A CITY OF SKYSCRAPERS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVLI, Issue 12, 20 September 1911, Page 33

A CITY OF SKYSCRAPERS.

Dangers that New Zealand Ought to Recognise in Time.

Bi)

EDGAR ALLEN FORBES.

HEN a long-headed Dutchman ? ■ I established the first realty (IjL values in New York, by the purchase of all Manhattan for basketful of trinkets, he got it cheap cause it was an island. And, for the iv reason that old Peter Minilit . uight it cheap, you may to-day be reived to pay £5O a square foot for its of it that are fertile enough to : oduce office-buildings. A little of it is id to have sold as high as 17/- a • ,uare inch, which has made many a \pw Yorker use Bill Nye’s reproachful .ords to his ancestors: “Where were \ .ii when they were selling New York f r £5?” The soaring value of land made the soaring office-building inevitable, for the skyscraper is nothing more than an attempt to meeet an economic condition —the limited use of space. The owner builds skyward to secure enough rentable floor space to make the land pay. But, in doing so, he scatters new economic conditions throughout the whole block, and these conditions produce other skyscrapers, one after another. in an endless chain. This is the way it works: A very rich man owns a corner lot in lower New Yoik. on which is a six-storey officebuilding. similar to those of his neighbours. It is fully occupied, but it does not bring in the money fast enough. One day the Great Idea flashes over him, and he hastens to his lawyers. They till him that “the law of ancient lights’' does not apply to anything this side of the Atlantic Ocean—nor the law of honourable breathing. He owns everything above his corner as far up as the blue skv, and half way to China in the other direction. There follows an anxious hour with his bankers, and then the architect is summoned. The outcome is a portfolio of blue-prints and figures, followed by a 12-storey officebuilding with an elevator, a switchboard, and “all modern appointments.” The result is that the occupants of the old buildings come like rats from a sinking ship, and engage all the new offices at high rentals before the roof is in place. Nobody likes to climb stairand everybody likes the mountain fop. There it stands, then—the

first skyscraper—a monument to business sagacity. On the heels of the unexpected follows the inevitable. Owner No. 2 sees that his building now looks like a dogkennel beside the new one. The taxable value of his lot has shot upward, but the productive value of bis building in rentals has gone the other way. He must raise the money for a new building that will meet the competition of No. 1. While he is -about it. he may as well go on up to twenty stories, and beat No. 1 at his own game. But in getting even with No. 1. the second builder has “put No. 3 in a bole.”

No. 3 also has a great head for business. He makes a combination with Nos. 4 and 5; they form a corporation to build a 30-storey pile that shall make the first two look like relies of the old Amsterdam regime. When the final plans are filed, it is discovered that they have bought up the whole block secretly, and their new skyscraper will run up behind Nos. 1 and 2 ami shut off the light and air from the rear as well as from one side. No. 1 decides to effect a combination with No. 2 and run up still higher, but hi' learns to his consternation that the corporation took the precaution quietly to lease No. 2 for a

penou or ninety-nine years, of course the land value of the leased propertv takes another jump, but the owner has tied his hands and those of liis son and his grandson. He must pay the penaltv of allowing himself to Is- eaught asleep. Now . w hen they are all done building, what is the net result in the block"’ Every owner has increased his rentable floor area ami his gross revenues. Likewise land values have gone up. and with them taxes, interest on the investment, and cost of maintenance. The first builders are still, as before they built, struggling to make the land par. And

you may find whole blocks of skvscrapers in New York where this struggle for existence is going on. Rut high land values and restricted space are not alone responsible for the tall buildings, Chicago ami St. Louis ami Seattle ami Houston and Atlanta are not islands, but the modern office budding is there. There is sueh a luxury and convenience about this product of necessity that a business man WIIO gets the skyscraper habit does not feel comfortable in any other kind of ■l'l office. There is also the pleasure of having l„s out-of-town customers find him m an ollie,, palace, and it helps his business. He finds it advantageous to nrnef in the corridors man, of the men With whom he does business, and to make the ae,pia intaiiee of iminv others who are potential customers. •lust to see how far this business convenience has already worked out. an >x'lii>'l'- nt the „ew Hudson '■ """I'l Buildings. The agent brom.l,t "" Ins ..ard-eatalogue to discover what • "‘"""t ""ght do if he should decide to build a railroad in a burn-. If was found that he might attend personally to ever, detail without even „itting on his hat. Among his fellow tenants are consulting, contracting, electrical. and mechanical engineers. pany could supply the crushed stone for ballast ; another had materials for all the concrete work: and a third would provide all the masonry. Tin* rails and the bridges could be ordered in the build in«r from dealers in structural steel. \ locomotive company could furnish the steam locomotives, while every kind of electric motor might he secured at th:* floors occupied by an electric company. From another office could he selected (‘very kind of car and coach that a rail road could require. And half a dozen other tenants could take orders for such accessories as switches and signals, couplings and trucks, eastings and meta! work, lamps and lanterns. Finally, a big coal company could provide the fuel, and one of the largest paint companies in the world could (ill even a railroad’s order for varnish and oil and paint. But neither business convenience such as this nor the high value of land accounts for the most recent and most conspicuous form of skyscraper—the tower building. While the otlice buildings of lower Manhattan were climbing steadily and gracefully higher, one of them sud-

denly -hot upward in a tall and beautiful tower to the height of l»l2ft. a jump to forty-odd Mories. While the ripples of excitement *et in motion by tin* Singer Building were still circling in distant parts of the world, the architect of the Metropolitan Building started new ripples by announcing that hi> tower would be 700 feet high—high enough to look down upon everything in New York except the smoko. And it was so. And now conies Mr. ('as* Gillwrt with a set of plans which he asks the Building Department to approve in order that he may erect near the New Post (Mime a building for Mr. Woolworth that will lift its stately head above both the Singer and the Metropolitan. Before the exact height is yet authoritatively announced, the caissons are boring down to bed-rock. The one thing that is cer-

Looking up Liberty Street toward the Singer tower. Typical of the streets of the financial district, into which Hie high buildings pour thousands of pie every noon ami evening.

tain about the new Woolworth Building is that it will go up higher than any other ha- gone. Equally certain is it that somebody else will come along and climb higher yet. These three sky-piercing tower buildings represent a new motive in lofty building—they are advertising buildings. Jt is not necessary that they return tinhighest yield as building investments.

i"r the publicity value i- worth something to the corporations whose names they bear. Consider for a moment how far you would have to travel in order to reach a place where the name of the Singer Building is unknown. A Iret was om-e made that a letter addressed simply to the building might be posted anvwhere on earth and yet reach its destination. At a remote point in the interior

of ( hina -ucli a letter was posted. On tiie envelope was a man’s name and the address ‘Singer Building.” The man got the letter safely and promptly. Considering only how high a building may be carried without fear of its top pl-ing over, there is really no limit which may be fixed for its height. Nor will the mechanics of the elevator set such a limit, for the engineer is ready to run

his traction ear as far toward heaven as the builder will carry his dome. Nor do the building laws of' New York limit the height, however much they mav hamper the architect in other ways. But all the skill of the architect ami of the en gineer cannot overcome certain economic

limitations that are fixed as the law of gravitation. However high some eeeen trie advertising building may go. the average ofliee building will hug the lower levels for the simple reason that it does not pay to go too high. And the in significant elevator is the factor that will

keep them close to earth—not the mechanical difficulty of climbing, but the proportion of floor space that the elevator batchways take up.

Everybody ktiows that the actual physical building of a sk.x -er.iper G itself a work that ealls for the highest engineering skill. In a sense, it is a steel

bridge standing on end. with electric car- running up and down on the inside. But tlie bridge-builder van support his bridge at -vxvral point-. wherea- the sky - -■ raj»er mu-t ':** -upftorted from one end only. Thi- part of the work alone calltor a sort of mining engineering, supplemented by the <-ai—<»n work of the tunnel engineer. Ihe foundation- of the New Wool worth Building, for in-tancv. are now going down to a depth of 130 feet berau-e of the necessity of reaching L*droek. But suppose there were no liedk. Very well: the architect ha- other wa\- ( »f meeting the diiliciilt} . lie hal.uilt his -ky-.raper- in Chicago, which re-i- upon a -übsiirfave of tioating mud. In that ity he has even worked out a successful plan whereby steel jacks ar*' built into the foundations of a tall building. so that if it settle- unevenly the whole corner of the building may be jacked up to the required degree. I he observer who -tan 1- on the street and marvels at the -kill and sj»eed which mark sky-cra|»vr construction is not see ing the work of the architect at all: that is mereh the work of the contractor. I‘he most marvellou- thing about a tall building is that it has been made in million- of pieces in different parts of the world, and yet. when the pieces are brought together. they all tit! Every detail of the building mu-t be visible to the architect'- eye before a -top is taken. Every detail ha- its blue print, with the measurement- worked to 1-ltith of an inch. Look at one of these drawings and \ou will -ee that every rivet hole has been accurately placed: the foundry takes the blue print and turn- out a piece of steel according to the pattern: and the builder looks at the blue print and know- exactly where to place the In other words, the architect carefully calculates the maximum "load” of every girder in the building before the -pecitications are made out.

Ami there are other things that mu-, be weighed with accuracy at the same t ime. A -kxscraper ha- an immense surface. and an ordinal'}' wind bloxving against it would overbalance it if the architect had left that out of his calculation. He mu-t make provision for more than the ordinary wind, however: he mu-t know how many tons of pre---ure would l>e exerted by the strongest gale that New York is likely to have: and he must know the direction from which it ••onies. Wind-pressure exerts an upward pull, which presses downward

with the -aim* force on the opposite side, and the direction as well as the weight of tiii- force must be definitely known. When Mr Leßrun figured out the total weight of the Metropolitan Tower as approximately is million pounds, he calculated the normal weight on the corner steel columns as 7.5 million pounds. But if he had proceeded to build on that calculation, the tower would have fallen long ago: the wind-pressure alone makes an additional load of 2.9 million pounds on that corner column. Continue thi- prove--, and you may

see what the future New York will l>e. unless a halt is called by somebody. ■ 1 • It will be a collection of towns and villages under separate roofs—half a dozen towns to a block. Each will be more or less complete unto itself, with its superintendent as a sort of mayor and its attendants as police. Its elevators will be street railways running perpendicularly. This is not fanciful. The Hudson Terminal Buildings now make a fairly complete city with a population of about 11.000, and the Singer Tower alone is a village of about SOO. i2» The streets of the lower city will

have i>e...me canyons of a depth varying from 200 to 400 feet, through which the wind will sweep in gales like those that play about the Flatiron Building. Most ..f these ■ anyoiis will be gloomy, for many of these downtown streets are so narrow that a broken-down truck al-m.-t blocks the traffic of an entire street. They were laid out by forefathers as shortsighted as ourselves. 31 The sky will be practically blotted out from the vision of this downtown city. It will lie a city of electric lights on the brightest days, with sufficient daylight only in -mall sections of each building. The business men will come downtown in a subway that deposits him in the basement of his building. He will a- end to an otli.-e artificially lighted. He will lunch in a restauratit in the same building, and walk lif he does walk I in a canyon where the sunlight never reaches him. And he will take the subway for home, perhaps, without having seen the sky at all.

(4) The bay and the two rivers will be visible only from offices in the loftiest buildings and from those near the waterside, for the water-front skyscrapers will go as high as any. The skyline will not materially change from its present ragged silhouette. The relative proportion of very high towers will probably not increase.

(5) The city will be a conglomerate mass of the finest architecture in the world—most of it calling for open spaces io disclose its beauty—all piled together without any comprehensive plan. In no other place of equal area will bo found so much expensive architecture, yet every new builder will be subordinating the work of his neighbours instead of using it to increase the effect of his own.

This Is not prophecy. Tills is what is happening every working day. And it does not seem to occur to the builders that the greatest city on the continent ought to have some plan of co-ordination, of conservation, and of protection against the aggressive and the mean.