The Metropolitan Life Tower was completed in 1908 in order to house the rapidly expanding Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. It was only the second tall building to rise in Madison Square. It was preceded by the 21 story Fuller or "Flatiron" Building, among the first Manhattan buildings to be regarded as a skyscraper. Upon completion in 1902, the Flatiron was the tallest building in New York, and it is to this building that Marcus alludes when he suggests that the Tower dwarfs its neighbors. In 1902 the Flatiron’s rise was almost scandalous; six year later, at a rise of 51 stories, the Metropolitan Life Tower was more than twice as high. A 1927 Red Book Guide listed the Flatiron among New York’s "Points of Interest," adding the caveat "Some years ago the greatest attraction in New York. Now it attracts little attention." The same list contains an entry for the Metropolitan Tower which is almost entirely numerical; like Marcus, the guidebook regards the skyscraper as remarkable, but remarkable only in the most quantifiable terms.

The Tower faces the south east corner of Madison Square, at the intersection of Madison Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, and chapter thirteen situates the spectator at the furthest point from the tower which can still afford him or her an unobstructed view. It is drawn from the north-west corner of the park, just north of Twenty-Sixth Street, perhaps as far west as the west side of Fifth Avenue.

As the introductory chapter to the book’s second half – the half focuses on Manhattan north of Twenty-Third Street – chapter thirteen makes somewhat nonchalant use of the representational strategies with which the early chapters had been so uneasy. In the first half of the book, the taller the building, the more reluctant Marcus is to use its name; the Municipal Building is the only tall building for which a chapter in the book’s first half is named, and even "The Municipal Building" comes only after the structure has already been discussed in "City Hall." The Woolworth Building is represented, with increasing specificity, in four chapters from the book’s first half, but only in chapter twelve is the book finally able to name, comprehend, and judge it.

In book’s second half there is little of this hesitation. Unlike the Woolworth and Municipal Buildings, the Metropolitan Tower does not need to appear in the margin of other structure’s chapters before it can be examined directly. And though its details are invisible in the drawing, the prose sketch is able not only to articulate, but also to interpret them. Chapter thirteen’s treatment of the Metropolitan Tower is analogous to the treatment of the Woolworth Building in chapter twelve, but it seems not to require the gradual and uneasy preparation with which the book approached the Woolworth.

Likewise, the chapter relies to a great extent on representative protocols borrowed from mass culture and the tourist industry, but in his appropriation of these (to be sure, extraordinarily problematic) codes Marcus is able to critique the oppressive and destructive order of which the codes themselves, and the skyscrapers they represent, are products. The grandeur of the Tower is linked explicitly to the suffering of the poor – the clock which regularizes the days of the employed emblemizes the disenfranchisement of the jobless. In this "The Metropolitan Tower" anticipates the second half of New York, the Nation’s Metropolis by further emphasizing the early chapters’ governing contradiction: modernity cannot be refused, it can at most be despised – and one can despise it only within its own despicable tropes.

Ironically, The Metropolitan Life Company was one of the few large corporations which took an active interest in welfare of the unemployed who – in this chapter – suffer in the same park next to which the company prospers. It was Met Life, and not the city government, which first attempted to provide affordable housing through the construction of large apartment projects. There is no evidence that Marcus was aware of the Company’s greater-than-average generosity, but if he was his representation of the building is not entirely unjust. The aid Met Life offered to the poor did not spring from selflessness alone; that aid would work in part to help the unemployed participate in an economy in such a way so that they could afford life insurance. Like Marcus, they are able to escape their suffering only by participating more fully in the system that had forced it on them.