SKYSCRAPERS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 3584, 9 March 1914, Page 2

SKYSCRAPERS.

THEIR GRACE AND BEAUTY

A CITY UNDER ONE ROOF. The. Pan-American Association are considering plans for the erection of the tallest building in the world on Broadway, New York, It will be called “Las Americas/’ bo SOI feet high, and will cost £3,700,000 In commenting upon this news item. Twells Brex, in the “Daily Mail,” observes that all who have visited New York will agree that their secondhand prejudices against the American skyscraper were changed into wonder at the majesty of those monstrous piles tliat have superimposed four or five ordinary cities on the narrow island of Manhattan. They must have dreamt that London, too, will sonio day realise the economy of concentration, and that the returned exile, standing on Waterloo Bridge, will lie astonished by vast and turreted waifs towering over the squat roofs of pres-ent-day London, humbling our now highest buildings to the lowliness of shacks.

One assumes that the chief objection to the skyscraper is not so much against itself as against the incongruity with lowlier neighbors. Perhaps any skyscraper —unless it be such an inspiration as New York’s Wool worth Tower —is unlovely if stands alone in an undergrowth of five-storey buildings. But when an old building comes down on the priceless space of Lower Manhattan a mammoth building goes up a 4 .a matter of < nurse. The steel and stone giants are no longer nakedly alone. They cluster in kingly groups and line whole streets like ha.ls of the Nibelungs. No one who has seen them —like a serrated coast ifisell —from hi s approarumg Atlantic liner, wandered under the .amazing walls, or travelled by their bits to tlie.r atria, summits will call tin’s hyperbolic. No single unit of man’s audacity and skill, the leviathan ship, the Nile dam. the Simplon tunnel, is more triumphantly self-complete and self-justified than the beautiful Woolwortli Tower, with its flying buttresses, its gißt ouch oil roof, its spire of crocheted gold, its white uplift by day, and its sky beacon by night. It captures your imagination when you see it from afar it draws you again and again while you remain, it is your abiding memory and svmbol of New York.

THE WOOL WORTH TOWER. The conception of a New York skyscraper is often of a stark rectangle rearing up in unbroken lines, almost showing its geometrical steel ribs under a lean flesh of unrelieved stone. There are enough of such buildings in New York, but they were only the raw beginnings out of which have evolved the Metropolitan Tower, the astounding massivity of the Plaza Hotel, the giant horse-shoe of the new civic buildings, the Bankers' Trust Bunding, with its airborne pilasters and pyramidical roof, the Candler Budding. rocketing above Times Square at night in lines and cornice* of fire, the cloud-aspiring Singer Budding, and—last of ad, until the next daring—• tin’s Woolwortli Tower, the highest inhabited building in the world, seven hundred and eighty feet in all. whose summit I have known literally hidden in October storm-scud. And they are towns in themselves, these New York office buildings, housing two, five, and ten thousand people under one roof. Their vast height is often based on a whole city block. They have within them the organisation of a munieipality, their own electric light, water, and power plants, and a fire-fightin equipment that, is almost a superrogation, because they are as nearly fire-proof as the wit of mail can make them. In the whole of the Woolwortli Building there is no wood work. The door* and partitions are of steel, terracotta and wire-glass. The frame of the building is a gigantic and homogeneous ste.*l cage, the beautiful walls and ornaments are laid on as a skin. Beams and ceiling arches are of steel, floors are concrete, stairway* are stone or metal. The fiercest blizzard of New York’s harsh winter would not sliake the skyscraper by a ’tremor, for it has boon built to stand the impossible pressure of a wind of two hundred and fifty miles an hour. Whatever you may think of their external artistry you cannot fail to be conquered by the internal complexity, efficiency, and completeness of these commercial palaces of New \ork. B lias been truly vaunted that a tenant need not go from under his own root for almost any cilivised want. He lias, of ciyirso, the enviably competent telephone service of New York, and he can mail his letters in a chute on his floor. Ho has a pest and telegraph office, a restaurant, a bank, an insurance office, a safe deposit, and even his own uniformed police. He can visit his physician, lawyer, tailor, broker, tobaconist, barber, and shoeblack. He can buy papers, books, stationery, theatre tickets, hoisery, hats, fruit, flowers and eandie s without passing his main entrance.

IMPOSING FIGURES. Some of these • hu”d;n<rs or.open clay and night, the cost of maintenance costing alone £20,000 a year, and the one item of water sypiy £IOOO. The Wool worth Building has 40 acres of floor space, 3000 exterior windows. SR,OOO electric light, and 28 lifts. Twenty-four thousand tons of steel wont into the construction, 17,000.000 bricks, 87 miles of electric wiring, and 43 miles of piping. These arc hut' figures, and no figures can so touch the imagination as an ascent to the top v»t New York s latest and greatest skyscraper. Tt holds thousands of citizens who pass their work-a-dav hours on all its fifty-five storeys—people who sit at their desks and nil heed by familiarity the most astonishing city view of the world. And the view from that high-borne ovrio hangs for ever afterward in the memory like .a great picture in a gallery.