MAKING A SKYSCRAPER

Evening Star, Issue 20981, 21 December 1931, Page 11

MAKING A SKYSCRAPER

MIRACLE OF PUMIM It is the regular thing in New York for chunks of what the real estate people call “ improved property ” even property presenting the .outward aspect of a large, expensive, and ornate building, like the Waldorf-Astoria, for example, or more recently the Belmont Hotel —to seem to become overnight nothing but great holes in the ground (writes H. J. Brock, in the ‘ New York Times’). In an incredibly short time after that, any particular great hole has vanished. From it has sprung up a larger, more expensive, very much taller—and often equally ornate—building, which in a few weeks or months counts only as a commonplace item in the urban landscape. At this precise moment the biggest new hole in the ground is that which in a couple of months has taken the place of the entire block of buildings bounded by F : fth and Sixth avenues and Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets. This area of momentary devastation is the site of the Rockefeller project which is still officially called Metropolitan square, but has come—with more exact relation to tho facts—to be commonly known and described as Radio City. Eventually the real estate footage involved will be a little short of 550,000 square feet—the _ shortage representing parcels of land in the flanking blocks which are not included in the 250,000,OOOdol Rockefeller investment.

The Radio City undertaking sharpens curiosity as to the means by which great urban building replacement operations are accomplished. The whole thing looks like a sort of magic—black and white, as you. choose to think. And the magic works every time a great modern skyscraper—say, the Cunard Building or the Chrysler Building or the new Waldorf-Astoria Hotel —takes tho place of a group of buildings belonging to a past era of smaller Of what does the magic consist? How is the spell worked? Normally, physical elements-involved are the assemblage piecemeal of the parcels of land of which the great building site, covering nowadays a largo part of a city block or even an entire city block, is composed; the wrecking of tho buildings already on that site; tho excavation, as a rule far below those of the old buildings, for the foundations upon which tho new building is to rest; and assembling the material of the now building and putting that material together according to an architect’s design. This sounds very simple —or it docs until you realise tho scale of tho undertaking and tho complications which the scale dud the congested environment introduce.

Along with these physical elements go others: the financing of the original conception of the undertaking, including the basic real estate opinions; the planning of the building by architects and engineers to meet the proposed uses and to meet them economically; the secondary financing operations which draw from outside sources—by a sale of bonds to the public, for example—the money that pays the construction cost and transforms the promoter’s project and the architect’s plan equally into fact; the renting campaign which sells beforehand (if possible) enough space in the building to assure its being at least a promising venture.

The first essential is, obviously, the existence of a group of persons who need (or think’ they need) a new building for purposes of their own—say, a largo corporation with general offices or a mercantile, manufacturing, or publishing enterprise—or else a group of persons who have sold themselves the idea that they can sell tho uso of a new building to other persons and enterprises who must have or ought to have the sort of space tho hopeful ones are prepared to furnish. It is such a group that promotes or undertakes the building—initiates the entire enterprise. ARCHITECT FIRST. Usually in this group will bo represented, besides tlie concern—if any—which is propelled into it by need of space for itself, a real estate firm and a building firm engaged in a general contracting business. Usually an architect is called in at tlio very beginning to mako preliminary plans. Among them these people take care of tho preliminary financing. They put up, or manage to put up, 100,000 dollars or so to clear the way for action. They organise the company and generally take, in return for tbeir cash, gold bonds and a distribution of common stock without par value. Their first need is possession of the site—-which they have probably had

in mind from the beginning. _ Presumably they have carefully avoided noising abroad beforehand their intention of putting up a big building in a specified locality. This in order not to have to face an automatic combination of the holders of tho component parcels of real estate, bent to hold out for top prices. Most likely the men on the ground floor have already begun a process of getting hold of the desired area by “ biting in ” —acquiring control of a lot hero and a lot there through a broker or brokers—until enough bites have been taken out to spoil the apple for any other group of “ improvers.” We shall suppose that this process has been employed and is complete—or so far along that control of the site is assured. It may have taken, a year or two years of patient dickering and undercover work. Reasonably, the architect who made the preliminary plans, or some other architect, has by now been selected to develop complete designs for a project, which may be known to the draftsmen in his office as “Project X.” At tliis point arises the need of a largo sum of money for actual building operations. And it is at this point that the people who make a business of marketing bonds issued on buildings in cotfrse of construction come into tho picture. Hand in hand with the bond-selling campaign and the planning of the building may go a selling campaign which disposes of space or allocates space, thus affecting both the plans for the arrangement of space and the distribution of tho bond issue, as new interests in the enterprise are created and large tenants become in effect participators in the undertaking. Suppose that the financing is successful and that the architect’s plans—after suffering many changes to meet this desire and to avoid that object, practical or aesthetic—have reached a stage of practical stability. After a year or more of preliminaries we are now ready to go to work on tho job itself. If a firm of general contractors is not among the promoters—such a firm may be tho promoter-in-chief—contractors are called in. These people start the wheels of the actual building process. The general contractor’s practice is to work with a straight contract with the promoting company or on a budget basis with a fixed fee or percentage. With the architects and tho engineers tho contractor lays out the job and lets tho sub-contracts—these sub-contracts, including almost all of the individual operations involved in building, such as plastering, electrical work, plumbing, installing elevators (10 per cent, of the total cost this last). A budget prepared by such a contractor—based on the specifications of the engineers and the architects — consists of a list of the component operations ■with an estimate of the cost of each attached, tho total being the cost of the whole job. Figuring back from that total, percentages of expenditure on each component operation are arrived at, and experience shows that these percentages are fairly constant.

AVrecking, though a very spectacular process and sometimes distressing, is a small item, financially. The wreckers get what they can out of the junk and the percentage is a fraction of 1 per cent, of almost any job. Barring strikes and disasters, and cutting out all x’ossiblc overtime—night work is rarely done on building jobs —tho actual building time can be figured very closely. Say, in our supposed building, eight months are allowed for the entire operation from the time the wreckers have cleared out. The process .is checked on a graph, a glance at which will show you whether any element in the building is up to schedule on any given day of the eight-month period. On a set day excavation begins, before that is finished the concrete layers go in; the steel workers arc at work as soon as the concrete has got far enough for them to build on it.

The cost of the building may be less than one-half —even as little as a third—of the total investment figure. For example, it is customary to speak of the Radio City project as a 250,000,000dol enterprise. That figure takes in a great many factors not included in the building operation which, in spite of the scale of it, is not excepted to reach even nearly tho 100,000,000d0l niark. This though the construction includes a tower sixtysix stories high, and lower buildings covering an area considerably greater than Stuyvesant Square, and roughly ten times as big as Gramercy .Park,