The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post
Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking
old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored
like mud.  The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were
thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining
new houses, homes--they seemed--for laughter and tranquillity. 

Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless
engine.  These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night
rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably
illuminated by champagne.  Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green
and crimson lights.  The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of
polished steel leaped into the glare. 

In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. 
The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades after a
night of talking with Paris and Peking.  Through the building crawled the
scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping.  The dawn mist spun away.  Cues
of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets
of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked