Anson Blackman on New York City architecture and machines

Truck overloaded with bricks.
Image credit: TechEBlog - One Brick Too Many

Here are a few orphics that [Ali] Baba threw off while riding from the Battery to Union Square in a cable car:
All is not beautiful that aspires high.
A square tower of bricks is as beautiful as a square tower of bricks.
A gorgeous entrance over-dazzles a multitude of shams.
When the front of a structure is as the wall, the wall would do as the front.
In all this dazzle of brick a man must think in squares and oblongs.
Methinks the oblongs are of the long-green variety.
The honest craftsman loves what is green in nature.
The New York craftsman delights in the other green.
New York is machine-made.
I hear it is run by a machine.
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.
No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
— Anson Blackman (Ali Baba) in The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, edited by Elbert Hubbard, Volume 18, Number 1, (East Aurora, New York: The Society of Philistines, December 1903), p. 26. Cited in part in private email by Lee Graves (March 8, 2005).