Skyscraper Appreciation Day Celebration

Join us on Saturday, August 10, 2013 at 12:45 p.m. to celebrate Skyscraper Appreciation Day at The Clinton Restaurant located at 9-17 Clintonville Street, Whitestone, New York.

More information about The Clinton Restaurant (Menu, Directions, History) can be found at:

http://www.theclintonrestaurant.com/

Skyscraper Appreciation Day is celebrated on August 10th, the birth date of William Van Alen, the primary architect behind the construction of the Chrysler Building, the most popular skyscraper in New York City.

Skyscraper Appreciation Day was started in 2009 by Dr. Tom Stevens, the founder of the Objectivist Party. It was created so people can appreciate the engineering and architectural marvels we know as skyscrapers, which represent the triumph of reason and of man's industrial nature.

Join the Skyscraper Appreciation Facebook Group at:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=41259490414

Ayn Rand loved skyscrapers. She loved them not only for their phallic erectness, but because they symbolized exactly what she stood for and what she thought was best about not only our country but our whole Western civilization. She wrote a brilliant paean to one such building in The Fountainhead:

"The building stood on the shore of the East River, a structure rapt as raised arms. The rock crystal forms mounted in such eloquent steps that the building did not seem stationary, but moving upward in a continuous flow - until one realized that it was only the movement of one’s glance and that one’s glance was forced to move in that particular rhythm. The walls of pale gray limestone looked silver against the sky, with the clean, dulled luster of metal, but a metal that had become a warm, living substance, carved by the most cutting of all instruments - a purposeful human will; the skyscrapers, the shapes of man’s achievement on earth." (The Fountainhead, pgs. 300 & 327)

In an article entitled "The Skyscraper: A Gesture To Reason, Freedom and Human Life" (April 27, 2003) published in Capitalism Magazine, Joseph Kellard wrote:

"The skyscraper's true symbolic gesture is captured best by philosopher Leonard Peikoff, when he said of his associate Ayn Rand: 'New York, the skyscrapers, everything that man had traversed from the time of the cave to the time of this glorious and industrial civilization, that was to [her the pinnacle of human achievement in physical terms.] It wasn't just acquiring philosophy. It was acquiring ideas, acquiring science and then remaking the earth accordingly. And she couldn't think of a more splendid and exciting and beautiful place than that view that you get of the skyscrapers when you don't see the details of each one, but the mass of ingenuity and talent soaring for the sky.'"

Regarding New York's skyline, Ayn Rand said:

"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline... The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?... When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."