HIGHER AND HIGHER.(Great Fortune)(Higher)(Book Review)

From 2002, Claudia Roth Pierpont on the construction of New York's Chrysler Building

"Heroic materialism," Kenneth Clark called the best of what the commercial culture of the past two centuries had made, at the close of his 1969 series "Civilisation," and he illustrated its triumph simply by standing on the bridge of the Staten Island ferry and peering out at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the spires high and gleaming. "Why are the public buildings so high?" another Englishman of the same Oxonian generation, W. H. Auden, who knew the squalid city rather better than Clark did, asked when he arrived. "why, that's because the spirits of the public are so low." ...