Flatiron.2

[Fiona Shnapple]

In Flatiron.1 we looked at John Sloan's Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue, oil,
1906.
We posted a link to the Met and a brief quote.



In Flatiron.2 we look at Alfred Stieglitz's The Flatiron Building,
photograph, 1903.

http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/269284

 The original World Trade Center featured landmark twin towers, which
opened on April 4, 1973 and were destroyed in the September 11 attacks of
2001, along with 7 World Trade Center.

The WTC was destroyed apx. 100 years after the Flatiron was erected. Some
have called this century, the American Century. Others have rejected this
characterization, American Exceptionalism, so on, but let's put that aside
for now. It was called,  when the Flatiron was built, The Machhine Age. And
though it not possible, to characterize exhaustively any historical epoch,
nor identify its exact start or finish, I think we can argue that Pynchon
placed the Flatiron at the front of his book, the WTC at the back, to
suggest that a century of machines has finally come to a close.
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