Skyscrapers going up in New York and Qatar and plenty of other places put this Skyscrapers in mind. Charles Sheeler painted it in 1922. It was given to the Phillips Collection on 21st Street in Washington — then called the Phillips Gallery — in 1926. It is twenty inches high. This is a skyscraper the size of a dress-shirt box.

"It was cheaper to be poor then,” Saul Bellow had somebody say somewhere. It was easier to scrape the sky then, too.

'Scuse me while I do.