's
precedingchapteralso acknowledgeshis awe for the sublime "beauty
of the Manhattanskyline," and in particularthe "vast grace of that
Cathedralof the Purchasedand PurchasingPoor,toppingthe world and
pointing higher"(243-44).47Indeed, at the moment of Jim and Julia's
union, the tower assumes an almost mystical and metaphysicalpower.
No longer a place of business,it becomes a divine vessel throughwhich
they are able to channel the cosmic forces impelling them towardtheir
apparentpostracialdestiny.Ultimately,whateverits precise motivation,
Du Bois's selection of the Metropolitan for his scene of racial
transcendence suggests an awareness of, and perhaps a deliberate
inversionof, the racial politics of the dominantscience fiction authors
of the Munsey era.48Just as it takes a deluge to make GarrettServiss's
protagonistsrealize the monumental solidity of a skyscraper,and a
geological disaster for George Allan England's to appreciate the
universalsignificanceof theirinnateracialtraits,so too does it take the
force of a comet to engenderan epiphanyin Du Bois's white heroine.
Nothing less than a terrestrialcollision, Du Bois ironically implies,
would be sufficientto stripaway the veil of racial (as well as economic
and sexual) dominationfrom modernurbanlife.
AnteriorFutures
Fictions of displacementinto the future anteriorprovided an occasion for overturningnot only social relations of gender and race but
also patternsof time andduration.The status quo ante, in which the life

METROPOLITAN LIFE
33 1
span of skyscrapersappearedto have become even brieferthan that of

the houses and churchesthey replaced,will now have been inverted.It
is significantthat in the deep futureof England'sDarkness and Dawn
only the tallest, most speculativebuildings have survived.From Allan
and Beatrice's panoramic viewpoint atop the tower, those "lolling
mast[s] of steel," representingthe skeletons of ancient skyscrapers,
were the sole discernibleobjects "thrust[ing]up from the desolation"of
foliage and detritus(20). While "almostall" of the residentialbuildings
uptown had "crumbledin upon themselves," it is those much taller
commercialstructureslocated downtownand midtown- the ParkRow,
the Singer, and the Woolworth,and of course the MetropolitanLife
itself- thathave surprisinglywithstoodthe forces of corrosion(20). In
spite of the widespreadcalculationsof the shortenedlife expectancyof
office buildings, it was those very structures that had remained
standing,albeit in varyingdegrees of ruin.
The unexpected afterlife of the skyscraperin the postapocalypse
- in the tempowould have introduceda kind of deviation- or "warp"
ral flux that had apparentlycharacterizedurbanmodernity.For critics
and commentatorsof the period, as well as more recent historians,the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appeared to mark the
momentwhen time itself, traditionallygroundedin the naturalrhythms
of the sun and seasons, was radicallyuprooted.Its source of authority
transplantedfrom the natural to the mechanical, time henceforth
consistedof standardizedand abstractunits thatcould be synchronized,
measured,allocated,and exchanged.With the introductionof "railroad
zones" in 1883, this emergent notion of time could theoretically be
imposed across the continent, and with the completion of the Pacific
telegraphin 1903, it could be imposed across the globe.49But it was
within the modern city, and more specifically in the advanced clock
systems installedin modernoffice buildingslike the MetropolitanLife
Tower,that the mechanizationof time was manifestedwith particular
intensityand immediacy.The Metropolitan's"slaveclock,"in addition
to discipliningits own male and female employees throughthe various
gongs and bells resoundingthroughits interior,was also connected to
the "largestfour-dialtower clock in the world"and wired to a "special
transmitter"that enabled the searchlightto flash "minuteimpulses"in
"exactsynchronism,"therebybroadcastingthe "fast-fleetingminutesof
life" to "over one-sixteenth of the entire population of the United
States,"accordingto the company'sown commemorativepublication.50

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From the city's "prison[s]"to the "open sea,"one aspiringpoet wrote,

this "Clockin the Air"was an inescapablepresencein the lives of New
Yorkers. It was, another reported, "almost synonymous with time
itself." Still others referred to "Metropolitantime," as one would
"railroadtime," "daylight savings time," or "WesternUnion time."51
But one did not even have to look in the directionof MadisonSquareto
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 turnoverof
capital would be reiteratedwith increasingregularityby visitors from
abroad.The Frenchnovelist Paul Morandwould note how New York's
"buildings have no past and no future either," while some of its
"districtsalter their appearancein one season. . . . Everythinggoes
fast."52With rounds of constructionand reconstructiongrowing ever
more frequent, the significance of architecturecould no longer be
found in the traditionalnotion of a "life cycle," whereby buildings
might be allowed to evolve graduallyfrom gestation throughmaturity
to old age.53Time- unmoored from such premoderncertainties and
reduced to mechanical chimes, flashing searchlights, and recurrent
demolitions- appearedto rush forward"in advanceof itself."54
The question in effect raised by "scientific romances"concerned
what kind of temporalorderwould supplantthis "homogeneousempty
time"of capitalistmodernity.Whereasthe Utopiannovels of the period
magically overcame the contradictionsof the present by transporting
theirreadersinto timeless cities of the future,andthe cataclysmicnovel
resolved those contradictionsin lurid scenes of urbandestruction,the
science fiction of future ruin articulateda third possibility, a more
complex kind of temporaloutcome.55Here, under the pressureof the
accelerating pace of urban life, and the intensified rate of building
turnover,time would not culminate in perfection or destruction,but
ratherwould begin to unravelout of control.56The continuous thread
that linked the past, present,and futurewould become untied,allowing
time to run off in multiple directions.It is in an attemptto convey this
unsettlingjuxtapositionof futurityand antiquity(which cannotquitebe
reducedto such currentterms of urbanand culturalcriticism as David
Harvey's "time-space compression,"Stephen Kern's collapse of the
past into a "synchronouspresent," or Fredric Jameson's "crisis of
historicity") that I resort here to the tense or mood of the "future
anterior."57In the future anterior, time would run simultaneously

METROPOLITAN LIFE
333
forwardand backward,as if the city was becoming at once modernand

archaic, an object of both anticipationand retrospection,a site for
futurology and archaeology.Time itself thus appearsto be pulled in
oppositedirections.The violent force of this temporalstrainis rendered
disturbinglypalpableto Allan and Beatrice when they hear one of the
"half-tonhands"of the Metropolitanclock 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,
leadingdown into unfathomeddepthsbelow,"mightbe readas marking
the dislocation of time in the postapocalypticcity (85).
It was not only in Darkness and Dawn that the clock of the
MetropolitanLife expresseda sense thattime was somehow getting out
of hand. New York'sdaily newspaperswere also circulatingrumorsof
its cataclysmic effects. According to one, a crowd of pedestrians at
streetlevel were almost killed by masonryfalling from the clock face.
Another reportedcollisions in the street, caused as distractedlocals
looked up to admire the newly installed timepiece.58In Murray
Leinster's "RunawaySkyscraper,"published in Munsey's Argosy in
1919, an even strangertemporalcatastrophebefalls the famous clock.
Two MetropolitanLife employees, again an engineer and his stenographer,Arthurand Estelle, realize something is amiss when the dials of
its clock begin to revolve counterclockwise:"The whole thing started
when the clock on the MetropolitanTower began to run backward.It
was not a gracefulproceeding.The hands had been moving onwardin
their customarydeliberatefashion, slowly and thoughtfully,but suddenly the people in the offices near the clock's face heardan ominous
creaking and groaning. There was a slight hardly discernible shiver
throughthe tower,andthen somethinggave with a crash.The big hands
As this "unwinding"of time
on the clock began to move backward."59
gatherspace, Arthur,Estelle, and the otheremployees begin to witness
the increasinglyrapidunbuildingof the city. First, the crowds thin out
and electric lights expire, and then- just like the "flickering"of a
- the cityscape is progressivelydismantled,"storyby
"motion-picture"
story,"layer by layer, until the Metropolitanis surroundedby a forest
populatedby pre-ColumbianNative Americans(fig. 9). In response to
the temporaldisorderin which they find themselves, the occupantsof
the tower set about dismantlingclass relations too. Corporatehierarchies are repudiated, as the blue-collar workers in the tower now
emerge as the most competentleaders.

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Figure 9. Illustration from Murray Leinster, "The Runaway Skyscraper," The

Argosy (February 22, 1919).
Leinster's "motion-picture"metaphoralludes here to the practice,

common from the turn of the century,of manipulatingthe speed and
direction of a film in an attempt to conjure certain special temporal
effects. The particularchallenges of representingurbanthemes such as
skyscraperconstruction provided early actuality filmmakers with a
perfectopportunityto experimentwith these new screen practices.One
practice involved the introductionof a time lapse, a predetermined
intervalof time insertedbetween frames.When projectedat the normal
rate (then, usually fifteen frames per second), a time-lapse film could
thereby exaggerate the speed with which a constructioncrew could
erect a new building.A by-productof this cinematic trick of accelerating time was an exacerbationof the alreadyjerky movementsof traffic
and pedestrians that happened to enter the frame: that "flickering"
impressionto which Leinster was referring.In April 1901 American
Mutoscopeand BiographCompanyappliedthe time-lapsetechniqueto
a scene not of construction,but of demolition. The razing of the well-

METROPOLITAN LIFE
335
known StarTheateron Broadwayand ThirteenthStreet, a project that

took approximatelythirty 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
constructioncrews to arrive, to witness the spectacle of rebuilding.
Anothercommon technique improvisedduring this period, albeit one
performedby projectionistsratherthan by cinematographers,was to
reverse the direction of the film, thereby transformingdepictions of
- or vice versa. This
destructioninto anticipationsof (re)construction
kind of playful inversionof normaltemporalprocesses, made famous
by the Lumiere brothers in their 1895 film Demolition d'un mur,
continuedto fascinate spectatorsin Americannickelodeons.60Furthermore,the two techniquestendedto go handin hand.The catalog issued
by AmericanMutoscope and Biographstipulatedthat exhibitorsof its
time-lapsefilm should reversethe directiononce they reachedthe end,
thus the title "Demolishingand Building Up the StarTheater."61
It is this combination of time-lapse and backwardprojection that
Leinster transposes into the realm of science fiction, in the process
creating a landscape of deconstructedbuildings. But in "Runaway
Skyscraper,"an additionallayer of temporalcomplexity is introduced
by the fact that while the remainderof the city is rapidly dismantled,
the Metropolitan Life Tower itself remains intact, and indeed the
actions of its occupantscontinueto take place in real time. While some
science fiction critics have read this as a flaw on Leinster's part, this
simultaneousbidirectionalityof time is in fact fully consistentwith the
notion of futureanteriority.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 futureanterior.Ultimately,for film audiencesand science
fiction readersalike, the attractionof such unfamiliarvisions lay in the
enchantment of seeing one's own city in a strange new light, of
perceiving in a few instants urban processes usually protractedover
longer periods.In otherwords, the futureanteriorimplied another way
of looking, not only at social relationsof genderand race but also at the
temporaldimensions of the built environmentitself.
If "RunawaySkyscraper"imagines a futuredisplacedinto the distant
past,Darknessand Dawn, in contrast,displaces the past into the distant
future.The epoch in which Allan and Beatrice awake is markednot by
radical new developments(secret weapons or technological discover-

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Figure 10. "Demolishing and Building Up

the Star Theater" (F. S. Armitage, 1902),
AmericanMutoscope& BiographCompany
(Source: Motion Picture, Broadcasting
and Recorded Sound Division, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C., [LC 1874];
stills extracted and mounted by author).
ies), butby the persistence of architecturalrelics from an earlierperiod.

Not all of New York will have been wiped out, washed away, or
overgrown;therewill still remain,as Allan himself remarks,the "works
of man," glorious "even in their overthrow" (60). All ruins, by
definition,resist the simple temporalitiesof the presentor perfecttense.
As relics of the past persisting into the present, they have conventionally been defined (at least from the eighteenth century onward) as
paradoxicalconfigurationsof ongoing decline and growth,decomposition and recomposition, erosion and accretion, and thus the moment
one intervenesto preserve them, they cease to be "ruins"per se. The
MetropolitanTower,as a site of gradualdisintegration(illustratedin the
episode of its falling clock hand) and also blossoming vegetation

METROPOLITAN LIFE
337
(signified by the foliage that encrusts its limestone), exemplifies this

Like a Gothic or classical ruin,it enfolds within
unstableequilibrium.62
itself- to use Simmel's terms- both the inexorable corrosion of the
"humanwill" to architecturalverticality by the downward force of
physics and also the emergence- throughthat very reconfigurationof
spirit and nature- of a "new whole ... a [distinct] unity."63But its
statusas afuture ruin stretches(or twists) this temporaltension further.
To be projectedinto the futureonly 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 disrupted.It is expressions of temporalconfusion such as these, I have
argued here, that were analogous and related to descriptions of the
confused temporalityof urbanconstructionand demolition duringthe
same period. "Withthe upheavalof the marketeconomy,"Benjamin
wrote of the arcadesof nineteenth-centuryParis,but with implications
for our understandingsof the cultureof architecturein early-twentiethcentury New York, "we begin to recognize the monuments of the
bourgeoisieas ruins even before they have crumbled."64
Justas Benjaminendeavoredto make sense of the prematureruinsof
the arcades, so too do the protagonistsof postapocalypticnarratives
who discover the remains of modern skyscrapers.These architectural
relics, which generallyconstitutethe centralsubjectof those narratives,
requiresophisticatedhermeneuticskills on the partof the explorersor
survivorswho encounter them and who attempt to reconstructtheir
meaningand uses. The fragmentsof these buildingsappearnot only to
have remained standing for centuries but also to have preserved the
secrets of the ancientcivilization that had originallyerected 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
regularlyand humorouslymisinterpreted imagined to be something
other than what they are, or were an effect that might be termed
"hermeneutic estrangement." The primitive gangs who inhabit
postapocalypticNew Yorkin Van Tassel Sutphen'sDoomsman (1906)
misconstrue its ruins: the Flatiron Building is taken to be a sacred
temple, while an abandonedelectrical plant is confused with a "reliInscriptionsand epigraphson monuments,often pargious shrine."65
or
erased
historicallyobscure,lead to similarlymystified conclutially
sions. Nevertheless, the activity of scrutinizing and discerning the
hiddenor recalcitrantmeaningsof a ruin, of reconstructingthe totality

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AMERICAN QUARTERLY
of a culturefrom its remainingfragments,is aided by certainclues. In

Darkness and Dawn, it is the discovery of an undergroundcrypt of a
neo-Gothic cathedraljust outside the city, a kind of "time capsule"in
which all the secrets of early-twentieth-centurymetropolitanculture
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 greatbooks of the formercivilization ("the serriedshelves
of books . . . and dusty tomes [in which] were hiddenthe ... secretsof
the mighty past")but also by more banal,everydayartifacts.66
Like the
as
these
are
themselves,
skyscrapers
presented archaeologicalcuriosities that might reveal some essential or lost "truth"about American
urbanism.
In order for them to constitute this crucial link to the ancient past,
structuressuch as the MetropolitanLife Tower will by necessity have
withstood the test of time. That is, they will have transcendedtheir
origins as commonplace business buildings- overcome their prior
status (described by Steffens) as provisional and expendable investments, to be demolishedandreplacedin the interestsof acceleratingthe
turnoverof capital- and finally acquiredan auraof imperishabilityas
well as fragility,persistenceas well as transience.Previouslyprevented
from growing old, they will now have accrueda past, a patinaof age.
And as such they could functionnot only as accidental"timecapsules"
preservingthe historicaland everydaytraces of capitalisturbanismbut
also as legitimateand appropriatemonumentsto the cultureas a whole.
Despite the earlierprejudicesof John Ruskin (among othertheoristsof
the ruin) against structuresof steel, iron, and glass- materialsthat do
not "properly"registerthe effects of time- these skyscraperscould no
"67
longerbe excludedfromthe "Lampof Memory Writingin Scribner's
in 1909, the leading architecturalcritic MontgomerySchuylerwent as
far as to invoke Ruskin himself in an attemptto explain how, if the era
of corporatecapitalismwere to come to an end, the office buildingsit
had producedwould stand as testimony to it. Futurehistoriansmight
find economic meaning in those survivingstructures,as contemporary
Ruskiniansfind spiritualmeaningin the ruinedGothiccathedralsof the
thirteenthcentury:"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
altogetherto oxide of iron, might still be, in the majestic Ruskinian
phrase, 'the only witnesses that remainedto us of the faith and fear of

METROPOLITAN LIFE
339
nations,'the faith in the dollartowardwhich they so plainly aspired,the

fear of 'the hell of not making money.'"68
Not only an aestheticallyminded critic such as Schuylerbut even a
pragmatic critic like Lincoln Steffens could concede the enduring
power of the skyscraperas 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
remnantsof the othercreationsof modernbusiness enterprise,the only
legible chapterof the common tale" (38).
Transformedinto an archaic ruin, the skyscraperthus embodied a
certain doubleness: its tragic relegation to the status of disposable
commodity and yet its ironic triumph in outlasting and thereby
memorializingthe era of capitalistmodernity.At the same time that it
resonated with Henry James's critique of the destructive upheavals
wroughtby the real estate market,it also betrayeda fascination with
how such commercial structuresmight in fact survive as monuments,
with all that they might reveal to futuregenerationsabout the culture
and economy thathad built them. By invokingthe capacityof a ruin to
maintaina stable equilibriumbetween the forces of disintegrationand
cohesion, such depictionsthus conjuredup the possibility of New York
finally acquiringa 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).

340
AMERICAN QUARTERLY
1. Earlierwriterswho did imagine the desolationof New York tendedto narratethe

events leading up to its destructionratherthan explore its postapocalypticaftermath:
see, for example, EdmundRuffin,Anticipationsof the Future, to Serve as Lessonsfor
the Present Time (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1860); Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar's
Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (1890; Cambridge: Belknap Press of
HarvardUniversity, 1960); and Joaquin Miller, The Destruction of Gotham (New
York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1886). One exception was John Ames Mitchell, The Last
American:A Fragmentfrom the Journal of Khan-li (New York: FrederickA. 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 initiativesof New York's older elites in establishingcivic
museumsand advocatingpreservationas responsesto the dehistoricizingeffects of real
estate in The CreativeDestructionof Manhattan,1900-1940 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999); Ann Douglas similarlysituatesthe culturalflux and creativityof
1920s New York againstthe backdropof the real estate boom of thatdecade 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
urbanplanning, advocated by both genteel reformersand machine politicians, were
promptedby the way in which the real estate market"annihilatedboth space and time,
dissolving all traces of locality and legacy in a sublime flux, creatinga landscapethat
was at once monumentalandprovisional,centralizedbut endlessly dislocated"{Empire
City: TheMakingand Meaningof the New YorkCityLandscape[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
postwarLos 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, TheAmericanScene (1907; Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1994), 6061, 63. In CreativeDestructionof Manhattan,Max Page arguesthatJames's concerns
aboutthe dissolutionof the past in the cauldronof constructionwere sharedby 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 marketwas a musealizedversion superimposedon the surfaceof
the city by an emergentcoalition of historicalpreservationists,museumarchivists,and
tree-planting advocates. Left to its own devices, in other words, the New York
landscapewould apparentlyhave become a place entirely strippedof any residues of
time. See also the discussion of The American Scene in Kevin McNamara, Urban
Verbs:Arts and Discourses of the AmericanCity (Stanford:StanfordUniversityPress,
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. KurtH. Wolff (New York: Harperand Row, 1965), 261.
6. The term "creativedestruction"was coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter
by 1942 to refer to capitalism's capacity to "incessantly"reproduceitself by clearing
away older ideas, technologies, and businesses and thereby making way for newer
ones; see Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harperand Brothers,
1942), 81-86. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s, in particularin the work of
MarshallBermanand David Harvey, that the term came to refer more specifically to
the rendingof the urbanfabric itself. See Berman,All ThatIs Solid Melts into Air: The

METROPOLITAN LIFE
34 1
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 oftenprolonged 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 (Advertisements, 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:

342
AMERICAN
QUARTERLY
Universityof Tennessee Press, 2000), 20; there was some overlapbetween this article
and Bierce's "Insurancein Ancient America" (CosmopolitanMagazine, September
1906). Bierce's hostility towardthe insuranceindustryin fact predatedthe Armstrong
investigation;see his prose articleson insuranceabuses:"Prattle,"Examiner,February
17, 1889, and "Passing Show," Examinerand New YorkJournal, October 28, 1900,
reprintedin Fall of the Republic,as "TheInsuranceFolly," and "InsuranceandCrime,"
respectively, 182-84, 184-85.
15. The verb muckrake was not coined until 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt
referredto these investigativejournalistsin a speech to the GridironClub, Washington,
D.C.
16. Lincoln Steflens, The Modern Business Building, Scrwner s Magazine 22
(July 1897): 37, 61, 46 (hereaftercited in text). Fromhis extensive statisticalresearch,
MannuelGottliebhas pinpointed1893 as markingthe beginningof this upturnin New
York's constructionindustry,in otherwords, a full five yearsbefore the recoveryof the
nationalconstructionindustry(and the business economy as a whole), in Long Swings
in Urban Development(New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1976), 165.
17. Dublin, Family of ThirtyMillion, 315, 316.
18. Haley Fiske, "Some Items about the Tower, addressdelivered to the Triennial
Conventionof 1909-10, Box H9, Home Office-Tower Folder, 1909-23, MLICA.
19. Steffens's referencehere to a "gilt-edgedbond"is misleading:gilt-edged bonds
were issued by companies that had proved their profitability and were thus safe
investments.Nevertheless,his point appearsto be that somethingas large as an office
building might in fact turnout to yield little more than a single bond certificate.
20. The MetropolitanTower, with its "thirtieth-storyloggia" and its "terminating
peak," was consideredto be flying in the face of warningsthat "space given over to
such purely ornamentalfeatures. . . would bring no money returns"(MildredStapley,
"TheCity of Towers,"Harper's Monthly,October 1911, 702). For otherdenunciations
of architectural"waste" during this period, see George Hill, "The Economy of the
Office Building,"ArchitecturalRecord 15 (April 1904): 312-27, and H. A. Caparn,
"TheRiddle of the Tall Building,"Craftsman10 (April-September1906):476-88; for
an overview of the debate, see Gibbs, Business ArchitecturalImagery, 131-33.
21. Economists and statisticianshave attemptedfor some time to map these long
cycles in economic and urbandevelopment;the data from turn-of-centuryNew York
does not, however, entirely fit their model. Manuel Gottlieb's insistence that investment in constructionin the United States has followed twenty-year"swings"(such as
the period 1893-1918 in New York's constructionhistory) remains at odds with the
"wide range of recordeddurations";some of these smaller cycles are so brief ("less
than three years") that he is obliged to disregardthem as "[indistinguishable from
(short)business cycles"; see Gottlieb,Long Swings in UrbanDevelopment,12-13, 59.
Similarly, Brinley Thomas's detection of "long cycles" in Americanbuildingactivity,
in Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic
Economy,2nd ed. (New York:ColumbiaUniversityPress, 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 architecturalhistorianCarol
Willis, by contrast,has drawnattentionto the sharpfluctuationin the New York real
estate market during these years, as a backdrop to the initiative of a zoning law
(eventuallyenacted in 1916) that might regulatethose excesses: "Afterrecordactivity
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
numberof building plans ever filed in the borough of Manhattan,yet this burst was
followed by [record]decline" (Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapersand Skylines in
New Yorkand Chicago [New York: PrincetonArchitecturalPress, 1995], 68).

METROPOLITAN LIFE
343
22. Neil Harris,BuildingLives: ConstructingRites 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. Cartoonin Tower Scrapbook, 1907-20, MLICA, unpaginated.
24. The demolition of the Tower Building elicited considerable attention in the
press: see, for example, "TakingDown a Skyscraper,"LiteraryDigest 41 (August 13,
1910): 235; "Wreckingthe GillenderBuilding, New York,"EngineeringRecord,June
11, 1910, 755-56; and "Wrecking a Skyscraper,"Architectural Record 28 (JulyDecember 1910): 76. The law of "perpetualmotion" also demanded more rapid
techniques of construction:see Montgomery Schuyler, "The Evolution of the Skyscraper,"Scribner'sMagazine, September1909, 257-71; the demolitionof the Tower
Building,completedin forty-five days, was the "occasion"for Schuyler's essay (257).
25. Landauand Condit, Rise of the New YorkSkyscraper,250.
26. Steffens tracesthis trendback to the aftermathof the Chicago Fire of 1871, when
Americanarchitectsbegan to "erectstructuresso 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. HarryZohn
(London:Verso, 1983), 85. Comparedwith the innovationsin demolitionin New York
by 1910, Haussmann's tools were relatively primitive. Benjamin writes: "He had
revolutionizedthe physiognomy of the city with the most modest means imaginable:
spades,pickaxes,crowbars,and the like. Whatmeasureof destructionhad been caused
by even these limited instruments"(85).
28. "New Skyscrapersfor Old," ScientificAmerican,May 21, 1910, 414. See also
"Wreckinga Skyscraper"(cited above), similarlywrittenin responseto the Gillender's
demolition:"a tendency to boastfulness [aboutthe height of New York's skyscrapers]
is held in due restraintby the consciousness of the economic waste in tearingdown a
comparativelynew structureof such proportions,and as firm as a rock still. Yet this
waste is only that, exaggerated in form, which accompanies all progress- the
substitutionof new machines for old machines"(76).
29. The Argosy, Cavalier and Scrapbook,All-StoryMagazine, and other pulp titles
in Munsey's empire, were all priced at 10 cents, althoughthe Argosy was later raised
to 15 cents. They also remainedmonthly 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
Foundingand Developmentof the MunseyPublishing-House,a Quarterof a Century
Old: The Story of the Argosy, Our First Publication, and Incidentally the Story of
Munsey'sMagazine (New York: De Vinne Press, 1907). Before finally respondingin
1893 to Munsey's challenge by lowering its prices, Cosmopolitansold for twenty-five
cents.
30. For circulation figures, and further discussion of the authors and subgenres
appearingin these magazines, see Sam Moskowitz, ed., Under the Moons of Mars: A
History and Anthologyof "TheScientificRomance"in the MunseyMagazines, 19121920 (New York:Holt, Rinehart,and Winston, 1970). Moskowitz claims therethatthe
oldest of Munsey's all-fiction magazines, the Argosy, launchedin 1896, had gained a
readership approaching five hundred thousand by 1907, while the Cavalier and
Scrapbookhad reachedabout seventy-five thousandwithin five years of its launching
in 1908 (329).

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AMERICAN QUARTERLY
31. Garrett P. Serviss, "The Second Deluge," Cavalier Magazine (1911); page
numberscited in text refer to the more accessible edition, The Second Deluge (1912;
Westport,Conn.: HyperionPress, 1974).
32. Hugh Thompson,"The Remakingof New York,"Munsey'sMagazine, September 1912, 900, 894, 901, 893 (emphasis added).
33. ThomasJ. Vivian and GrenaJ. Bennett,"TiltingIsland,"Everybody'sMagazine,
September 1909, 380-88.
34. Daniel P. Wiles, "FearfulCatastropheIf Mile-High Edifice Is Built: Famous
Expert Tells Why Magnates Must Not ConstructDizzy Skyscrapers,"unidentified
newspaperclipping, Tower Scrapbook, 1907-20, MLICA.
35. George Allan England, "The Last New Yorkers:A Weird Story of Love and
Adventureamid the Ruins of a Fallen Metropolis,"Cavalier and Scrap Book (191 112). New YorkEvening Mail reprintedthe story, beginning March4, 1912. Darkness
and Dawn (Boston: Small, Maynardand Co., 1914) sold for $1.35 and consisted of
three parts:"The VacantWorld,""Beyondthe GreatOblivion,"and "TheAfterglow."
Page numberscited in text refer to the reprintof the book edition (Westport,Conn.:
Hyperion, 1974).
36. William R. Taylor, "Launchinga CommercialCulture:Newspaper,Magazine,
and Popular Novel as Urban Baedekers," in In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and
Commercein New York(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 71-72.
37. Englandbecame involved in left-wing politics during his convalescence at the
turnof the century;giving up his day job as an insuranceclerk, he joined the Socialist
Party,wrote socialist pamphletssuch as Get Together!(New York:WilshireBook Co.,
1908), and eventually received the party's nominationas candidate for governor of
Maine in 1912.
38. Beatricedid sometimes participatein less traditionalactivities:"Thehousekeeping by no means took up all the girl's time. Often she went out with him on what he
called his 'piratingexpeditions'"(71); she also exhibits more "masculine"traitsin the
fight with the Horde (135^5).
39. By 1915 the stenographers(or "Miss Remingtons,"after the typewritersthey
used) earned an average weekly wage of $11. For wage figures, see Olivier Zunz,
MakingAmericaCorporate,1870-1920 (Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press, 1990),
119. On the significantbut limited gains made by the first generationof women office
clerks in companies like MetropolitanLife, see, in additionto Zunz's MakingAmerica
Corporate, Sharon HartmanStrom, Beyond the Typewriter:Gender, Class, and the
Origins of ModernAmerican Office Work,1900-1930 (Urbana:University of Illinois
Press, 1992); and Angel Kwolek-Folland,EngenderingBusiness: Men and Womenin
the CorporateOffice, 1870-1930 (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994),
94-128.
40. Felix Grendon,"A ThousandYears from Now," New Review 2 (1914): 232-33.
41. Later, in the second volume, as Allan flies over New York, the sight of the
remainderof 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-limbedmen; those lithe, deep-breasted
women, fair-skinnedand with luxurianthair;all alike now plungedfor a thousandyears
in the abyss of death and of eternaloblivion" (bk. 1, chap. 21).
42. For illuminatingdiscussions 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 MariannaTorgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects,

METROPOLITAN
LIFE 345
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,
therebyobscuringthe multipleconcernsof its authors.In Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles
and the Imaginationof Disaster (New York: MetropolitanBooks, 1998), for instance,
Mike Davis claims that since the late nineteenthcenturythe popularliteratureof Los
Angeles has been deeply permeatedby paranoidfantasies of racial incursions and
genocidal purification(273-356). Withoutdownplayingthe influence of racism itself,
I wish to suggest that this genre (at least in its early twentieth-centuryNew York
moment) was fluid enough to permitracial issues to be articulatedwith various other
concernsand that it was even open to adaptationby critics of racism, as the following
discussion of Du Bois demonstrates.
43. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Comet," in Darkwater: Voicesfrom within the Veil
(1920; New York: Dover, 1969), 253-73 (hereaftercited in text). The slightly earlier
sightingof Halley's Comet (the tail of which was observedfrom the roofs of New York
hotels and skyscrapersin May 1910), together with the opening of the Metropolitan
Life Tower in 1909, might allow us to speculatethat "The Comet"(like several other
chaptersof Darkwater)was writtenseveral years priorto its publication.Du Bois may
also have been respondingto the newspaperreportsaboutthe public's apocalypticfears
regardingthe potentiallyfatal toxic effects of the comet; these superstitiousfears were
particularlyascribedto female "hysterics"and to "ignorant"blacks; see "Chicago Is
Terrified:Women Are StoppingUp Doors and Windows to Keep Out Cyanogen,"New
YorkTimes,May 17, 1910, and a reportabout the "negroes"of Asheville, N.C. being
in "a state of frenzy . . . believing that the end of the world was at hand . . . [and
declaringthat] there would be no more paydays,"New YorkTimes, May 18, 1910.
44. On the appropriationof the apex of the tower as a site of illicit interaction
between MetropolitanLife's male and female employees duringthis period, see Zunz,
Making America Corporate, 120, 121.
45. Compare,for example,Julia s vision of Jim as her BrotherHumanityincarnate

with the opening "Credo"of Darkwater,affirmingthat "all men, black and brown and
white, are brothers"(3). Du Bois's feminismencompassedprocreationand 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
Christin Texas"(53-55, 105-8, 123-33). ArnoldRampersadviews these referencesto
a "blackChrist"as an essentially propagandisticdevice, ratherthana theological claim
(TheArt and ImaginationofW. E. B. Du Bois [Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press,
1976], 180-81). On the centralityof this messianic trope within black nationalism,see
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulationsof a Religious Myth (University Park: PennsylvaniaState University
Press, 1982), esp. 142-54. And on the intersectionof Du Bois's socialism, feminism,
and Pan-Africanism,see Adolph L. Reed Jr., W.E. B. Du Bois and AmericanPolitical
Thought:Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
46. Even thoughMetropolitanLife acceptedAfricanAmericanpolicy holders(other
insurancecompanies,such as John HancockFinancialServices, discouragedits agents
from soliciting African American customers until as late as 1960), it effectively
reinscribedracialdiscriminationby dividing its industrialpolicies into "standard"and
classes. African Americanstended to have access only to the latterand
"substandard"
thus paid a higher premiumwhile receiving fewer benefits. In 2002 MetropolitanLife
finally agreedto a settlementcompensatingminoritiesfor policies they held from 1901
to 1972. See "MetLifeReaches Settlementson Alleged Race-BasedPolicies,"Business
Review, August 30, 2002; see also "In Black and White: Old Memos Lay Bare

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MetLife's Use of Race to Screen Customers,"WallStreetJournal, July 24, 2001, Al,

A10.
47. This may be a referenceto the WoolworthTower (completed in 1913).
48. In asserting the influence on Du Bois of German literatureand philosophy
(especially Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel) and opera (Wagner), critics may have
overlookeda more local and popularsource in the Munsey magazines.For a reference
to the messianic "Of the Coming of John"(from Souls of Black Folk) as inspiredby
Wagner's Lohengrin and Goethe, Heine, Schiller, and Hegel's writings, see Stuart
Hall, "TearingDown the Veil," Guardian(U.K.), February22, 2003.
49. See Michael O'Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time
(Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1990), esp. 55-98.
50. The MetropolitanLife Insurance Company:Its History, Its Present Position in
the InsuranceWorld,Its Home OfficeBuilding,and Its WorkCarriedon Therein(New
York, 1908), 47-48, 45-46.
51. John CurtisUnderwood,"TheClock in the Air"(n.d.), in TheBook of New York
Verse, ed. Hamilton Fish Armstrong(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917), 363;
"The MetropolitanClock- It's in the Movies," Home Office 9 (April 1920): 1, in box
H10, MLICA; "Metropolitan:A Beacon to Hills," New YorkSun, February1922, in
box H10. See also Sara Teasdale's "The MetropolitanTower," one of several songs
and poems preserved in MLICA, in which the Metropolitan's clock marks the
inception of a romance.
52. "Certainsquartiersmodifient leur aspect en une saison: 'je m'absentepour une
fin de semaine,' me dit une dame, 'et, en rentrant,je ne reconnaisplus ma rue'" (Paul
Morand,New-York[Paris, 19301,276).
53. On the notion of building life cycles, see Harris,BuildingLives, 5, 59-60, 11213, 163-65.
54. The phrase "in advance of itself is used by Georges Gurvitchto describe the
"sense of time" characteristicof periods of intense financial speculation; see his
Spectrumof Social Time, trans, and ed. Myrtle Korenbaum(Dordrecht, 1964), also
discussed in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity:An Inquiry into the
Origins of CulturalChange (Cambridge,Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 223-25.
55. The most widely read Utopiannovel was of course EdwardBellamy's Looking
Backward,2000-1887 (1888; Harmondsworth:Penguin, 19821:its counterpartin the
subgenreof the cataclysmic novel would be IgnatiusDonnelly's Caesar's Column:A
Story of the TwentiethCentury(1890; Cambridge:Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity, 1960). The critical literatureon both Utopianand cataclysmic fiction in turn-ofthe-centuryAmerica is voluminous;for a survey, see KennethRoemer, The Obsolete
Necessity: America in Utopian Writings,1888-1900 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1976), and Fredric Cople Jaher, Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic
Thoughtin America, 1885-1918 (New York: Macmillan, 1964), respectively.
56. This third understandingof time (which might be called postapocalyptictime)
complicates and ultimatelyunderminesO'Malley's argumentabout a simple two-way
choice between modern"artificial"time and premodern"naturaltime."
57. "Time-spacecompression"is employedby Harveyto characterizethe successive
roundsof spatial and temporalrestructuringin Western society throughoutmodernity
as well as postmodernity{Condition of Postmodernity,240, 284-307). Increasing
synchronicity,accordingto StephenKern,was a featurecharacteristicof the turnof the
twentieth century; see The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge:
HarvardUniversityPress, 1983), 11-15, et passim. The "crisisof historicity"is Fredric
Jameson's term for the flattening of temporalityunder the representationallogic of

METROPOLITAN LIFE
347
late-twentieth-centurymultinationalcapitalism, 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
LookingUp at New Timepiece,"unidentifiednewspaperclipping, n.d.; see also "Gazes
Skyward;Loses His Memory: Man Who Looked Up At SkyscraperUnable to Find
Home . . . ," unidentifiednewspaperclipping, n.d.; all articles in Tower Scrapbook,
MLICA.
59. Murray Leinster, "The Runaway Skyscraper,"Argosy (February22, 1919),
FASF; page numberscited in text referto the reprintedversion in TheBest of Amazing
[Stories], ed. Joseph Ross (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 47.
60. One of the earliest experimentsin backwardprojectionwas 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 Cinematographewill be
desirous to witness," in Post-Express, February20, 1897, 14, quoted in George C.
Pratt,Spellboundin 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 thankTom Gunningfor showing me this source and therebyconfirming
that Star Theaterwas indeed projectedin reverse.
62. "Even upon the huge, squaredstones which here and there lay in disorder,and
which Sternknew musthave fallen from the tower, the moss grew very thick;and more
thanone such block had been rent by frost and growing things"{Darknessand Dawn,
42-43).
63. Simmel, "The Ruin,"261.
64. Benjamin,"Paris,the Capitalof the NineteenthCentury"(Expose of 1935), in
Charles Baudelaire, 176 (emphasisadded);in the more recent translationof the 1935
expose, the worddestabilizinghas been substitutedfor upheaval(TheArcades Project,
trans.HowardEiland and Kevin McLaughlin[Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press,
2002], 13).
65. Van Tassel Sutphen, The Doomsman (New York: Harperand Brothers, 1906),
FASF, reprinted,with a new introductionby Thomas D. Clareson (Boston: Gregg
Press, 1975), 124-35; see also the review of The Doomsman,"NightmareProphecy,"
New YorkTimes,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
monumentalarchitectureof the Third Reich, preferringthe "ruinvalue" of stone; see
Alexander Scobie, Hitler's State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity
(UniversityPark:PennsylvaniaState University Press, 1990).
68. Schuyler,"Evolutionof the Skyscraper,"259.


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The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1909-19

Author(s): Nick Yablon

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