ABSTRACT
The small-town ethos of Main Street and the high-stakes gambling mentality of Wall Street may represent an analogous pair of oppositions within the American geographic imaginary. The new postwar buildings were no less a statement of American wealth and prestige, but they were more emblematic of the ever-increasing abstraction, fleetness and fungibility of twentieth-century capital. The polar conception of reality and unreality on which this capitalist universe rests is in turn concretized spatially in the images of the small, face-to-face community and the big, anonymous city, respectively. Turn-of-the-century images feature the landmark spire of Trinity Church being progressively dwarfed by Wall Streets earliest skyscrapers in an epic battle between moralism and Mammon for the spirit of the capitalist city. As the development of the technologies of telegraph, telephone and stock ticker increasingly turned the act of money changing hands into symbolic performance, architecture became the most visible embodiment of Wall Streets preponderance.
