A Supergirl-Inspired Epiphany

I saw Supergirl over the weekend and found it enjoyable. There’s a flashback scene where Kara meets her cousin Clark for the first time, as she arrives on Earth from the ruins of Krypton. She’s in a spacesuit and he’s in his Superman costume, and she says to herself “Why is he in his underwear?” I realized yesterday why this question resonated with me, beyond the fact that I’ve been wondering about his costume for a very long time. Here’s a picture looking east on Liberty Street from Church Street: Left to right, we’ve got the black monolith of the US Steel Building, (now One Liberty Plaza), completed in 1973, the 1924 Westinghouse Building at 150 Broadway, the 1910 Sinclair Oil Building at 55 Liberty Street, the 1924 Federal Reserve Bank, and the 2003 apartment house at 2 Gold Street. Gold Street has a concrete frame and the others have steel frames; Westinghouse, Sinclair Oil, and the Fed have traditional masonry curtain walls. Sinclair Oil and the Fed do a serious job with the…