Drawing three comes very close to depicting what the spectator in drawing two would see if s/he were to occupy the other (west) side of Broadway and pivot ninety degrees to the right. Depicted is Exchange Place at Broadway, looking east.

The kind of claustrophobia Marcus describes in the written text had been, in the 1910s, among the most widespread arguments against skyscraper building. It was thought that buildings allowed to rise unhindered over their entire base would, as they became more common in New York, cut off air and light to the inhabitants of the buildings and to the street below. In 1916 a comprehensive zoning ordinance regulated skyscraper design by mandating set-backs at regular intervals and allowing only a small percentage of the building to rise to an unlimited height.

Marcus would presumably have harbored some hostility to the imposing design of the massive buildings, but the analogy with which he closes the prose vignette is characteristically equivocal. This comparison – between the perpetually dark streets of the financial district and the great canons of the west – is especially puzzling in that it appears again on the very next page of the book. The fact that canons are compared to the skyscrapers two times in as many pages suggests that Marcus had some kind of specific investment in the comparison. It is not clear what opinion of canons Marcus expected the reader to hold, but it is certain that the comparison works to undercut the readers sense of this street as one marred by a suffocating artificiality.

Canons are associated most closely in America with the vast expanses of the West – and with an entire economy of experience which could not be more inconsistent with the conception of the city as dark, crowded, and stale. But the comparison derives great power from this disjunction. While there are considerable differences between a canon and Exchange Place, to cling rigidly to the idea that they have nothing in common would be to adhere to the doomed aesthetic Marcus associates with the nineteenth century. The built environment may very well be damaging to people, but the natural world is no less imposing, and no less dangerous and no more aesthetically satisfying than the city against which it is defined. Both are spaces legible through the logic of the sublime and both pose threats just as they open up possibilities. The chapter is apprehensive about the towering structures, but it can only represent its apprehension by conceding that the skyscraper may be valued as an aesthetic experience comparable to the most spectacular sights in the unbuilt world.