Peck Slip was the Manhattan side terminus of the first Brooklyn/Manhattan ferry lines in 1814. It is drawn here, as Marcus notes, from South Street, looking west. While the representation of the Slip itself is worthy of some attention, what is fascinating in this drawing is the use of the lamp post and hanging street light to frame – just above the center of the page – a picture within the picture. The viewer is asked to look not so much at the foregrounded margin, but at the drawings centerpiece – the tallest building in the world – the Woolworth. It is indistinct and far in the distance, but its dominance over the rest of the city is unavoidable even from so far away, and from a location so closely associated with the nineteenth century.

The prose piece enacts a similar contradiction; the Woolworth Building is at the center of Marcus’ Father Knickerbocker fantasy, just as it is at the center of his drawing. At seven hundred ninety two feet, the Woolworth is clearly the structure "rising eight hundred feet" in the distance. But as direct as this reference is, the building is completely mystified by the fact that it is presented through the eyes of a time traveler. This is the books most extensive treatment of the Woolworth so far, and yet even here it is kept at enormous distance. It is incomprehensible, unnamable, and can be accounted for only through superstitions.

This chapter is consistent with the others in the book in several ways. It is extremely interested in tensions between nineteenth and twentieth century conceptions of Manhattan; it represents the nineteenth century as an old man (just as does chapter five); and it regards the damage inflicted by the skyscraper on nineteenth century sensibilities and structures as painfully lamentable, while at the same time asserting the skyscraper’s inevitability and undeniable spectacularity. But chapter nine is also Marcus’ most patronizing treatment of the past. While he reinvokes the figure of the old man from chapter five, in this chapter he does so in order to infantalize him, representing him as more quaint than distinguished.

But while the prose marks what is Marcus’ most simplistic treatment of the relation between past and present, the chapter as a whole represents one of his most neuanced. Father Knickerbocker sees the building as "all white and glowing," but the drawing – so dazzling in its treatment of the light reflected in the puddles – depicts the Woolworth as an amorphous gray smudge. This discrepancy allows the reader to step out of Father Knickerbockers position – it is clear that he is not seeing the Woolworth at the same time of day as the viewer enacted by the drawing. If the reader sees Manhattan through nineteenth century eyes s/he will be astonished and overwhelmed – the skyscraper may be seen as a product of evil, but it cannot be seen as a product of dubious historical forces. Indeed it can barely be seen at all, except as a blinding tower of light; this is the way the building would appear early in the day with the eastern sun reflecting off it. In order to see the building for what it is, one must see it later in the day, with the sun behind it, a vantage that caries with it the suggestion that one must see it as part of a later era than the one of which Father Knickerbocker is a part.

In order not to be blinded by the skyscraper, the viewer must look at it as its contemporary. Critique of twentieth century life is therefor possible only from within that life. To attempt to see the skyscraper from outside the machine age is to fail to see it clearly.