Drawing ten is the third of the book’s drawings to focus on the Brooklyn Bridge. It appears as though it might show the western pier of the Brooklyn Bridge from the south, looking northward, or the eastern pier from the north looking southward. The ships and wharf below the Bridge are rendered so darkly that they cannot be identified as part of Brooklyn or of Manhattan. There are faint angular smudges just above the Bridge’s roadway in the far right of the panel, which may represent the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, but may as easily represent cloud formations.

Compounding the ambiguity in drawing ten’s point of view is an inconsistency in the grammatical treatment of the Bridge. While the drawing shows a pier, and the title asserts that it is the pier, the prose sketch discusses the piers as a pair. The referent of "pier" is made even more difficult to determine by the plethora of piers – that is to say, docks – which jut into the river around and below the Bridge. Until reading the prose, the reader might easily assume that the chapter was to focus on one of the piers in the wharf, rather than on one of the Bridge’s piers.

The chapter therefor falls in line with the previous two chapters on the Brooklyn Bridge in that it takes the well known tourist attraction and works to undermine its familiarity. The drawing works to decontextualize the Bridge by severing it from other identifiable structures; the chapter title forces the reader to see the Bridge as a set of parts – pier, roadway, and suspension cables – rather than as a unified whole. The prose piece further complicates this defamiliarized version of the postcard View by calling attention to the other pier. In doing so it acknowledges parts of the Bridge to which the reader is denied visual access. Marcus demands that the reader consider the entire Bridge even though he allows that reader to see only a portion of it. It remains unknowable, even after such extensive treatment in the book so far. At no point has the reader been shown the entire bridge, and the prose of chapter ten serves as an explicit reminder of that fact.

The texts insistance that the reader be shown only a part of the whole is compounded by the fact that the ambiguity of the drawing's point of view is resolved from outside the chapter. "The Pier" is one of two chapters in the book which presents a different title than the one by which it is called in the table of contents (the other being "The Soldiers and Sailors Monument," which in the table of contents is striped of the article). The reader can discover where s/he has been possitioned only by returning to an earler section of the book. The chapter is indicative of the complexity of the relation the book maintains with its readers. It seems to demand both strict liniar sequence (in its clearly numbered chapters and organized spatial progression through the city) and circular, retrospective treatment. The book seems to ask that readers attempt to move through the twenty-five chapters in order, awhere that they will find themselves unable to do so. In ways not unlike modernity itself, New York, the Nation's Metropolis asserts that looking back is both nessisary and impossible.

Chapter ten also has some resonance with Masonic symbolism. While there is no evidence that Marcus was a member of the Freemasons in 1921, he was a member of his local Masonic lodge in Stonington, Connecticut when he died in 1934. In Masonic iconography the "two pillars" represent both duality and transformation. While duality, specifically the conflict between the past and present, is one of the book’s central concerns, chapter ten reads the piers of the Bridge as a gateway entrance to the metropolis. Freemasons understand the two pillars as "mark[ing] the passage from one place to another quite different one… They announce the departure from a familiar world to an unknown one." The Bridge represents in two ways the point of entry into the incomprehensible cityscape of modern Manhattan. It is situated spatially at the mouth of the East River, and situated temporally at the dawn of modern engineering. It is with the Brooklyn Bridge that the skyscraper techno-aesthetic began.