Word: tower
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Explained Milwaukee Port Director Harry C. Brockel: "The Supreme Court decision creates a dangerous precedent . . . The Great Lakes have a great many jobs of their own to do without becoming the village water tower for the eastern half of the United States. Enough of these diversion plans will pull the cork out of the bathtub...
...because an architect has dreamed of the marriage of Frank Lloyd Wright and a silo . . . The public that lives in the houses our architects design ... is a broadminded, tolerant, adventurous public, one that has triumphed over inherited prejudice to an astonishing degree. You can put a spherical plastic gas tower on aluminum stilts, divide it into rooms, and quite a few people will be willing to crawl along saying, 'Is this the floor? Is this the wall?,' to make a down payment and call it home...
...TOWER IN THE WEST, by Frank Norris (362 pp.; Harper: $3.95), proves once again that imitating J. P. Marquand is tricky business. The danger: instead of capturing the hypnotic quality of Marquand's even-tempered prose, the writer may find he has only reproduced Marquand's low emotional pulsebeat. In this 1957 Harper Prize Novel, Author Frank Norris* does not quite get out of this Marquandary. His hero, George Hanes, is cut to the Marquand measure; he is an Ivy Leaguer (Princeton '01), a professional man (architect), unhappily married, and an ineffectual struggler against the leg irons...
George gets them. His trials begin with the sudden death of his talented older brother Jeff, who had designed and built the Tower in the West, one of the first skyscrapers in St. Louis. Six months after the fatal accident, George learns that his brother's widow is pregnant by another man. To protect Jeff's good name, he marries her and breaks the heart of true-blue Margaret Carton, who has been patiently waiting for his proposal. George now proceeds to mishandle the affairs of his stepchildren, loses control of his brother's monumental Tower...
...Samstag (who was so cynical that "the failure of tomorrow's sunrise would not have astonished him"). But Author Norris writes with more love of buildings than of people. Rhapsodies to the 20-story "thing of beauty" created by Jeff Hanes run murmurously through the book, and the Tower, though defaced by the years and its occupants, never becomes as caitiff or craven as the people who live from its earnings. Sometimes the book's human characters seem as lifeless as statuary against the soaring and vital affirmations built from steel and concrete...