The hitherto sleeping black cat on my lap gave me a scowl of the kind cinema fogeys give bogans who rustle their popcorn during poignant moments of a movie.

The object of my ecstasy was the story Belconnen Boom Town and more especially the dramatic photograph/artwork that accompanied it. It showed a Belcoscape sprouting towering towers.

I am a skyscraper enthusiast. Travels to Chicago (the city that invented the skyscraper) and to skyscraper-festooned Shanghai have both broadened and elevated my mind. Canberra's stubborn insistence on extreme stubbiness in its buildings has been a great disappointment. Now at last the city has begun to sprout some promising towers.

These ones are not quite lofty enough to be true scrapers of the sky, but they are a start. In recent times I have been to and written enthusiastically about two major Goliaths underway and heading skywards in Canberra. One of them is the Infinity Towers development at Gungahlin with towers of 22 and 20 storeys respectively. The other is the 88-metres-tall, 27-floor Wayfarer (what an odd name for something that must of necessity stay in one place and never go wayfaring!). The Wayfarer is part of the aforementioned Belcoscape celebrated in last Saturday's paper.

In my enthusiasm for tall and handsome buildings I gushed when I wrote news stories about these two handsome brutes. I may subconsciously have been taking my cue from the poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). A Chicagoan he wrote with rapture and horror of his burly, sometimes noble sometimes shameful city. His mighty, multi-storey poem The Skyscraper, (why not Google it now, for a treat?) http://carl-sandburg.com/skyscraper.htm is a hymn of praise to skyscrapers.

The poem praises and describes an early skyscraper of just 20 floors, so only about the height of the two Canberra junior scrapers just mentioned above. Today one of mightiest of skyscraper-rich Chicago's skyscrapers is the John Hancock Centre (to the top of which this reporter was whisked by a rocketing elevator). It is 344m tall and brandishes 100 floors. In amazing Shanghai the Shanghai Tower has 127 floors and so is almost five times as colossal as Belco's dainty little Wayfarer.

But size isn't everything there is to skyscrapers and in his poem Sandburg is marvelling at the skyscraper as a wondrous feat of human imagination, invention and of building. For him it is a living, mystical object. His described skyscraper is an office tower. This enables him as a big-hearted champion of the people to praise not only the toiling labourers that built the towering miracle but also the battling workers "the ten-dollars-a-week stenographers" that work there.

BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys ....
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
and has a soul.

Meanwhile, and still on the subject of built Canberra, it was with a muffled expletive (waking the hitherto sleeping cat on my lap) that I read Tuesday's typically fearless Canberra Times. The front page story Knock Them Down reported the likely demolition of the mouldering Anzac Parade East and West buildings.

For years I have been crusading to allow Canberra to have some ruins. Readers sharing this crusade pointed to the promising East Building, vacant for 20 years now (save for its ghosts and bats).

Worldly readers will be well abreast of the fact that modern urban ruins have a hard-to-define allure..

"Some attribute it [this allure] to the role ruins play as our 'brooding unconscious' " one thinker broods in the online Urban Ghosts, http://www.urbanghostsmedia.com/2012/11/in-love-with-rust-photography-obsession-with-modern-urban-ruins-urban-exploration/ in a piece that wonders why it is photographers are obsessed by modern urban ruins.

Urban Ghosts continues, hauntingly that "In the same way zombies are said to represent our guilt over forgetting the dead, ruins are said to embody a similar guilt over civilisation's unchecked progress."

Go online to the sensitive recent essay The Poetry of Decay https://www.failedarchitecture.com/the-poetry-of-decay/ for a sweet account, with lots of pictures, of what it is about ruins that is so melancholy and magical and so inspirational for artists.

All truly great cities have some characterful ruins but Canberra thus far has almost none. Canberra has always been run by tidiness-mad folk who think a capital city has to be spick-and-span. Nothing in Canberra is ever allowed, once it has been abandoned, to just stay there, charismatically crumbling.

In the wake of Tuesday's chilling news I went , grieving, to the East Building. Abandoned, bedraggled, a bit boarded up, haunted (a haggard, wild-eyed, stark white face came to a grimy third floor window and gazed down at me), it is poised on the brink of true ruin greatness.

Awake Canberrans! If you love this city it is time to stand up for the right of East Building to go on standing, lovingly neglected, giving Canberra at last some of the poetry of decay.