By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
  has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
  it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
  poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
  valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
  out all day that give the building a soul of dreams
  and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
  for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
  the way to it?)


Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
  parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
  sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
  and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
  grappling plans of business and questions of women
  in plots of love.


Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
  earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
  hold together the stone walls and floors.


Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the
  mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an
  architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
  and the press of time running into centuries, play
  on the building inside and out and use it.


Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
  in graves where the wind whistles a wild song
  without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
  and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
  at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
  layer who went to state's prison for shooting another
  man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the
  end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has
  gone into the stones of the building.)


On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names
  and each name standing for a face written across
  with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving
  ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's
  ease of life.


Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls
  tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from
  corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,
  and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
  ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of
  the building just the same as the master-men who
  rule the building.


Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor
  empties its men and women who go away and eat
  and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and
  all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
  them.
One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed
  elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers
  work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
  and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
  and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling
  miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for
  money. The sign speaks till midnight.


Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence
  holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor
  and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip
  pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money
  is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights
  of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of
  red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span
  of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of
  crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
  and has a soul.