New York - The Novel

Fifth, that Edmund Keller smiled with pleasure.
    There it was: the Flatiron Building.
    There were some tall buildings uptown these days, but it was only when you got to the Flatiron Building that you entered the realm of the real skyscrapers. The Flatiron Building, however, was one of a kind. Over twenty floors high, on a triangular groundplan at the intersection of the two great boulevards, and looking at Madison Square, it was one of the most elegant landmarks in the city. The narrow corner offices were especially prized.
    Edmund Keller liked skyscrapers. He supposed it was natural that commercial and financial men in the crowded world of Wall Street should try to get the maximum use out of the sites their offices occupied, which meant building up. In the last twenty years, the development of iron girder construction had meant that the weight of buildings no longer had to be carried by their walls, but could be cheaply and effectively carried by huge networks of steel. Back in the Middle Ages, medieval builders had been able to raise soaring buildings using pillars of stone and complex frameworks of wood, but these structures were massively expensive. Steel construction, by contrast, was simple and cheap.
    Yet it was also in the spirit of the age, he thought, that the mighty business titans of America should send their buildings soaring into the sky, so that they could look out, like eagles, upon the vast new continent. And if the summits of the buildings were like mountain tops, he foresaw that the avenues between them would soon be great canyons, down which the daylight would come striding, bold as a giant.
    From the Flatiron Building to Gramercy Park was a short walk, not even five blocks. As the butler opened the door, the buzz of voices toldKeller that he was to join quite a large company. He did not see that, behind him, a silver Rolls-Royce was drawing up by the curb.

    As Rose caught sight of Edmund Keller, she nodded to herself. She’d managed to keep him at a distance quite effectively so far. Once, he’d come round to call at the house during the afternoon, and she’d told the butler to say she was “Not at home.” It was standard social procedure, and he’d gone on his way. A while later he had written a brief letter to say that he hoped to call, and she had sent an equally polite reply to say that as one of the children had measles, this would be a bad idea. He hadn’t troubled her after that. Seeing him entering Hetty’s house now, she thought: Well, if socialist Mr. Keller was coming, that just proved how right she was to intervene. And if he wanted war, he was going to get it.
    “This is where we get out,” she said to the two young people who accompanied her. And a few moments later she was sweeping them past the astonished butler.
    She was smiling brightly, though as she saw the other guests gathered in the house, she couldn’t help feeling glad that dear Mrs. Astor had died eighteen months ago. Thank God, she thought, that the poor lady wasn’t alive to see this.

    The whole, wretched business had begun in the fall. Some of the garment workers in the downtown factories had started to complain about their working conditions. Perhaps they had a case. Rose didn’t know. But in no time, agitators—socialists and revolutionaries from Russia mostly, she’d heard—were whipping them up. The garment workers were threatening to strike, and the factory owners were outraged.
    But not Mr. Blanck and Mr. Harris, the owners of the Triangle Factory. They had provided an in-house union for their employees, but they told them firmly that anyone who joined the militant outside union would be dismissed.
    Soon the whole garment district was in an uproar, with the workers calling a general strike, and the braver employers, headed by Triangle, locking them out and hiring others instead. Some employers paid thugs to beat up the leading strikers. Tammany Hall, which controlled the police, was on the side of the employers, and there were arrests. But theunion used women on the picket lines, and when they were jailed and sent to hard labor, there was some public sympathy. Even the
New York Times
, which usually supported the employers, began to waver.
    Rose didn’t condone the bad treatment or the violence, but these things had to be kept in proportion, they mustn’t get out of hand. And things wouldn’t have got out of hand, if it hadn’t been for a certain group of women. The women in this room.
    You