A CITY WITHIH A CITY

Evening Star, Issue 20055, 21 December 1928, Page 1

A CITY WITHIH A CITY

' SKYSCRAPERS IN NEW YORK A -new city within a city is (says a New York correspondent) growing up iii “ mid-town,” New York, a city with its head in the clouds and its feet in confusion and ■ clamour. Around the Grand Central station, in Forty-second street, square towers and pointed towers and cubes of a monumental massiveness are rising in reckless profusion.- A story a week and fifty, even sixty, stories in. a year—in no time at all there is a new “skymark.” A real estate “operator” gets-an idea, finds a few millions of dollars to. back it, and presently a big hotel or a,warehouse, built a generation ago to last for over, is in the hands of the housebreaker. An interesting building is the New York Central Building,' which has two streets passing directly through it, and which rises thirty-five stories above the streets it bestrides. Those streets, though they run through the very vitals of tho building, are physically separated from it, so that no vibration from the vehicular ’ traffic may be felt 1 in the offices above and around them. Tho building itself, huge • though it is, stands on stilts, for under it are two levels of railway tracks, the lower of them being sUft below tho street level. Tho tracks are used by more than 700 trains daily, but one would never know in the building above, from any. sound or vibration, what was underneath it. With all this rapid growth around Forty-second street a serious problem has arisen, which has only, partly been solved by. widening that street and Bark avenue and by creating tho now traffic arteries through tho Grand Central Building. These great new structures, togetner with two or three, others not so tall, but with a larger’ acreage of floor space, that have only lately been completed,: are -bringing into tho Grand Central zone a daily ■■. influx of over 50,000 persons and 5,000 motor cars, in.addition, to,those already there. Even qow congestion ; of the streets causes a huge economic loss through the delays, to traffic, but what will it be in two, years from now, when the last of-tho, new buildings is finished? Only one of the schemes thus far suggested for dealing with the congestion promises to be a measure of genuine relief; that is, the building of, a moving , footpath from Lexington avenue 'ou, the east to Sisth avenue on tho .west, upder Forty-second street.