It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth....... In a great workshop like Chicago this creative power germinates, even though the brutality and selfish preoccupation of the place drive it elsewhere for bread. Men of this type have loved Chicago, have worked for her, and believed in her. The hardest thing they have to bear is her shame. These men could live and work here when to live and work in New York would stifle their genius and fill their purse.... New York still believes that art should be imported; brought over in ships; and is a quite contented market place. So while New York has reproduced much and produced nothing, Chicago's achievements in architecture have gained world-wide recognition as a distinctively American architecture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears--as the song of birds, wind in the ...trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk- happy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It ha...s been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban consp...iracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town... steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city's flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »