THE SKYSCRAPER.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XLVI, Issue XLVI, 21 October 1911, Page 6

THE SKYSCRAPER.

That much* abused American development, the -"" skyscraper," is the ■abject of an informative and sympa- \ thetic article in' the "World's •"Wbrk. ,, To the writer, -who is e'vir dently thoroughly well acquainted with his subject, the "skyscraper" is. not a thing to be deplored. It has been rendered necessary by certain conditions, and it ha s a beauty of its own, as the fite illustrations by Mr Joseph* Pennejl show. To illustrate the convenience of these huge build. ' ings that house the population of a town, he states that if a tenant in the Xew Hudson buildings in New STork decided, to build a railway, he .. riight personally attend to every de ; tail of the enterprise without putting r.n bis bat; for among his fellow tenants are firms dealing with the man> things wanted for a railway, from ballast and rails to coal and signals. The elevator is. the factor that limits the height of, the '* ' skyscraper. ; ' Ar_* chitects are quite ready to plai. safe /buildings much higher than those is existence, but the higher the. building the more the space that must- be given . iu> to -elevators, and the less that is available :for letting to tenants. The «levator space iri- the lofty Singer tswer is astonishingly large., . The ■problem of moving the population of these enormous buildings is much more difficult than one would think. Eight htfndred people live in the Singer tower,, exclusive of the great building below, and thereare 11,000 in -the Hudson Terminal b:Vldings. It is obvious that to devise a system to carry these people up and down quiekxlv requires a good deal of careful planning. "!Por instance, in a certain building it would take 20 elevators 30 minutes to take'the 2400 people out to lunch, assuming that they lunched at the same time. In some buildings it would take twtce as long. In a Chicago building it was found necessary to arrange with the tenants to dismiss their employees af differ, ent hours, so as to avoid crowding on the elevators, and it was found that in a New York, skyscraper it would take the elevators an hour and a half to get everyone out of the building ia case of panic. Tenants insist on a good elevator service, so if the height of towers like -the Singer structure is> greatly increased, most of the floor snace will have fo be devoted to elevator wells. -