The buildings of midtown Manhattan in which I spent a good portion of my working life have always had a dual affect on me. One was the panoramic sweep of the skyline that seemed to have its own noisy beauty, an endless castle of Capitalism; the other, passing into the 21st Century, it seemed a dark force climbing with a voracious intensity to eat the sky (and me), in an increasingly Mad Man eat Mad Man and everybody else world.

To this day, years after I left adland, I get this tightening in the gut walking across 57th Street, west to east, but not to Grey Advertising, or before that north to south to Ted Bates agency on the West Side. Today I’m headed to my eye doctor on Park Avenue. And the buildings seem as imposing outside as ever, imposing inside with their high-speed elevators soaring to boardrooms, the flashy facades that hit you as doors open, the teeming offices behind the plated names. What wealth of power, what elevation, what craziness.

Now, sitting in my doctor’s office, eyes dilated, blurry, it’s ironic that the building I spent sixteen years in as a staff writer, then creative director, then freelancer (after I was creamed and asked back) at Grey Advertising would be on Page 46 of New York Magazine’s Oct. 5 issue, Money (or what’s left of it), with George Washington winking at you. It was an article called “Bargain basement skyscrapers.” I strained my bleary eyes to read. I couldn’t believe what I saw . . .

There was the black tower of 777 Third Avenue looking grimly down. I counted up the tower’s stories to my tenth floor corner office (the last one, the “exit office”) on the 48th Street side; then I counted up to my 49th Street corner office on the ninth floor that had long preceded that, wherein so much fun was had, along with anguish, booze, creating, recreating and recreating ads ad nauseum with my art director, destroying at least one entire forest for literally miles of storyboards.

And there was the article by Devon Leonard about 777 Third Avenue: “There are still some ad-agency types hanging out here, but not for much longer. Grey Group, the primary tenant, is moving farther downtown in December. According to Tenantwise, this will leave the property almost entirely empty. Mermel [a self-described real estate vulture] doubts the owners, the William Kaufman Organization and Travelers will be able to fill the void anytime soon, and so they may have difficulty servicing a $102 million mortgage stemming from a 2007-refinancing. Maybe, he adds, it might be wiser to sell. Mermel thinks they could get $98 million in this market. Jennifer Wislocki, a Travelers spokeswoman, vigorously disputed his analysis of the building’s occupancy and its financial performance. She said the owners are talking to a number of prospective tenants.”

Or “don’t bullshit a bullshitter” as we used to say in the black tower. So, here was the market bomb exploding under old friends’ feet, leaving a ghost-like stillness as the sirens sped by to the nearby UN to protect Ahmadinejad and the Israelis from killing each other. And Bernanke rolled the presses in D.C. to save the dollar. Not.

Nor was it just my old haunts. There was a sampling of 10 other skyscrapers of note: 11 Times Square, for instance, 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, meant to be a new $1.1 billion dollar skyscraper, investors financing the project with a $660 million mortgage from a banking consortium led by Pittsburgh’s PNC. “Mermel [he’s commenting on this vulture’s feast between the author’s narrative], says they still don’t have a tenant: ‘This always happen in a boom. These out-of-towners come in, borrow a ton of money, and get hammered.’ Prudential has acknowledged that the financial performance of 11 Times Square “will not be what we expected.” SJP declined to comment.”

Mermel, I might add, according to the author is “a 47-year old Morgan Stanley banker turned real-estate vulture investor [who] stands in his pin-striped suit outside an elegant white 23-story building on Madison Avenue.” Mermel traded this building up from when he first bought it for $160 million in 2003, filling the floors with hedge fund guys. As rents soared, he and his backers sold it for $220 million, but he kept a minority interest in it. Sure enough he sold 660 Madison to Risanamento, an Italian real-estate firm, for $375 million in 2007, getting out just before the credit crunch hit.

He has now raised $50 million for a vulture fund, figuring the building’s now worth $143 million, less by a lot than Risanamento’s $175 million mortgage alone. It’s good news to him that the Milan-based company “is trying to unload the tower to stave off bankruptcy. It only improves his chances of picking it up again cheaply.” Talk about predatory selling -- and to the rich not the poor.

Yet think of Mermel’s untrammeled belief in the cyclical nature of the markets, of Capitalism, that what goes around must come around. Think with the inevitability of the vulture who waits on his branch, or circles the skies with his pin-striped wings as the tide of the Dow rises and rises and floats everything up, up and away with it, and Mermel, too. Before that, think of the day when the Dow hits its low and Mermel dives, strikes, with the swiftness and hunger of the vulture, and flies up with 660 Madison in his beak again, bought for a song, and about to sell it one day for $500 million.

But what if . . . what if the cycle of the market cracked, collapsed, as it almost did, as told y an ex-trader in his blog, Zero Hedge (another of the New York Magazine articles]) called “Dow Zero,” on Page 30.

The article was “How The World Almost Came To An End At 2 PM On September 18 Posted by Tyler Durden at 12:56 PM” February 8, 2009:

“On Thursday (Sept 18, 2008), at 11 a.m., the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the U.S., to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there.

”If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2 p.m. that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the U.S., would have collapsed the entire economy of the U.S., and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.”

To boot, Durden writes, “We are no better off today than we were 3 months ago because we have a decrease in the equity positions of banks because other assets are going sour by the moment.”

And so what of all the Mermels and little Mermels in their belief in the infallible cycles of the market and its Dow? What would this mean above and beyond this present panic? I thought, about to get my eyes shot through with lights of all colors for still more pictures of the retina. And what about the nine other buildings I haven’t mentioned, with hundreds of millions, if not billions in financing, reduced to “bargain basement prices,” strapping banks, investors, buyers, sellers, the system itself, these monoliths standing like singles at a chic bar, waiting to meet someone, someone with money, to fall for them.

And if this was happening in New York City, that is a 17 percent vacancy rate and falling in Midtown, how long would it be until it hit Chicago (if it hasn’t already), Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Seattle, all points on the compass. The mixed vibe this street gave me, 57th in particular, speckled with the jewel of Carnegie Hall and the Russian Tea Room sitting next to it, the Recital Hall above, another black tower hanging in the sky, where Martin Scorsese, the great film director lived, and all the towers hanging about it . . . what would it all be . . . a ghost town? Could that ever be?

And then it was time to see the doctor, finally the top dog, my eye doctor, who said it seemed the loss of retina in my right eye had stopped for now, at least not traveled any farther than months ago, when I first noticed the shadow to the right shading the view. Unpredictable, a one-in-the-world case for a man of my age, as said by the most notable doctor of retinopathy in New York City. If by chance, sheer randomness, or some unseen condition this had occurred, it was abating. I shook the doctor’s steely hand, thanked him and left his tower.

On the street again, 57th, now my sight looked like an acid trip from the late 60s. The towers were purplish, red, yellow, blue, turning with a gold aura. It looked as if we were somewhere over the rainbow, where bluebirds do not fly. I thought of these giants, these castles of inestimable wealth, on the blocks now, piece by piece, an aftershock of that 777-point [as in 777 Third Avenue] drop on September 29, 2008, the single largest Dow point drop in history? Was it all random? Or were Mermel’s laws of finance inviolable?

And how many more buildings would he have for lunch, dinner and breakfast, deal making with the other pinstripe suits? Buying, selling, cajoling, arm-twisting, rising up, and having that inner clock, that indispensable gift of timing to the end, of when to buy and when to sell. Is that what it all came down to, an instinct, like a flautist’s, when exactly, on what beat, to reenter the symphony of life, and when to exit? And how could a world full of investors ever have that kind of gift or curse?

And as I walked in this light-induced blurred vision, the world seemed unreal. Except for the strong cool wind that had risen in the evening, as the crowds poured from the office buildings, hurrying to subways, to their dates, to shop, to a drink at the Plaza, a deal at The Four Seasons, a buyout at Danielle’s. I pushed my tired body on, gaining new strength from the fresh air, winding my way through the thick crowds, the incredibly dense traffic, the fumes of taxis, buses, cars, the hydrocarbon civilization, with modern rickshaws peddling tourists, and a horse and carriage or two down from Central Park.

How strange it was, and the Madoff victims, and the upsurge of Union Square property, and was Eli Manning really worth it? What was value? What determined it, the ability to generate more money, or the money itself that raised the beholder’s interest, the stakes? What really created value? Rarity? Why was gold, a shiny rock rising as the dollar tumbled? And was it Goldman flash-dealing transactions on that day of the attempted e-bank bust?

Or was it some other dark force from cyberspace? What mystery finance was? Like life and how civilizations came and went like recessions, depressions, boom times, the wheels turning, gears crunching us all as time rolled on.

And yet, after all was said and done, beyond my own fear, or the world’s fear, I loved this city, loved it like life, life that could be ugly as death in one moment, transcendent as the light of the setting sun in the west in the next moment. But somehow Mermel knew for sure, for sure for sure, that in the deepest adversity were the best buys of fate. Wow! Pass it on, I thought. Pass it on.