TAILOR TO LANDLORD

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 151, 30 June 1928, Page 20

TAILOR TO LANDLORD

A ROMANCE OF INDUSTRY. An immigrant tailor who stitched his ; way out of Grand street into a fiftceh- '■." roomed apartment at No. 1-1(55, Park avenue, was tho guest of honour at a testimonial dinner in the Hotel Commodore, attended by city officials, Judges, nnd others prominent in the official business (says ,the New York "World"). V-i : T' c little shop at No. 274,.Grand street, '"" which the tailor opened with his savings of 50 dollars twenty-two years ago, still carries his name over tho door, . but it is notjiis any more. He turned , it over to his two helpers in 1900, when .ho started out to buy up sites in what is now called the garment district. Today Abraham Brickcn, immigrant boy, from Kiev, Russia, who came. to the United States' at the ago of twenty-two '.■with a needle and a spool of thread in his pocket, can look down from a handsomely appointed office in ono of his skyscrapers upon 50,000,000 dollars' ■worth of steel and concrete that have been raised by his initiative. His latest achievement,, tho Transportation Building, at Barclay street and Broadway, is the third tallest office .building in the world. Mr. Bricken's first job as helper /to a tailor."in: Gr.vid street paid.him G dollars a'weck. From this meagre sum in three months he managed to save 50 dollars, with which ho opened his • own shop. Fourteen years later he amassed 20,000 dollars. Then he left tailoring for real gstate. -It was Mr. Biieken who built tho first skyscraper. in the Borough Hall section of Brobkljn. He paid 1,300,000 dollars for. a site at Court and Remsen streets. Its value has doubled'since the purchase. Then, anticipating the trend of the garment industry in Broadway in Manhattan, he began building in the East Thirties. His company, the Bricken Construction Company, is to-day' the largest individual owner of buildings in tho garment centre: .