Charles C. Ebbets
Lunch Atop A Skyscraper

THE REVIEW

Forget the luxurious chic restaurants and the Grand Cafés of the Big Apple. Put the sumptuous table, fruit baskets adorning succulent dishes ranging from appetizers to after-dinner drinks, in your mental drawer. Bid farewell to relatives, friends, spouses, children, grandchildren, forget the Easter and Christmas feasts.

Few diners at this unusual banquet devoid of decoration, silverware, fine and precious cups and ceramics. A handful of workers, the cream of the American workforce post-Great Depression, crouched, as if they were pigeons on a gutter, atop a rigid metal beam. They eat, exchange words and food, regenerate exhausted and battered limbs before the final round against the steel beast that they themselves shape, mixing bolts and sweat.

Immersed in the midst of the marriage between sky and earth, witnesses to the advance of concrete and iron towards the empyrean, promoters of progress that has pushed from stone to reinforced concrete. Behold the Tower of Babel of our days, here are the new, daring explorers of the atmosphere and the nebulous desert. Beam after beam, brick after brick: the earth joins its ceiling, the sallow and ashen gray of skyscrapers rises in unison, chromatically and vertically conquering the clear blue that remains impassive in the face of it.

It is man who attempts to trace the new path to Paradise through the shortcut of metal, progress, and technique. Babylon gives way to New York, to the City of contemporaneity. The human, the biped of the Big Apple will never see his language confused by divine wrath: the contemporary Man is the idiom of himself. English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Yiddish... bland expressions of an ineffable progress, of an ingenious will that knows no vocabulary whatsoever.