Insuring a View

When you view this city at a distance, it gives an almost shocking sense of how dense and vast it really is, vertically as well as horizontally, and how beauty has emerged from chaos. This view, from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, reveals details in the top floors of buildings that you can never see from the street. Sometimes architects started out with Gothic at the ground floors which morphed into Art Deco at the top. The two which are brightly lit up are from the very early days of skyscrapers, 1883 for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building (at right) and 1928 for the New York Life Insurance Building. BTW, this photo is from our archive, since our memory card failed this evening...