Skyscraper

Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women's writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-twentieth century. From mysteries to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

Faith Baldwin

SKYSCRAPER

Vera Caspary

BEDELIA

LAURA

Dorothy B. Hughes

THE BLACKBIRDER

IN A LONELY PLACE

Gypsy Rose Lee

THE G-STRING MURDERS

MOTHER FINDS A BODY

Evelyn Piper

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

Olive Higgins Prouty

NOW, VOYAGER

Valerie Taylor

THE GIRLS IN 3-B

STRANGER ON LESBOS

Tereska Torrés

WOMEN'S BARRACKS

BY CECILE

AFTERWORD BY LAURA HAPKE

THE FEMINIST PRESS AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY NEW YORK NEW YORK CITY

Published in 2012 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition, 2003

Copyright © 1931, 1959 by Faith Baldwin

Afterword copyright © 2003 by Laura Hapke

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Originally published in 1931 by Dell Publishing Company. This edition published by arrangement with The Faith Baldwin Literary Estate.

Cover and text design by Drew Stevens

Cover photo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baldwin, Faith, 1893–1978

 Skyscraper / Faith Baldwin; afterword by Laura Hapke.—1st Feminist Press ed. Originally published in 1931.

p. cm. — (Femmes fatales: women write pulp)

eISBN 978-155861-787-2

 1 Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. Women—Employment—Fiction. 3. Separated people—Fiction. 4. Women employees—Fiction. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 6. Skyscrapers—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

 PS3503.U97S55 2003

813'.52.dc21

2003013433

This book is for Major and Mrs. Percival Wren
in friendship and gratitude for friendship.

To my friends in the trust department of a great bank, to the buyer in a Fifth Avenue store, to the control-room engineer of a radio corporation and to all others who helped me so materially, my acknowledgments and thanks.

  1 SOARING STEEL

  2 HIS KIND OF GIRL

  3 MEN ARE COMPLICATIONS

  4 FINISHED—OR BEGINNING?

  5 ANYTHING YOU WISH, DAVID

  6 HARMLESS AS A SERPENT

  7 ON THE KNEES OF THE GODS

  8 AFTER LAUGHING, TEARS

  9 ON A NOTE OF HEARTBREAK

10 TWO TROUBLED GIRLS

11 MARA'S WAY OUT

12 THE PERFECT HOST

13 A SECRET BETRAYED

14 DWIGHT GIVES HIS WORD

15 JENNIE'S BARGAIN

16 A GNAWING SUSPICION

17 “MEN MAKE ME SICK!”

18 FAREWELL TO JENNIE

19 SARAH TAKES ACTION

20 HIS ARMS, HIS KISS

21 THEIR SKYSCRAPER

AFTERWORD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM FEMINIST PRESS: FEMME FATAL SERIES

ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS

 

 

 

SOARING STEEL
MIDTOWN IN MANHATTAN, THE SEACOAST BUILDING rose steadily in a series of sculptured setbacks for more than eight hundred feet, to challenge the imagination, to utter the most recent, but probably not the last, word in structural engineering.

From the lowest caisson anchored on a rock, to the tall tapering of the final soaring tower, incredible tons, impossible masses of steel and stone had been shaped, shrieking their protest, into a pattern of progress, into a concrete expression of man's upward striving.

Here upon this site, not many months ago, a group of brick buildings, irregular and dingy, had stood. Demolished, they have been torn apart, vanishing into dust. Then had come an ordered confusion, earth ripped open, earth in a long travail, earth in the preparatory throes of deliverance of a monster. Enamored of the antlike activities of swarming workmen, the crowds had stood still, pausing from their futile, their important, personal affairs to gape dully at the exposed bowels, the torn womb of earth; to watch hour upon hour the heavy open jaws of the steam shovels digging their relentless way through earth to quicksand and running water, through quicksand and running water to the mammoth, the dinosaurian bones of solid rock.

Men
. Architects—engineers—contractors—job runners—
timekeepers—marble-setters—ironworkers—carpenters—plasterers—masons—painters—glaziers. And back of them, invisible, the forests, the quarries, the mills, and the kilns.

Noise
. The discordant hymn attending these gargantuan rites, from the bell signals to the donkey engines, from the clatter of tools to the machine-gun staccato of the riveting-gun. The precise madness of the riveters' gang holds the watching crowd breathless—rivet boys and heater, the magnificently nonchalant catcher, the bucker-up with his dolly bar, the gun man with his pneumatic hammer, are to the audience the star performers of this theatrical spectacle played out against the backdrop of an indifferent, challenged sky.

Two thousand workmen—a dozen languages—tools of all trades—laughter—profanity—and, when the whistle blows, complete and arrogant relaxation over a wedge of pie, a can of coffee; lean backs, broad backs squared against the wooden temporary structures, legs stretched negligently, laughter—
Some kid!—Hey, baby, what you doing tonight?

Still legs flash by, a chin is lifted in repudiation. The workmen laugh, belly-laughter—

Cement and sand; hoists and derricks; here comes a foreman—
listen
to the foreman if you are not too sensitive—

Skyscraper—not so many months ago.

Now the workmen have vanished. Now the finished building stands; soon the public wonder will concentrate on other miracles. Now the sight-seeing cusses make a detour so that the visitors to Manhattan may view the tallest building in town—“On your right, ladies and gentlemen, the Seacoast Building, eight hundred and forty feet high, seventy-two stories, the home of the Seacoast Bank and Trust Company, of the United Broadcasting Company. Hundreds of offices, thousands of workers. Express elevators—and from the towers the finest view of the city obtainable. On your right, ladies and gentlemen.”

Statisticians, professional and amateur, contend with one another for space in the instructive press. “If the bricks used in the construction of the Seacoast Building were laid end to end—” “If the steel used in the construction of the Seacoast
Building—” “It is estimated that through the bronze portals of the Seacoast Building so-and-so many thousands of people pass, every day—”

A clerk in the minor building opposite turns from his files and thinks of the Seacoast Building in terms of dollars and cents. If I had that much money—a tenth—a twentieth—he dreams in envy. God, if he had that much money, would he put it into steel and stone? Not he!

An architect, writing for a business magazine, defines the Seacoast Building in terms of the blueprint. He speaks of vertical masses, the absence of cornices and of horizontal accents. “In the Eliel Saarinen tradition,” says the architect, for so soon, so swiftly with the passage of inexorable time do the most recent flowerings of the visionary mind become tradition.

A historian, passing by, on foot, looks up. He is dizzy with looking up; is there no end to this building, which to his restricted and tortured vision appears to lean, perilously balanced? He thinks of the lost towers of Babylon, craning his thin neck, while the building slants above him.

From Jersey, a sightseeing airplane soars over Manhattan and skims like a sliver dragonfly high above the tallest tower of the Seacoast Building. The guide murmurs his little lesson: “We are now passing over the Seacoast Building—” The passengers in the plane look down. They see a finger pointing into the sky, they see a pinnacle falling leagues short of its arrogant endeavor. They see a pyramid, built from the blocks of some gigantic child, blocks placed one upon another, setback, step-off. They see something small and aspiring, lifting itself above the striving of other buildings yet never attaining that blue height which their pilot, chewing gum, his hand easy upon the stick, attains. They feel confident and secure. They look down upon this insolence of steel, and it is dwarfed. They are above it.

It is all in the point of view.

A poet is riding in a fractious taxi, at the expense of his broker friend. The poet leans from the window and looks upward; the poet thinks, vaguely, in terms of light and shadow, he sees in the Seacoast Building an immaculate beauty, with menace
at the core. He thinks of the coinage of the country symbolized by the bank on the lower floors. He thinks of people and what money will do for them and what it will not do for them. He thinks of greed and lust, of rescue and rapture. He thinks of the broadcasting station in the towers, topless from a taxi window. He thinks of countries linked by mystery and of the strange dreaming voices of the ether which no man-made filament has yet captured. He wonders if he can get it down on paper. He knows that he cannot—being a poet, he says, “Let's go somewhere and get a drink.”