Drawing two shows Broadway from the south-east corner of its intersection of with Exchange Place, looking north. Were the spectator of this scene to turn ninety degrees to his or her left, s/he would see something very much like the drawing in chapter three.

Shown on the left side of Broadway are some of the most symbolically charged structures in Manhattan. The steeple one block north of the spectator belongs to Trinity Church. Built in 1839 and designed by Richard Upjohn (the third structure named Trinity Church to have occupied the site) the Church’s steeple dominated the Manhattan skyline for much of the nineteenth century.

Also on the west side of Broadway, three blocks further north than the Church, is the Singer Building, identifiable by the dome which tops its tower. Designed by Earnest Flagg and completed in 1911, the Singer Building was at the time of its completion the tallest building in the world.

Less clearly rendered – but specified nonetheless by its pointed tower – is the Woolworth Building. Upon its completion in 1913, only eighteen months after that of the Singer Building, it was the tallest building in the world. It retained that distinction still in 1921, and would not be surpassed until 1930.

As depicted here, the Woolworth Building is a full seven blocks from the spectator. Of all the structures depicted, the Woolworth is seen from the greatest distance, and this distance allows Marcus to represent it as quite a bit shorter – on the two dimensional plane of the page – than the two former champions closer in. Likewise, the Singer Building, significantly taller than Trinity Church, appears deceptively equal in height to it. Actual measurement of the drawing reveal that Trinity’s steeple and the tower atop the Singer Building’s dome rise exactly as far as one another above the drawing’s bottom boarder, but that the cross which tops the Trinity steeple, about a millimeter in height on the page, puts the Church at the slightest advantage.

The drawing thus challenges the dogma of skyscraper worship, which had by 1921 attained the status of a gospel in the minds of most of New York’s architectural and real estate thinkers. In this drawing, the taller a building is, the more indistinct it becomes, and the further it moves from the nineteenth century commitments which Marcus links to the Church.

The drawing parodies the logic of the skyscraper by depicting the height of the buildings in reverse order. The greater the actual rise of the building, the shorter Marcus makes it appear on the page. What is most important about this strategy is not the challenge it poses to the skyscraper aesthetic, but rather its ultimate reliance on the values it critiques. There drawing can represent the value of a building only by making it appear larger, and it therefor affirms size to be the true signifier of worth.