Word: fortresses
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Stylistically, the colleges seem to favor fortress-like buildings. Whether made of humble brick, crisp steel or powerfully molded concrete, the structures somehow look ready for any attack. A case in point is the rust-colored, 13-story agronomy tower designed by Ulrich Franzen for the State University of New York at Cornell. It not only looks eminently easy to defend but also is assertive in its own right. With good reason. The agricultural college, long treated as a stepchild by Cornell, needed to get back into view. While marking the ag college with the tower, however, Franzen respectfully designed...
...word that sums up conditions at New York's most infamous jail is precisely the one that Chief Justice Burger used: "miserly." Known appropriately enough as the Tombs, the Manhattan House of Detention for Men is stuffed with close to 2,000 prisoners; it is a dank fortress built to hold 932 at most. Last week, as if to dramatize the Chief Justice's appeal for penal reform, 800 Tombs prisoners erupted in a window-smashing, furniture-throwing, bed-sheet-burning display of frustration brought on by inhumane conditions and the apparent indifference of the outside world...
...strategic fortress, now held by rebels of their own stripe, were truly to fall into enemy hands, who knew what might occur? The Whites could play upon popular discontent, of which there was now an excess; or they might simply muster a large militia and drive the Soviets under for the last time. In any event, the prospect was a dangerous...
...happened. Bombardments, raids, and finally, a massive expedition of 50,000 troops crossing the thick layer of ice atop the Finnish Gulf to take back the fortress from the insurrectionists. The rebels blow gigantic holes in the ice, and hundreds of loyalist troops drown in chilling graves. The expedition's survivors bludgeon their way into the city, defended by 15,000 men, and there is fierce hand-to-hand combat raging in the city's homes and streets. Then a silence, and it is over, some of the sailors fleeing across the ice to Finland and the rest on their...
...legacy of suppression that began with the Soviet bombardment of Kronstadt led directly to the Stalinist terror and to the faceless, cynical technocracy that the Soviet Union is today. That alone, in retrospect, would make the attack on the fortress absurd. But the burning irony of Kronstadt is that, before the siege began, at a time when it might have been stopped or called off, the real perpetrators were nowhere to be found...