The sky-scrapers that cluster about the lower end of Broadway—­their natural home—­were as impressive as I could have desired, but not architecturally.  For they could only be felt, not seen.  And even in situations where the sky-scraper is properly visible, it is, as a rule, to my mind, architecturally a failure.  I regret for my own sake that I could not be more sympathetic toward the existing sky-scraper as an architectural entity, because I had assuredly no European prejudice against the sky-scraper as such.  The objection of most people to the sky-scraper is merely that it is unusual—­the instinctive objection of most people to everything that is original enough to violate tradition!  I, on the contrary, as a convinced modernist, would applaud the unusualness of the sky-scraper.  Nevertheless, I cannot possibly share the feelings of patriotic New-Yorkers who discover architectural grandeur in, say, the Flat Iron Building or the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building.  To me they confuse the poetical idea of these buildings with the buildings themselves.  I eagerly admit that the bold, prow-like notion of the Flat Iron cutting northward is a splendid notion, an inspiring notion; it thrills.  But the building itself is ugly—­nay, it is adverbially ugly; and no reading of poetry into it will make it otherwise.

[Illustration:  A WELL-KNOWN WALL STREET CHARACTER]

Similarly, the Metropolitan Building is tremendous.  It is a grand sight, but it is an ugly sight.  The men who thought of it, who first conceived the notion of it, were poets.  They said, “We will cause to be constructed the highest building in the world; we will bring into existence the most amazing advertisement that an insurance company ever had.”  That is good; it is superb; it is a proof of heroic imagination.  But the actual designers of the building did not rise to the height of it; and if any poetry is left in it, it is not their fault.  Think what McKim might have accomplished on that site, and in those dimensions!

Certain architects, feeling the lack of imagination in the execution of these enormous buildings, have set their imagination to work, but in a perverse way and without candidly recognizing the conditions imposed upon them by the sky-scraper form:  and the result here and there has been worse than dull; it has been distressing.  But here and there, too, one sees the evidence of real understanding and taste.  If every tenant of a sky-scraper demands—­as I am informed he does—­the same windows, and radiators under every window, then the architect had better begin by accepting that demand openly, with no fanciful or pseudo-imaginative pretense that things are not what they are.  The Ashland Building, on Fourth Avenue, where the architectural imagination has exercised itself soberly, honestly, and obediently, appeared to me to be a satisfactory and agreeable sky-scraper; and it does not stand alone as the promise that a new style will ultimately be evolved.