People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosoph… - F. Scott Fitzgerald

he was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.

Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning.

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.

And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.

Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.

Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless.

And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.

That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.