The Essence of New York City while they remained standing, connoted a stability, security, and sense of power not true, in the same degree, of the urban architecture of many another city. By the late 1880s, steel skeletons lent new support to structures that rose considerably above the "cloud touching edifices" of Walt Whitman's "tall-topt" Manhattan. By the late 1920s the whole city was "being lifted up" to match the occasional "Himalayan pinnacles" of 1898. As early as 1905, a French engineer wrote that "New York gives the sensation of a city of giants more than any other city, even London."47 To the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, who visited New York in the mid-i92os, "The dizzy loftiness of the Manhattan skyline" loomed "like a citadel raised on high by the cyclops."48 The ultimate appeared to be reached with the completion, at the turn of the 1930s, of the lofty Empire State Building, whose 102 stories penetrated rather than just "scraped" the clouds. As E. B. White wrote, New York "managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression."4 The architectural transformations of the mid-twentieth century, less concerned with height, seem to suggest even more strength. They represent an increasing rejection of the elegant and the decorative in favor of a pattern connoting sheer, uninterrupted power. Power and magnitude—variety and multiplicity—more of everything: these, also, represent the quintessence of New York City. But like the other qualities of the community to which reference has already been made they are derived from externals. One wonders if there is a "geist," a corporate, community spirit, something that characterizes the community aggregate on and beyond and apart from the individual traits of the eight million who constitute the transient, diverse, variegated population of the Empire City. O. Henry looked for this in 1905 when he sought to catch the Voice of the City—"the composite vocal message of [its] massed humanity." Other cities have voices, he 47 Eugene d' Eichthal, Quelques notes (Tun voyage aux &tats-Unis, excerpts from Annates des Sciences Politiques (March 15, 1906), 4. 48 Arthur Feiler, America Seen through German Eyes (New York: 1928), 27. 49E. B. White, Here Is New York (New York: 1949), 22. 420