NEW YORK SKYSCRAPERS

New Zealand Tablet, 28 April 1910, Page 653

NEW YORK SKYSCRAPERS

Mr. William Bulfin, editor and proprietor of the Buenos Aires Southern Cross, whose death was recently reported in the Tablet, spent a few weeks in New York on his last trip to Europe. He was much impressed with the many changes that had taken place in that city since his previous visit five years before. New York (he wrote) is changing, growing year by year, day by day. During the five years that have gone by since my first visit it has soared skyward some hundreds of feet and spread out for miles. New skyscrapers 'pierced the clouds and deep canyons of brick and mortar opened in bewildering vistas through the murk of the winter’s evening as our ship steamed to her berth. The spire of Trinity Church has ceased to be a feature of the scene. "We caught a glimpse of it hidden away between two immense cliffs of tawny building which overtopped it by several storeys. Amongst the monsters that have reared their heads into the clouds since my first visit the new Singer Building stands conspicuously out. It is over 600 ft high. Step off a length of 200 yards on roadway of sidewalk and imagine it standing on end straight up into the sky! It is a triumph of engineering, and it is also a triumph for two Italian masters who lived 600 years ago. One of them was Giotto di Bondone, the other Andrea Pisano. One designed the Florentine Campanile, the other finished its construction. The Singer Building is a glorified Campanile. It is very graceful and symmetrical, like the Florentine structure after which it was designed. But Giotto’s Campanile is only.27sJft high. The Singer Building is 612 ft above the sidewalk. It has no fewer than 49 storeys or floors. It has 91 acres of floor space, 15 miles of steam and water piping, and 15,000 electric lamps. But there is another Campanile higher still. It is the new Metropolitan Life Building, on Madison square. Its height above the sidewalk is 658 ft. It is not so handsome in design as the Singer tower,' but it is more imposing. The building of which it is the main feature occupies the entire block between Madison and Fourth avenues, and Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth streets. This building has a floor area of 25 acres, all told. It is all occupied by offices. The skyscraper is not a mere freak. It is born of sheer necessity. The business centre of New York is geographically circumscribed as to ground space by the water which surrounds Manhattan Island, and as the architects found no room upon which to erect new office buildings to meet an ever-increasing demand for premises they were obliged to go skyward. Hence the evolution of the skyscraper. In the ordinary course of things an average office building, erected on the site of a skyscraper, would accommodate three or four hundred people. A skyscraper accommodates as many thousand. Engineers "hold that the limit of the skyscraping building has not yet been reached. They see no mechanical difficulty in the way of running up a hundred storeys. There are two important reasons for supposing they are right ; and these are the two reasons that have made the building of 50 storeys possible. Both are mechanical. One is the system of steel cage construction. The other is the passenger elevator, which renders access to the highest floors quite easy. The steel cage construction is a great frame work of steel girders bolted together and riveted with hot rivets hammered by pneumatic strikers. The frame goes up first and the walls are put in afterwards. There are stairways, but they are rarely used. An average skyscraper has four or five elevators, and they are constantly on the run up and down. There are express elevators which go without

stopping to the upper floors,' and: then there are ‘ locals,’ which stop at ' each floor as desired. One of these colossal; office buildings is a little world in itself. It has a manager who is governor. It has its own uniformed police, and an army of sweepers and cleaners. It has also its own post office, its telephone service, its barber’s shop, restaur ant its own electric power and light plant, its own heating plant. The basement storeys of these monster buildings are filled with machinery, boilers, furniture, power, light, and heat generators; and if there is any spare room it is generally rented out as a safe deposit for valuables. In 20 or 30 seconds you can ascend by an express elevator from the basement story to the upmost floor; and here is a list of the professions, arts, crafts, trades, etc., which you may pass en route. I take it at random from two or three ascents I happened to make. First a restaurant, then a bank,-next an insurance company. Then there are several lawyers, a magazine, a weekly newspaper, various stock brokers, a tailor, a wholesale fur dealer, a doctor, a dentist, a detective agency, a piano teacher, an express agency, a lawyer again, a stenographic and typist bureau, a firm of mining engineers, a soap maker, a paper manufacturer, and an advertising agency. - : Office rent in Central New York is not charged by the set of rooms, nor by the single room. It is charged at the rate of so much per square foot. For chambers on lower floors rent runs as high as 11 dollars and 12 dollars per square foot per year. On the upper floors rents ■ run to about 2 dollars per square foot per year. At the rate of 12 dollars per square foot a room 15ft x 12ft would cost 2160 dollars per year, or 180 dollars per month. The rent includes light, heat, sweeping and cleaning, and the sex-vice of the elevator. It does not include the telephone. Roughly speaking, I should say that office rent in New York costs as much per month in gold as it costs in Buenos Aires in paper currency. »