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PARTISAN REVIEW
vators and street-car ads, of the city pressing its way north on both
sides of the great park, of dynamos and electric lights, of ten-story
hotels, of the old iron tower near the depot at West Brighton with its
two steam-driven elevators rising and falling in the sky-and in his
blood he felt a surge of restlessness, as
if
he were a steam train spew–
ing fiery coal smoke into the black night sky as he roared along a
trembling El track, high above the dark storefronts, the gas-lit saloons,
the red-lit doorways, the cheap beer dives, the dance halls, the gam–
bling joints, the face in the doorway, the sudden cry in the night.
It
is only a matter of time before he has bought an abandoned wax
museum, converting it into a successful lunchroom. This proliferates into
a chain of lunchrooms serving identical food (he has anticipated
Macdonald's!), and he sells the chain and buys the Vanderlyn. The old hotel
is modernized and a "subterranean street of small shops" (a shopping–
mall!) is installed in its basement. He is inspired to make his hotel emulate
the new department stores which he saw as
immense solutions to the problems of organizing space, of bringing
together in a complex harmony an astonishing number of often clash–
ing notes .... the ingenious inclusion of elements that ought to have
clashed but didn't: the tea rooms and cafeterias where customers
refreshed themselves in order to gain more energy for buying, the
organ in the rotunda, the odd services-a bank, a barbershop-that
seemed to make of each grand emporium a little enclosed city, a
roofed city with an intricate system of elevators and stairs moving
shoppers vertically through a world of attractions. [Department stores
and hotels] were experimental cities, cities in advance of the city, for
they represented in different forms the thrust toward vertical com–
munity that seemed to Martin the great fact of the modern city ...
Martin imagined great structures hundreds of stories high, each a city
in itself, rising across the land.
And now the dream takes off. Martin hires for the creation of the New
Vanderlyn a young architect who has already designed steel-frame depart–
ment stores of advanced type and entertainment parks at Coney Island.
Soon they have also created the Dressler, a huge apartment-hotel with din–
ing rooms and shops "in a labyrinthian arcade," a whole interior "Theater
District," and dioramas, museums, and artificial landscapes representing far–
away places (a Disney World!) Martin also engages the services of a new
kind of specialist-an advertising professional who understands the way
