Completed in 1931, the Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world for four decades until the construction of the World Trade Center.

As earlier in the essay, the city’s architecture plays a significant role in Fitzgerald’s arguments about New York and America at this time.

Four-time Governor of New York, Al Smith was a Progressive-Era politician. After he left politics, he became president of Empire State, Inc., the company that built the Empire State Building. For Smith, the skyscraper, like the Brooklyn Bridge of his youth, symbolized the city as a democratic utopia. For Fitzgerald, though, the New York of glittering steel and glass had a darker side.

Nick spends much time describing Tom’s physical presence throughout the novel, as in this scene from Chapter I:

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body — he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body.

Also in the opening chapter, Tom’s eyes are likewise described as “restless,” a quality that links many of the characters in the book as well as Fitzgerald and other members of the so-called “Lost Generation” who were unsettled by World War I.

As he does in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald here alludes to a darker side of the Roaring 1920s. Both here and the novel, the term “restlessness” is key. In the opening chapter of Gatsby, Nick describes introduces himself with the term.

I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.

Tom and Gatsby himself are also described with this quality of “restless.” Both at the beginning and end of the novel, Tom’s eyes are described as “restless.” And Gatsby too also has an underlying sense of “restless” despite his suave facade:

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand. (Chapter IV)

Still the 4th most widely circulated newspaper in America, Daily News was the 1st daily printed in tabloid form instead of the usual (and somewhat annoying) broadsheet—tabloid actually originally described the printing process not the content of a newspaper.

Fitzgerald is describing the transition into what is known commonly understood as the “Roaring” 20s in American history, a period of prosperity that followed World War I and preceded the Great Depression. His own term for the time was the Jazz Age.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rARN6agiW7o

To establish this decadent historical context for his film version of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann had Toby Maguire read selections from “My Losy City,” including parts of this passage, as the voiceover for the trailer.

Flappers were “liberated” women in the 1920s who dressed in short skirts, wore their hair bobbed, listened to jazz, drank, smoked, had casual sex, and generally flaunted a disdain for societal norms.

The flapper was indeed a central character type in Fitzgerald’s fiction and in the drama of the Roaring 20s more broadly.

Fitzgerald’s nautical theme here recalls the “boats against the current” at the conclusion of The Great Gatsby.

Celebrating the end of World War I:

Another mechanical marvel at the time, the Chariot Race Sign was erected in 1910. The American Sign Museum writes:

In 1910, the great chariot race sign in New York City was one of the most famous electrical displays in the world. Erected on the roof of a seven-story building overlooking Herald Square, it featured a Roman chariot race and the sign was composed of 20,000 bulbs of different colors, 70,000 connections and 2,750 switches…The simulated movement of horses, drivers and whips was accomplished by 2,500 flashes per minute and the sign attracted crowds every night for years. The erection of an intervening building ended its period of use by a series of advertisers.