HUGE BUILDINGS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16320, 8 January 1921, Page 8

HUGE BUILDINGS.

MEW YORK’S SKYSCRAPER QUARTER.

“ Fifteen thousand clerks in a single building! Surely that must bo a ■misprint P ’ ’ The traveller in the train repeated these figures ■with an incredulous air. He was quoting from the description of the “ skyscraper quarter ” of New York, in the middle of which the disastrous explosion took place, when twenty-six people were killed and nearly 200 injured'. But there was no misprint. These gigantic buildings, rising for hundreds of feet above the level of the street, hold, in business hours, populations equalling those of good-sized towns. It is the Equitable Building which was referred to as having accommodation for Id,ooo persons, but there are several other buildings in New York City which have only slightly smaller populations. The Woolworth Building, coded, from its Gothic architecture. the Cathedral of Commerce,” is nearly 800 ft high and over 10.000 people can be found working in it at once. The Metropolitan Building houses the 6000 members of the staff of the Metropolitan Fife Insurance Company, a big bank, and numbers of smaller offices. There are many others on this scale On the 39th floor of the Equitable Building is a club, the Bankers’. reputed to be the “ highest ” club in the world, which has a number of lofty and statelv rooms hundreds of feet in the air. where several hundred business men sit down to luncheon every day. After their meal members can ascend to the roof and take their fill of tho exhilarating upper air. The higher storeys of these great buildings are reached by “express lifts, which stop only at each 20th floor or thereabouts. The Bankers’ Club has a non-stop “ elevator ” to itseH. The sensation of going up and up and up for what seems an interminable period is uncanny. Coming down is equally extraordinaiy in a different way. Tho pressure o c air in the lift increases so much towards the bottom ot the shaft that a sort of momentary deafness is caused, and you .have to “ clear ” your ears by swallowing hard. The ground floor? of most skyscrapers resemble arcade-?. Each building has its set of shops of all kinds. Tho Hudson Terminal Building in Church Street has a complete outfit of 6hops. like a am all town, on the street ievel inside the building and in the basements, while lower still are platforms of the tube railways which go under the Hudson "River, from which the building takes its name. It ir, an extraordinary experience to look at, say, the Woolworth Building for tho first half-dozen times- You wonder liow a mere human being could ever have even dared to contemplate building to such a height. This building has fifty-seven storeys. As soon ae labour and building conditions admit work will be begun in New York on two skyscrapers of seventy storeys each !