Towers of Tomorrow
“They looked like abandoned villain headquarters in a comic book.”
This is , a monthly column on the history of buildings by Adrian Shirk. Shirk has previously written about the feminist takeover of an abandoned building, the death of shopping malls, the Robert Moses building in New York, and Brooklyn's Admiral Row houses.
The towers were not silvery and serpentine like Seattle’s Space Needle, which had come out of their world’s fair a few years earlier. Rather, these were stolid and kind of crude, the saucer-shaped decks fixed atop three thick concrete columns and painted lemon yellow.
Men in Black

Adrian Shirk is the author of And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, a hybrid-memoir exploring the lives of American women prophets and mystics, named an NPR ‘Best Book’ of 2017. She's currently working on a manuscript about utopian communities. Shirk was raised in Portland, Oregon, and has since lived in New York and Wyoming. She's a frequent contributor to Catapult, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, among others. Currently, she teaches in Pratt Institute’s BFA Creative Writing Program, and lives on the border of the Bronx and Yonkers with her husband Sweeney and Quentin the cat.
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