THE DAY AND WIGHT SKYSCRAPER.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 41, 18 February 1911, Page 10

THE DAY AND WIGHT SKYSCRAPER.

TWENTY STORIES IN TWENTY WEEKS. Imagine -a massive, granite-and-brick, fire-proofed sky-scraper covering twothirds of a block, building upward at ■ the rate of a story a week ! A story a week means a completed story, complete even as to inside furnishings and •ready for immediate occupancy. Tt sounds impossible. Strangers won't believe it till they see the building grow before their eyes. But this rate of construction is an actuality to-da-y ; aaid there is no telling just what greater speed the terrific demand of this age will bring forth. EXPRESS BUILDING. The sky-scraper is altogether an American institution. Its express speed of construction is also exclusively American, an expression of American enterprise, inventiveness, impatience, and daredeviltry workmen. The story of the express-built skyscraper begins away back in the s*eelrolling mills of Pittsburg and Bethlehem, where they also race against time and short-cut processes, and with a gigantic remorseless rash, turn out a product whether men get in the way or not. Here the entire steel frame of the sky-scraper is built in multitudinous sections — thai is to say, columns, beams, headers, girders — each with connecting flanges all punched and ready to be fitted and riveted together. The columns weigh as much as fifteen tons each. The black metal timbers are moved swiftly out of the roaring shops and on to hundreds of heavy flat cars, but every last item is known by name and number to the tense-featured foreman, the lines in whose lean face grow deeper as each story is added. He is working his men under tremendous pressure. An ordinarily slow iron job with its rattling dynamic progress is enough of a burden. But to rush one, to crowd ponderous steel into fleeting hours, is another matter. His employers give him so much time, and keep pounding him, and along with this pressure they give him constant but contrariwise orders — to wit: Don't kill any men. It is difficult to accomplish' with results. But it can be done, and to-day it is done. The framework of one big store in New York, containing 22,000,000 of steel, was erected in only 400 hours. Not an ironworkei was killed or seriously injured. The Metropolitan tower, rising fifty stories above the streets, was topped with the same fortunate result; so was the lofty "Singerhorn." GIANT'S JACKSTRAWS. It is a wonderful giants -game of jackstraws — this rearing of the steel structure. First a platoon of monstet derricks is set up in the pit. The masts are sometimes 90ft in height with booms nearly as long, and are shipped all the way across the continent from the big pine forests of Oregon. They are trucked through the streets to the building site at midnight when other traffic is all save suspended. Now the steel is arriving, drawn from the river lighters in great double-teamed, extension tracks, and is unloaded all around the edge of the rectangular pit. Each length is marked to go an a certain place. The drivers the most part are ex-ironworkers, and know how to handle steel as well as horses. Tho derricks are electrically run, and move silently, swiftly, steadily. The spasmodic jerking of the puffing steam upright engine is absent. The big booms swing, dip, raise their many-ton loads with all the precision and delicacy of human hands. Just think of swinging a heavy girder into a flange-union with a play on either side of little more than a quarter of an inch ! With each derrick there's a crew of iseven men, comprising a "pusher" or squad-boss, a derrick-man, and five overhead ironworkers. Over all the squads is the iron foreman, darting here and there, looking up and own, seeing the wholed process and every part of it. The mighty work goes on continuously by day and night. One shift — on a big job it numbers fifty men — relieves another. There must be no stopping; minutes count. At night yellow and white incandescent lights sputter over a ceaseless din and travail. Now and then ■an ambulance rings, its way into the congested side-street. For there aro accidents. They cannot be altogether avoided. THE SILENT POWER OF STEEL. From the edge of the pit you see an iron beam roll lazily out of a pile. Its motion is slight and noiseless, seemingly inconsequential, but it hit a man's leg and stripped it to the bone. Two beams meet, slowly, with velvet-like contact; but a man's fingers intervened, and they .sere nipped off. And metal v/ill break. There's the foreman, now, bending white-faced over the broken link of a derrick-chain. It is an inch thick and outside it looks polished, hard, sure; but within there was a bubble in the steel, leaving only ,a thin circumference of meta] to hold it together. Luckily, when it snapped, as snap it must, there ■svere no men riding on the load of beams ; but" there might have been. There are accidents ; but the work is too ponderous to make them noticeable, its purpose tow serious to have them interfere or subtract a minute of progress. Not one takes heed of them, not even the waiting lino of idle ironworkers, anxious for a job and the chances of it. Only the best and steadiest men are employed, experienced workers, who are • not only careful cf themselves, but also of their 'team- mates; and it is remarkable how the character of the iromvorker has changed to meet the exactions of these days of rapid construction., A RACE OF BUILDERS. In the past they were a boisterous, swashbuckling lot. A hero among them was a man who had the longest fall to his credit, or who could toss a whitehot rivet the greatest distance. They lived hard and died easily. To-day they know that a man stands highest on the pay-roll who takes his work and its danger most seriously, who also watches the man next to him— for in this calling one man's error often means another's life. Even so the bridgeworker of t o-da-y has not lost his romantic side. He is still the cavalier of the workaday world. See hun now, clinging like a fly to the top ring of that lofty derrick, or swaying in mid-air with one leg wound carelessly about a dangling cable, or standing upright alongside a dizzy column, hundreds of feet above the ground, with nothing more substantial under his clinging toe than an inch-wide bolt ! The plumber laying pipes in the dark basement geta just as high a wage, and his work it quite as important. But the ironworker gets the * eyes of tho crowd, and knows it. " Cowboys of the skies " they have been styled, and aptly so. They have many characteristics in common with their brethren of the plains. They lovo a dare and a scampering race. Often they make and have them — when the boss is not watching. Jtist recently two sky-scrapers in New York raced up side by side— a veritable Marathon of the skies ! — and prodigies of daring and foolhardiness were done by the rival gangs facing each other across the intervening side-street. They stole each other's hats and wrenches as they sailed up atop the loads of iron, danced giddy hornpipes on the end of projecting beams, tried to "best" each other taking chances amid the pandemonium of whip-snapping cablus and swinging iron..

HEROES OF THE GIRDER. They affect extravagances and peculiarities of dress. .That athletic-looking fellow with the grimy face and hands appears on idle Sundays in white flannels and silk hose. Tho man beside him is a favourite at bridgemen's dances, and has been known to wear and grace a frock-coat. They make no serious complaints over the new order of things — the rush of the work. " Sure," said one, " it's all right, only it's over nowadays before you get your second wind." Said another : " This going up at a storey a day interferes with me social life. On that Thirteenth-street building there was an hotel within arms-reach, and one day I got to talking with a pretty maid— through a window. Next day I had to talk down to her, and next day I had to yell to her, and in two days more I had to say ' Good-bye.' " ' Good-bye.' says she. ' Sorry to see you go; but I'll introduce you to my friend Katie who works on the tenth floor.' " They wait for nothing, and obey no precedents in the building of the express sky-Bcraper. While the steal frame is hastening skyward, the walls, floors, tiling, fire-proofing, wiring — all are racing after it. The very moment a support is made that renders possible the commencement of another branch of the work, the latter activity begins. On a granite and brick building the bricVlayers start work—on the fifth story, say ■ — before the granite has reached them. By the time the latter is laid and meets the brick they are several stories in advance. That means several stories saved in time. They work shoulder to shoulder — not an inch of room is wasted — on a long, mechanically elevated platform that seems to climb upward before your very eyes. Already the plastering has begun — while there still remains a gap in the ■under walls between granite and brick. Another precedent broken ! Said a neryous young superintendent one morning, "We begin plastering to-day." A PUZZLE FOR THE FOREMAN. "What!" expostulated the foreman. He interposed objections, slowly, obstinately; the superintendent snapped each one out of the way. They were precedents only. " And now, why not?" he concluded Tho foreman scratched his head ; and then a light , began to twinkle in his eye, the light of daring, initiative — of Americanism, for that is what the spirit really is. He jumped up, shook his shoulders and squared them. The wheelhorse became a racer. "I got you," said he. "I'll have a hundred and fifty men on the job by noon." HOW THE TRADES DOVETAIL. It is this dovetailing of all the various activities— from baise to cornice, from side to side, that helps most to solve the puzzle of rapid construction. No trade waits for another to finißh. Each fits in the moment another makes a groove, and all work skyward together. Thus there may be more than a thousand men on a building at one time. They swarm like ants over the structure. Mauls, riveting hammers, trowels, wrenches, shovels, saws, join in a tremendous chorus which may be heard for blocks. Around the base of the building drays are fighting for room and dumping materials rushed hither from the railroad yards of Harlem, from the scows of the North and East rivers. There is another remarkable feature' of the express sky-scraper— this, that in their construction amid the trafficcrowded streets of the metropolis, thousands of tons of diverse materials are whirled up and into place without injuring those below or even impeding traffic to an appreciable degree. THE SPORT OF SPEED. All the various trades— the masons, steamfitters, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, plasterers, fireproofers, stoneBetters, concrete mixers, labourers — are organised in gangs, as are the ironworkers. They take a savage joy in the speed of the work. Each gang seeks to outrival the other; every trado works for a .record. Each strives to do '"Etunts." Tho first column, up and grilled fast in its concrete base, is decorated with a flag— a tribute to the gang that erected it. The last piece of iron in the completed structure also bears a like emblem, which waves in honour of the whole force. Stonesetters, bricklayers, fireproof ers — all greet the completion of their tasks with a triumphant yell. Yesterday the record was a hundred and fifty drayloads of materials laid in a day ; now they have made the record two hundred. The jjioderD sky-scraper is really a great steel cage blanketed with stone, cement, and brick. Its walls and partitions are very t>hin as compared with the old-fashioned brick processes which ' took up room and gave less strength, which, moreover, were slow and costly to erect. The new type of building stands for strength and economy — and speed. THE FUTURE OF THE" SKYSCRAPER. It was new only a score of years ago. Then the people of Chicago marvelled over such a structure only nine stories high. Pedestrians blocked the sidewalks in front of it, and had to be dispersed by the police. To-day tho fifty-story sky-scraper has' already ceased to be a wonder. What does the future hold forth? Greater height? The architects say no ; that a multitude of such structures will shut out light from the streets and make an ugly sky-line. The limit of height has been reached. Greater speed, then? Yes, in all probability. The express sky-scraper is just beginning. Everyone, from architect down, is working to further its speed. All are simplifying processes, inventing new mechanical aids, devising better building systems. Verily, soon we shall have "sky-scrapers while you wait."— William Allan Johnston in Life.