As the Grand Cosmo rose to the thirtieth floor, as the steel skeleton began to disappear beneath its sheathing of rusticated stone, ads began to appear in newspapers and weekly magazines, showing the building with the cloth lifted to various heights; and around the half-concealed structure stood phrases such as THE GRAND COSMO: CULTURE, COMMERCE, AND COMMODIOUS LIVING.
The Grand Cosmo opened on September 5, 1905, five days after Martin’s thirty-third birthday; the delay was caused by a flaw in the refrigerated-air system, which circulated cool air through wall ducts on every floor and subterranean level. Martin, who had reserved ninety percent of the living quarters for permanent residents and ten percent for transients, noted that fewer than half of the spaces had been rented, but he was certain that the failure was due to the strangeness of the Grand Cosmo: people didn’t know exactly what it was. He had forbidden Harwinton to advertise it as a hotel; Harwinton had been forced to make use of teasing hints, such as THE GRAND COSMO: A NEW CONCEPT IN LIVING. The final stage of the campaign had emphasized the completeness of the Grand Cosmo, the sense that it was a world in itself, a city within the city. Harwinton, in his customary way, presented his central idea in a double manner that could only be called contradictory. For if on the one hand he made the claim that the Grand Cosmo, insofar as it contained everything the urban resident could possibly desire, was nothing less than the city itself, so that to dwell within its walls was to be, at every moment, at the very center of the city, yet on the other hand he emphasized that the Grand Cosmo was set apart from the city, he presented it as an exotic place that provided sensations unavailable to the mere city-dweller unfortunate enough not to enter its enchanted walls, he did everything in his power to turn the Grand Cosmo into an attraction, an eighth wonder of the world, a place you simply had to see. These two contradictory images of the Grand Cosmo, which at first threatened to lead the campaign into confusion, were brilliantly reconciled by Harwinton in a third image that began to emerge more strongly: the Grand Cosmo as a place that rendered the city unnecessary. For whether the Grand Cosmo was the city itself, or whether it was the place to which one longed to travel, it was a complete and self-sufficient world, in comparison with which the actual city was not simply inferior, but superfluous.
The newspaper reports were on the whole favorable, though Martin detected a frequent note of puzzlement or bewilderment: the critics, while admiring particular effects, seemed uncertain when the question arose of what exactly the Grand Cosmo was. Some called it a hotel; a few, taking a hint from the ad campaign, called it an experiment in communal living. What struck most of the first wave of observers was the overthrow of the conventional apartment. Instead the Grand Cosmo offered a variety of what it called “living areas,” in carefully designed settings. Thus on the eighteenth floor you stepped from the elevator into a densely wooded countryside with a scattering of rustic cottages, each with a small garden. The twenty-fourth floor contained walls of rugged rock pierced by caves, each well-furnished and supplied with up-to-date plumbing, steam, and refrigerated air. Those with a hankering after an old-fashioned hotel could find on the fourth and fifth subterranean levels, which formed a single floor, an entire Victorian resort hotel with turrets and flying flags, a grand veranda holding six hundred rattan rockers, and a path leading down through an ash grove to a beach of real sand beside a lake. Still other floors and levels offered a variety of living arrangements: courtyard dwellings (four to six irregular rooms arranged about a central court landscaped with trees and ponds), screen enclosures (large living areas supplied with folding screens that might be variously arranged to form temporary, continually changing divisions), and perspective views (room-like enclosures with windows that provided a three-dimensional view of a detailed scene resembling a museum diorama and supplied with live actors: a jungle with stuffed lions, a New England village with a blacksmith and a spreading oak tree, an urban avenue). In every case an attempt was made to abolish the corridor, to interrupt monotony, to overcome the sense of a series of more or less identical rooms arranged side by side in a rectangle of steel.
The theme of abolishing the expected was taken up by a number of writers, who reported that in order to avoid the tedium of a fixed architectural scheme, the Grand Cosmo employed a staff of designers, carpenters, landscape artists, and architectural assistants who roamed through the building and decided on changes: the removal of an inner wall, the construction of a new summerhouse or tunnel, the transformation of a cafeteria into an Italian garden or a croquet lawn into a street of shops. It was therefore possible to say that the Grand Cosmo was never the same from one day to the next, that its variety was, in a sense, limitless.
While taking note of the unusual living arrangements, and ignoring conventional features such as lobbies, cafeterias, and a very efficient laundry service, many observers preferred to comment on the large amount of space devoted to services and entertainments not generally associated with hotels: the many parks and ponds and gardens, including the Pleasure Park with its artificial moonlight checkering the paths, its mechanical nightingales singing in the branches, its melancholy lagoon and ruined summerhouse; the Haunted Grotto, in which ghosts floated out from behind shadowy stalactites and fluttered toward visitors in a darkness illuminated by lanternlight; the Moorish Bazaar, composed of winding dusty lanes, sales clerks dressed as Arabs and trained in the art of bargaining, and a maze of stalls that sold everything from copper basins to live chickens; the many reconstructions of Hidden New York, including Thieves’ Alley in Mulberry Bend, an opium den, a foggy street of river dives (the Tub of Blood, Cat Alley, Dirty Johnny’s), and bloody fights between the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, with a nearby shop called Hell-Cat Maggie’s in which one could purchase brass fingernails and have one’s teeth filed to points; the Pantheatrikon, a new kind of theater in which actors on a circular stage surrounded a central auditorium that revolved slowly; a Séance Parlor with heavily curtained windows, a spirit cabinet of black muslin, and a round table at which sat, in a high-necked black dress, the medium Florence Kane; the Salon of Phrenological Demonstrations, presided over by Professor Geoffrey St. Hilaire of Geneva; the reconstruction of a gloomy Asylum for the Insane, with barred windows and shafts of pallid moonlight, in which more than two hundred actors and actresses portrayed patients suffering from more than two hundred delusions of melancholia, including the sensation of being on fire, of having one’s legs made of glass, of being possessed by the devil, of having horns on the head, of being a fish, of being strangled, of being eaten by worms, of having the head severed from the body; the Temple of Poesy, in which twenty-four young women, led by Miss Fanny Parker, all wearing white Grecian tunics and garlands of green satin vineleaves around their heads, recited one after the other, for an hour at a time, twenty-four hours a day, the best-loved poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Whitcomb Riley, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant; the Palace of Wonders, in which were displayed a two-headed calf, a caged griffin, a mermaid in a dark pool, the Human Anvil, a school of trained goldfish fastened by fine wires to toy boats in order to enact naval battles, Little Emily the Armless Wonder, the Heteradelph or Duplex Boy with his second torso and his second set of legs, and the infant Adelaide, a four-year-old musical prodigy who played the complete piano sonatas of Mozart on a specially constructed piano with sixty-four keys; the Museum of Waxworks Vivants, in which waxworks, automated waxworks operated by concealed clockwork, and living actors impersonating waxworks represented tableaux such as The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the Actor John Wilkes Booth, Gorilla Seizing a Young Girl, Lazarus Rising from His Grave, and Lizzie Borden Murdering Her Father and Stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts; the Grand Cosmo Cigar Store, composed of many dusky rooms each opening into the next, as far as the eye could see, including a gaslit workroom where cigars were rolled by authentic German cigarmakers, each room containing one or more wooden Indians automated by clockwork and performing motions such as lifting cigars to their lips and blowing smoke rings, raising and lowering tomahawks, spitting tobacco juice into a brass cuspidor, and in one case walking slowly up and down the length of the room with a menacing expression; elaborate stage sets representing Civilizations of the Solar System, such as the white catacombs of the Selenites, the Venusian gardens, and the glowing palaces of the Empire of the Sun; the Hall of Optical Novelties, including Zemmler’s Eidothaumatoscope, a machine for viewing objects just beyond the edges of inserted photographs; a reconstruction of the Heavenly City, based on the reports of more than one hundred mystics; a new kind of department store, designed to disrupt the monotony of displayed merchandise by attractions such as meandering aisles, festive plazas containing striped palmist tents and crystal-gazing booths, and a pygmy village with real pygmies making spears; the Laboratory of Psychical Science, including Professor Blackburn’s Ectoplasmosphere (a large hollow glass sphere for attracting and collecting ectoplasmic projections for scientific analysis), a curtained booth for the study of automatic writing in which Miss Eva put visitors in contact with a Persian spirit called Aouda, and a number of recently invented machines for measuring the claims of spiritualism, such as a Phantothermoscope for registering the presence of departed dear ones and a mahogany Telekabinett in which electrodes were attached to the temples of clairvoyants in order to display their mental images on a ground glass screen; the Cine-Theater, which showed short films (four to eleven minutes) featuring tricks and illusions and provided by Black Star Films, including “The Decapitated Man,” “Mesmer’s Castle,” “Cleopatra’s Resurrection,” and “Tchin-Chao the Chinese Conjuror”; the Phantorama; the Théâtre des Ombres; the Wonders of the Fairy World, a reassembled plot of genuine Irish forest and glade, including trees and turf shipped in an ocean liner and an authentic woodland stream transported in thirty cedar barrels, the whole illuminated by stage lighting that exactly reproduced the conditions of a moonlit summer night, in order to assist the visitor who wished to search for the fairies who had been observed dancing in a ring on that very plot of ground on May 26, 1904, in County Sligo; and the Theatrum Mundi, a globe-shaped chamber in which black-and-white images from every corner of the known world were projected in ever-changing cinematographic montage, showing oncoming trains, the faces of English coal miners, Amazon alligators, cyclists in bloomers, polar bears, the Flatiron Building, a Dutch girl watering a tulip.