Weekend Words: Tower
A new luxury condominium tower (104 units, $7,000,000-$95,000,000) under construction in Manhattan has just topped off at 1,396 feet — 150 feet taller than the Empire State Building.
A new luxury condominium tower (104 units, $7,000,000-$95,000,000) under construction in Manhattan has just topped off at 1,396 feet — 150 feet taller than the Empire State Building.
From an article in The New York Times:
Tony Malkin, whose family has controlled the Empire State Building since 1961, said he would not add 432 Park to the interactive displays on its observation decks, which help visitors identify the skyline. “It’s medieval,” Mr. Malkin said. “That’s where towers come from, the Middle Ages. The wealthy built them for protection and isolation from the city below.”
“They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut.”
—Johann von Goethe
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row
—Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”
“Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fish pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.”
—Song of Solomon, 7:4 (KJV)
“I don’t ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn’t work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who’s playing.”
—John Zorn
“Giotto’s tower,
The lily of Florence blossoming in stone.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Giotto’s Tower”
“I’ve been to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It’s a tower, and it’s leaning. You look at it, but nothing happens, so then you look for someplace to get a sandwich.”
—Danny DeVito
“Thus they relate,
Erring; for he with this rebellious rout
Fell long before; nor aught availed him now
To have built in Heaven high towers; nor did he scape
By all his engines, but was headlong sent,
With his industrious crew, to build in Hell.”
—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1
“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.”
—Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
“Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”
—Saint Augustine of Hippo
