“MILLIONAIRES’ ROW”

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 October 1928, Page 8

“MILLIONAIRES’ ROW”

A NEW SKYSCRAPER.

The newest idea for a skyscraper is to have two main motor roads running right through the heart of it. This particular skyscraper also has two levels of railroad tracks running through its base. It is the New York Central Buildingnow in process of erection behind the Grand Central Terminal Building, which contains the stations of two railways. There is no bedroom in this building, but otherwise most of the requisites of life are to be enjoyed, from a bath to an art gallery (writes the correspondent of the “Daily News”). The new building occupies the last available plot in the central district of New York, and has hitherto been the lowest part of Park Avenue “Millionaires’ Row,” as it is called, where flats are let at £2OO per room per year.

This double row of hotels and flats began when the New York Central Railway Company electrified the first part of its railway and deepened the culvert through which it had run. Both sides of the avenue had been filled with buildings, many of them standing ovef the railway tracks, and the Railway Company is now finishing the scheme by closing the bottom of the avenue with an enormous 35-storey building. The station already draws to itself more traffic than the streets around it dan hold, in spite of underground approaches which admit taxicabs to the interior of the station from a block away.

The new building will draw another increase in traffic, so a new method of dealing with it has been devised. (This needs two roadways running through the heart of the skyscraper, each as high as an ordinary four or five-storey building. Through traffic approaching down Park Avenue will thus be able to pass through this building, around the Grand Central Terminal Building on raised roadways, ,> and then, by a gradual slope to enter Park Avenue again below the station, passing over the head of two lines of cross-traffic. The new building -will stand completely over the tracks which leave the station. These are already two deep, and the steelwork on which the building will stand passes down to the rock between the lines of rails. Steel 'frames weighing hundreds of tons have been lowered into place without interfering -with the movement of the trains.

The great archways (lined with Italian marble), into which cars will enter, rise to a height of two storeys at the back of the building, and cross the roadway there on two diverging bridges, each wide enough for three cars.

The cars then pass on elevated roadways like shelves along the sides of the existing railway station, and round to the front, where the cars going down into lower Park Avenue will meet cars coming up and circling Toifnd and through the two buildings in the opposite direction. This new building is considered a triumph of modern American construction. The whole of it is supported quite clear of the ground. It stands over railway tracks which are in turn two deep, express trains running over the suburban trains. The building will stand on huge steel feet, running between the platforms and the rails to the solid rock below. Already a striking system of columns exists. The two sets of tracks and platforms were supported on columns.

Independently of these, the roadway running between the old and the now building was supported on its own columns. In order to avoid the vibration from the trains, its foundation posts are isolated from contact of any kind till they reach the rock. Everything has been cut away to give them freedom, and the braces which hold them together are’ in the form of frames which pass round the other columns. The whole building thus stands in such a way that, if a giant hand could grasp it it. could be lifted straight up in the air without interfering with anything about it. It will be crowned by a huge lantern of bronze and glass several storeys high to be illuminated at night. The city authorities were slow to consent to two New York streets running through the heart of a skyscraper, but the relief offered to the congestion round Grand Central station finally convinced them of its value.