Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  A “Katie Gibbs” type became proverbial in the culture at large. Gibbs herself was the perfect symbol of the delicate sternness that she wanted to cultivate in her students. In Judith Krantz’s soapy-dirty roman à clef Scruples—published in the late 1970s but set in the early 1960s on the cusp of the sexual revolution—her protagonist, Billy, recalls stepping off the elevator at the entrance to the Gibbs school for the first time: “The first thing that met her eyes was the gaze of the late Mrs. Gibbs, preserved with all its stern implacable presence in the portrait that hung over the receptionist’s desk. She did not look mean, thought Billy, only as if she knew all about you and had not decided whether to actively disapprove—yet.”34 Her vivid description of the school’s rigorous educational program jibes with many other accounts:

  Why had people been so cruel as to invent shorthand, she wondered, as the infernal, eternal hourly buzzers went off and she moved hurriedly, but with the required precision, from the steno room to the typing room and then back to the steno room again. Many of her classmates had some knowledge of typing before they entered Katie Gibbs, but even those who thought they had a leg up on the system were swiftly disillusioned about their skills. Being “Gibbs Material” meant that you were expected to reach certain degrees of proficiency that struck Billy as outrageous. Were they seriously expecting her to be able to take one hundred words a minute in shorthand and type faultlessly at a minimum of sixty words a minute by the time she had completed her course? They were indeed.35

  Nothing about the school’s famous discipline prevents Billy from indulging in her first experiments in casual sex—in fact, the discipline and her sexual life seem to complement and encourage each other: “Billy could feel her strong obsessive drives finally coming to her aid, helping her to bite into the work with the confidence that she would master it, make it her own … She became so sexually charged that sometimes, between classes at Katie Gibbs, she had to duck into the ladies’ room, lock herself in a stall, thrust a finger up between her thighs, and, rubbing hastily, have a quick, silent, necessary orgasm.”36 Becoming “Gibbs material” helps her to become adult, confident, assured. “Although Billy was five months short of her twenty-first birthday,” Krantz writes of her postgraduation, “she looked and sounded a superbly balanced twenty-five.” She swiftly lands a secretarial position at Ikehorn Enterprises, on the upper echelons of the new Pan Am Building towering above Grand Central Terminal and Park Avenue.

  Gibbs girls, writes Lynn Peril in her rich history of the secretarial world, were trained to be “no less than office geishas.” They were taught how to make small talk on the telephone and also to discourse sparklingly about current affairs at cocktail parties. They were, in other words, consummately finished—unembarrassed accessories for bosses looking to embellish their offices. But also, as Krantz and others showed, office women had to prepare themselves for a world thick as any Jane Austen novel with subtle codes and systems of manners. They wouldn’t subvert the order they entered; they would simply master it. Gibbs herself recognized the injustice of the world for which she was preparing her students: “A woman’s career is blocked by lack of openings, by unjust male competition, by prejudice and, not least, by inadequate salary and recognition.”37 Yet aside from the question of finding a job, being a Gibbs student remedied hardly any of these problems. Gibbs might have been a businesswoman, but her students were merely supposed to work for businessmen. Much as earlier generations of guidebooks and organizations had taught women to shrug off the unwanted advances of rapacious businessmen, Gibbs taught her trainees to deal with the office world with a certain measure of aplomb. That was the best, it seemed, that they could ask for.

  4

  UP THE SKYSCRAPER

  If your eyes could penetrate the opaque masses of the façades, they would see an incredible spectacle: three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand men and women—perhaps more—at work in a pool of space at the same time. A humanity having broken its millenary destiny which was to be attached to the ground, which is suspended between heaven and earth, going up and down at high speed in clusters of twenty and in sheaves of two hundred. Is it a new scene in purgatory?

  —LE CORBUSIER, When the Cathedrals Were White1

  By mid-century, with the United States hunkering down for the first frigid decade of the Cold War, nothing signaled the dynamism of American business more than the skylines of its cities. The Communists might have touted the equality of their peoples, but in terms of the jagged inequality of their skylines Moscow and East Berlin, let alone Beijing and Hanoi, had nothing on New York and Chicago, whose silhouettes looked a lot like the wild spikes and dives of a GDP chart. Photographs of the time of lower Manhattan from across the Brooklyn Bridge show a mountainous cluster of ridges, some of them sleek and glassy, others stern shafts of masonry and steel, ornamented by spires and finials, while the Loop in Chicago was a tour through a flatter and more elegant skyscraper plateau, placidly regarding the smooth curve of Lake Michigan. Skyscrapers were the birth and growth of the office made visible.

  Until the resurgence of globalization after the Cold War, when tall buildings began to bloom along the coastline of southern China and on the Arabian Peninsula, the skyscraper would remain one of the most peculiarly American of white-collar institutions, much more a symbol of the prowess, even ruthlessness, of American-style capitalism than what it equally was: an especially tall collection of boring offices. Abroad they were viewed as objects of aspiration for men and women of business; it’s no wonder that the signal image of the growth of contemporary China is Shanghai’s Pudong district, burgeoning with weird and futuristic skyscrapers. As Taylorism and other related managerial ideas spread throughout the world, the administrative branches of industry, along with financial institutions, grew enormously throughout the Western world (if not quite to the same extent as in the United States). But European cities didn’t exhibit the same pattern of development. They were older, denser, constrained by centuries of building tradition as well as the sheer thickness of their urban fabric. European cities imposed height restrictions well before skyscrapers even became popular in the United States. The London Building Act of 1894 limited heights to 30 meters; in Berlin for many years the maximum was 22. Wartime devastation cleared spaces to build higher, and restrictions were loosened, but a certain resistance remained—enabled by strong welfare states where property developers were tacitly seen as enemies of social democracy. By 1950, the tallest building in the United States was 373.5 meters (the Empire State Building). Fifteen years later, London’s tallest buildings were the Shell Centre and Portland House, which were 107 meters and 100 meters, respectively. The next three tallest were below 70 meters.2

  The relentless pace of skyscraper building in the United States meant that the character of its cities changed drastically. The transformation was so enormous, powerful, and lasting that for contemporary city dwellers and visitors it can be hard to imagine what urban life might otherwise have been like, without so many offices around. Places like Chicago and New York, once known as much for their industries (the stockyards in Chicago, shipping in New York) as for their financial districts, became full to the brim with offices. Small, low-density residential areas were rezoned and demolished, replaced by buildings that housed thousands of office workers. Between 1871 and 1923, New York built about seventy-four million square feet of office space; from the 1920s through the early 1930s, the city added more than thirty-eight million more—thirteen million built from 1930 to 1933, the first years of the Great Depression. Even the collapse of the world economy could not stop the building; it was the endless capacity to build that seemed, on the ground, at once the most exhilarating and the most frightening fact of all: that all the short houses and apartments could be leveled for more offices; that one could simply build higher and higher. And the infinity of the skyscraper corresponded to the deepening and widening of the offices inside. The experience of the man on the street, alienated by the towers around him, be
came a classic trope of American literature. “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?” Allen Ginsberg wailed in Howl (1955). It was “Moloch,” the god of child sacrifice, “whose buildings are judgment! … whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! / Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!” And Ginsberg testified only to the presence of the skyscrapers; some years later the poet James Merrill, in “An Urban Convalescence” (1962), would conjure the absence caused by the process of destruction, the thousands of buildings cleared in the “urban renewal” plans to make way for the new buildings. “You would think the simple fact of having lasted / Threatened our cities like mysterious fires.” By the middle of the century, it had become a source of worry to many that the jagged skyline might only be a mirage of variety; that any beautiful skyscraper was actually filled story after story with identical-looking white-collar workers; that the city glinting over the river at night consisted of little more than millions of square feet of office space.

  The rise of the skyscraper is one of the most well-documented aspects of the history of the office, the subject of countless works of architectural history. But they almost exclusively fasten onto the exterior of the buildings, their scale and power and imposing bulk. You might never know from the books on skyscrapers that people actually work in these buildings. (“What our critics have learned to admire in our great buildings is their photographs,” Lewis Mumford lamented in Sticks and Stones in 1924.) But during their implacable ascent over the cities of the United States, the life inside the skyscrapers was as much a subject of interest as the gargoyles springing from the tops of the towers. And much of how the skyscraper would be shaped drew upon the struggles going on within them. The most famous shot of King Vidor’s film The Crowd (1928) makes this point dramatically: the camera approaches a conventional Art Deco skyscraper and begins to scale up along a column of windows, until it enters one, and we hover above a waste and empty sea of desks, with countless clerks minutely filling in columns of ledgers. Later, we see the same figures exiting en masse and meeting friends who work in other skyscrapers. More and more people who looked up to the skyscrapers from the street in dread eventually went to work in them. These were the new figures who made up the lives of the skyscrapers, who were at the heart of American business. What did they see?

  The office zombies of King Vidor’s The Crowd (1920). Photofest

  As with the interior expansion of the office, technological advances once again aided the skyward growth of the office building. Until the 1870s, a six-story building was about as high as things got, thanks—as the architectural historian Hugh Morrison has written—“to a universal human disinclination to walk up more than five flights of stairs.”3 Passenger elevators propelled by steam were developed in the 1850s but not used in an office building until 1871; the hydraulic elevator was patented in 1872 and used in the New York Tribune Building, lifting it to ten stories off the ground. Meanwhile, the other key ingredient—a skeleton steel frame to support the exterior wall—was first used in the Home Insurance Building in Chicago in 1884–85, a building often cited as the first skyscraper. After Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler’s genre-defining Wainwright Building went up in St. Louis in 1891, the rage for skyscraper building proceeded unabated, the most significant of them going up in Chicago. The names of skyscraper architects have entered the canon of American architecture, often referred to informally as the Chicago school: Sullivan and Adler, Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root. Now that their buildings have passed into art history, it’s hard to recall the terror and fear these marvels aroused. In his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber made recourse to a skyscraper-inspired metaphor when he argued that modern bureaucratic administration was tightening around humanity with a “shell as hard as steel.”4

  But, of course, the steel was only in the interior, visible to the gawking, fascinated public when the giant things were going up. For modern viewers inured even to the most hyperbolic deployments of glass and concrete, the old skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, with their exotic brickwork, refined masonry, and spectacular lobbies done up in patins of gold and arching ironwork, exude an especially refined, even rococo attention to ornamental detail that one associates with the buildings of the more distant past. But, despite the modernity of their construction materials and the power of their sheer immensity, the skyscrapers were deliberately cast as antimodern when they were built, designed to mitigate their potential appearance as cold, cruel paeans to efficiency and greed. Sullivan’s towers were infamously divided just like columns: a base of large windows and high ceilings allowed for courtyards or street-facing businesses; an unbroken stretch of office floors constituted the shaft; and a square roof capped the affair—the cornice of which, from the street, seemed to point outward and upward, continuing the sense, as your eye wandered up the building, of soaring thrust. Showy ornamentation, engaged columns and pilasters interrupting the upward flow of the building, reduced and tamed their bulk. In New York, the drive to festoon skyscrapers was even more relentless. The neo-Gothic Woolworth tower, the Venetian bell-tower shape of Metropolitan Life: these were modern buildings that shamelessly conjured styles and notions from the past.

  Ensuring that the skyscraper preserved the aristocratic heroism of modern life while also conveying the power of American business remained a constant preoccupation of figures like Sullivan and his contemporaries. “How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration, this stark, staring exclamation of eternal strife, the graciousness of those higher forms of sensibility and culture that rest on the lower and fiercer passions?” Sullivan wrote in “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” from 1896. “How shall we proclaim from the dizzy height of this strange, weird, modern housetop the peaceful evangel of sentiment, of beauty, the cult of a higher life?”5 Why this intensely florid preoccupation with the “cult of a higher life” for buildings that were about progress and the creative-destructive power of business? Why, in other words, were the titans of commerce seemingly so afraid of the implications of modern life?

  For an answer, there’s no better place to look than Chicago. The home of the skyscraper was also the home of a business district constructed essentially from scratch, perhaps the purest “downtown” of any American city: namely, “the Loop,” a place devoted entirely to the consecration of white-collar work. Before the fire of 1871 tore through the area, the Loop was already the cause of worry for many of the city’s more traditional residents. It was filling up with office buildings, but also with warehouses and workshops; though low-rise, these commercial structures had already begun to overshadow the churches and residences of the midwestern city.6 After the fire, the chance to reshape the district forcefully emerged. Part of the district had originally been home to a working-class neighborhood that was illegible to the city’s middle classes. In the words of Mahlon D. Ogden, a real estate investor, it was “covered with countless old rookeries and miserable shanties, occupied, for the past twenty years, as dens of infamy and low gambling dives, the resort and rendezvous of thieves, burglars, robbers, and murderers of all grades and colors, to the exclusion of all decency, or business purposes.”7 The fire cleared out this entire section, making land available and the character of the neighborhood more appealing to speculative real estate developers. To drive up rents, business moved out warehouses and factories northwest of the area.

  Besides maintaining high real estate prices, in those years there was another reason to keep the factories and stockyards away from the centers of administration. For the spectacular, relentless development of industry in Chicago hadn’t come without social costs, which took the form of the city’s increasingly restive labor movement. As industry increased, so did the level and tenor of the impulse to organize. In the 1860s, Chicago was home of the campaign for the eight-hour day; by the 1880s, the city government had become sympathetic to
the union efforts, and city police often refused to cooperate with business when the latter attempted to hire nonunion labor or replace striking workers with scabs. Skyscraper development itself, dependent on wage labor, was halted by frequent strikes: three of the greatest examples of the Chicago school—Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Burnham and Root’s Rookery, and Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium—were beset by strikes from carpenters, masons, and bricklayers.8 The local architecture journals covered the growth of the movement with alarm; they usually advocated on behalf of strikebreakers.

  Especially terrifying to the city’s business leaders and the skyscraper architects they employed, as well as less welcome to the city’s political establishment, were the radical anarchist factions of the labor unions. Besides the world-leveling scope of their ideas, it didn’t help that the anarchists took special care to organize immigrants whom many other labor unions left out: many of the union leaders and members—though by no means as many as their xenophobic opponents alleged—were German immigrants, bearing with them the vigorous debates and ideas animating the socialist and anarchist Left in their home country. They advocated a radical solution to the growing gulf between capitalists and workers—“the establishment of a free society based on co-operative organization of production”—which of course implied the elimination of a capitalist class altogether. Rather than on the fringes of society, the offices of the anarchist journal Alarm were located very close to the Loop; not just a few of the anarchists despised the skyscrapers that were rising all around them. In one article written for Alarm in 1885, Lucy Parsons, a former slave who had come north with her husband and who was one of the leading anarchist figures, interpreted the skyscraper precisely as architects and executives might have hoped—as a consummation of American business—only to invert the moral of the story: