The Soldiers and Sailors Monument was begun in 1900 and building ceased in 1902 – the structure was never actually completed and remained in 1921 (as it does in 2000) unfinished. It is located in Riverside Park, overlooking the Hudson River, at Eighty-Ninth Street. It was originally intended that the Monument would be built at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street – the site featured in chapter sixteen – but an objection from the Municipal Arts Commission forced the city to change its plans.

At twenty-three words, chapter eighteen’s is the shortest of all the book’s twenty-five prose sketches. It is also perhaps the most opaque in a book that features some of history’s most cryptic writing about New York City. Most notable in this chapter is the absence of numerical data. Of all the book’s chapters named for twentieth century structures, chapter eighteen is the only one to refrain from mentioning numbers, and to contain no synonym for large. In Marcus’ understanding, The Soldiers and Sailors Monument is somehow able to defy quantification – indeed, it is able to refuse language itself. Every other drawing in the book depicts a structure which is then articulable through written language; the Monument cannot be talked about, it can only be felt. That monuments canonically represent mournful recollection further evidences Marcus’ belief that grief is the affect made inarticulable by the modern world

In this sense it is out of reverence, and not out of neglect, that Marcus treats it with such striking brevity. The privileged position the Monument occupies in the book refuses final and definite explanation (its unknowablity is part of the reason Marcus accords it that privilege) but one might speculate that the Monument succeeds in occupying the philosophical and affective space which the book is trying desperately to create for itself. It is a product of the twentieth century which obeys the visual codes of the postcard (its position along the Hudson makes possible a picturesque river background and recognizable silhouette in its mass-produced likeness), but it is able to mourn losses of the nineteenth century (in its case military losses) from within twentieth century discourse. No other structure represented in the book is able to perform this work. Each is represented as part of the slain nineteenth century, or part of the slaying twentieth, but none besides this monument grieves as a survivor of the dead.

"The Soldiers and Sailors Monument" also helps to resolve one of the dilemmas left over from the book’s first half. The early chapters had asserted that when twentieth century New York took shape, it destroyed not only its nineteenth century predecessor but the language through which one could lament that destruction. Like the book, the Monument attempts to create a space within the discourse of modern life through which one can experience the sorrow of loss. But where the early chapters merely insist on the importance of this project, chapter eighteen – like chapter fourteen before it – begins to negotiate the specific form which the project is to take. Where chapter fourteen had focussed on frustrated desire, however, it is in chapter eighteen that the book makes explicit the centrality of emotion to its project. The work of the book is of a specifically affective transformation, and not of aesthetic or overtly political challenge.