Different Sides of the Gate.

• Position: United States Military Academy at West Point - Brief Article

Just south of the United States Military Academy at West Point is the village of Highland Falls. Main Street of Highland Falls is familiar to everyone: the First National Bank with venetian blinds, real estate and insurance offices, yellow homes with frilly victorian porticos, barber shops, and wooden churches--the tiresome monotony and the incredible variety and discordancy of small-town commercialism. The buildings form no part of a whole: they are simply a motley, disconnected collection of frames coincidentally adjoining each other, lacking common unity or purpose. On the military reservation the other side of South Gate, however, exists a different world. There is ordered serenity. The parts do not exist on their own, but accept their subordination to the whole. Beauty and utility are merged in gray stone. Neat lawns surround compact, trim homes, each identified by the name and rank of...