I came acrross this passage by Mark Twain. It was part of his speech to St. Nicholas Society in New York, 1900, December 6. It's about New York but could very well have been about my super city.
"The foreigner coming to these shores is more impressed at first by our sky-scrapers. They are new to him. He has not done anything of the sort since he built the tower of Babel. The foreigner is shocked by them. In the daylight, they are ugly. They are - well, too chimneyfied and too snaggy - like a mouth that needs attention from a dentist, like a cemetery that is all monuments and no gravestones. But at night, seen from the river where they are columns towering against the sky, all sparkling with light, they are fairy-like; they are beauty more satisfactory to the soul than anything man has dreamed of since the Arabian nights."
"The foreigner coming to these shores is more impressed at first by our sky-scrapers. They are new to him. He has not done anything of the sort since he built the tower of Babel. The foreigner is shocked by them. In the daylight, they are ugly. They are - well, too chimneyfied and too snaggy - like a mouth that needs attention from a dentist, like a cemetery that is all monuments and no gravestones. But at night, seen from the river where they are columns towering against the sky, all sparkling with light, they are fairy-like; they are beauty more satisfactory to the soul than anything man has dreamed of since the Arabian nights."
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