'Cathedral of commerce'

I read this article in the New York Times this morning about how construction in slowing down:'End Seen to New York Building Boom'. I think this will demonstrate the economic turn of events most dramatically in the long term, because the city scape that is home to Wall Street won't up and re-invent itself, in 'The American Way' which people have come to expect. Instead, things will slow down, and perhaps in a few more years the city will look even older than it does already. I think that will change our visual experience of the city, and in turn its symbolic function as an icon of western capitalism to the rest of the world. 

Frank Winfield Woolworth, head of the self-named chain shop, called his famous Gothic style skyscraper, the Woolworth Building  a 'Cathedral of commerce'. In the light of this apt quotation perhaps New York is more akin to the fall of Babylon rather than 19th c. Paris! If that is the case then Joe Friedman's epithet for New York's famous brand of tall buildings 'temples to Mammon' springs to mind. It remains an apt comment considering such temples and their priests, the banks, have been pretty humiliated by this crisis. In turn, their power, as reflected in the architecture, seems to be receding. 

Unfortunately it will be schools, and city infastructure that is the most hard hit by this recent turn of events. It's sad to think that monumental public buildings will be a thing of the past. Of course we will mourn the passing of new corporate 'cathedrals to capitalism', but one gets the feeling that now is neither their time nor place. It seems that Grand Central Station will become all the more bizarre, as a relic from a time of national affluence in conjunction with a serious faith in the public sector.