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© 2021 by Heinz Hermann Maria Hoppe.
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Author: Heinz Hermann Maria Hoppe
Even the steel skeleton of the first skyscraper was pressed into the shape of the site. Since 1902, the wedge-shaped Flatiron Building in Manhattan has been reminiscent of an ‘iron’.1 On the building sites next door, however, the economy of the right angle spread, almost always, analogous to the plan grid for the streets. In the gaps of the close-meshed grid, every square meter of ground is a ‘goldmine’. Bricks and building elements pile up on it, floor by floor, into the third dimension upwards, in order to wrest cubic meters from the sky.
8.8 million people live and work compressed on the tip of a peninsula2. 8.8 million destinies jostling together every day as they make their way through congested streets and into packed elevators. The great freedom promised by the statue seaward in Upper Bay comes at a price. Everything has a price in the commercial center of the Western world. The cost of living mercilessly sifts out existences with emptying pockets. From the higher floors, those who have actually ‘made it’ look down on those who have arrived at the bottom of the sidewalk slabs and cardboard boxes as places to sleep. I wonder how many of the 40 billionaires and 400,000 millionaires3 in New York City really started out, according to the ‘American Dream’4, as ‘dishwashers’.
Taxis whiz past hissing air shafts from the underground. 60 million tourists5 drift, every year, through Wall Street and across the Brooklyn Bridge, screeching through shopping malls. Batteries of creatives fire insane ideas into the networks of virtual media. Life seems compressed, like the compressed breathing air in a diving cylinder. How many residents might the constant overstimulation have kicked into closed departments, rather than cool lofts?
In 1975, people fled shootings and drugs; in 2001, terror and fear in the face of the gaping concrete wound of September 11; in 2012, the spring tide that flooded tunnels and first floors; in 2020, epidemic bankruptcy. A daily trade volume on Wall Street of about 45 billion US dollars6 attracts, despite everything, always new ‘dishwasher’ aspirants from all over the world. In the ‘nucleus’ of Western values, labor, impulses, Subway bars, consumer turnovers, exhibition visits and securities derivatives condense. On the downside, in ‘Gotham City’, they are caught up with worries, money woes, hatreds, trash heaps, heart attacks and soup kitchens.
‘The city never sleeps’, they say. In perception, the rush of overlapping impressions can result in a war of images. Do people perhaps also not come to rest because of the many ‘highlights’?
Notes/Directory of German Sources:
1 See Flatiron Building. In: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Date of last revision: 08-21-2021, 14:06 UTC. URL: https://de.wikipedia.org /w/index.php?title=Flatiron_Building&oldid=214939490 (Date retrieved: 08-24-2021, 10:43 UTC).
2 See New York City. In: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Date of last revision: 08-20-2021, 13:19 UTC. URL: https://de.wikipedia.org /w/index.php?title=New_York_City&oldid=214912509 (Date retrieved: 08-24-2021, 10:57 UTC).
3 Status 2014. See New York City. In: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
4 See American Dream. In: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Date of last revision: 08-19-2021, 07:21 UTC. URL: https://de.wikipedia.org /w/index.php?title=American_Dream&oldid=214879606 (Date retrieved:08-24-2021, 11:40 UTC).
5 Status 2015. See New York City In: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Ebd.
6 Average per day, as of November 2004. See New York City In: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Ebd.