I stand on the rooftop and see towers on all sides. A radio tower springs high from the roof of another building, and another. In the distance, over the water, a taller tower -- for a few years now the tallest tower again in the New York City. The Empire State Building is well known for its monumental height of course, an edifice contributing to the city's identity for generations. That height is at once preposterous, in the true sense of after coming before, out of order, and like Eiffel's tower made practical at first only because its height could be sold to radio broadcasters.
I wonder if this double function as a radio tower has been too long overlooked. New York is not the capital of America, it is the Empire City. I have called it the pons colloquium, a bridge where national culture crosses into the local, because it is the center of media -- that place where conversations and faces get reproduced then cast broad. New York's towers may be an evolutionistic response to running out of real estate in an overpopulated port, but they become spandrels giving rise to a new reach of technological communication. And communication's binding grip.
There are towers too without spires, with just water tanks, or nothing. Plain rooftops. Plentiful rooftops. New York is a city of rooftops above all, and from rooftops I have enjoyed many sunsets, a few daybreaks. Rooftops are the city's best yards, its choicest dancehalls. I will leave the city, but it pleases me to celebrate one last time from a roof. There is not much real estate left. Transmitting towers make provincial our cosmopolitan ground, but on the rooftops we can still stand and holler.
