Hewlett's essay anticipates some of the concerns important to the book as a whole. The first paragraph meditates on the difficulties facing the artist who seeks to represent modern New York - difficulties arising from the "violent contrast" of old and new with which Marcus finds himself so deeply concerned. The essay goes on to argue that Marcus occupies a position of great advantage in representing the modern because in doing so he occupies a space excluded from the often limiting parameters of a single medium and genre. He has had to be part architect, part artist, and part silversmith in order to negotiate the sheer disjunction of machine age Manhattan. No one aesthetic could hope to explain so conflicted a landscape; it is a job for the dilettante and not the specialist.

The second paragraph anticipates the general narrative curve which the book will go on to trace. Hewlett perceives the "undisturbed" natural landscape as fundamentally preferable to the "contrasts" of the modern city. To be human is, in this essay, to see the natural and the beautiful as coextensive. But the inborn perception of natural beauty brings with it a drive to pollute and corrupt. The "imagination" must intervene in order to restructure cultural attachments to the natural world (which had themselves been natural and innate) so that they are artificially made to appreciate the built world. Hewlett makes much greater use than Marcus of the gendered rhetoric which was so often used to understand changes in the American landscape. He invokes a familiar narrative in which people - often designated with the signifier man - love the purity of the "virgin land," but are helpless against their compulsion to corrupt and violate it. But in almost every other way, paragraph two outlines the assumptions out of which Marcus will write. The pure natural world is the field of true beauty, but true beauty has been lost forever, and art must provide a way to renarrate peoples innate attachments to the natural. Aesthetic experience must find a way to let people relinquish their pre-modern aesthetics and to acquire a notion of the beautiful which will serve them in the machine age.