BROADWAY, THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF BUSINESS. View from twenty-second story of building at Broadway and Pine Street, looking north." may be a failure financially without disappearing, like a mismanaged store or banking company. It will remain, bearing in its form and plan the traces of its uses, which may be finally the only remnants of the other creations of modern business enterprise, the only legible chapter of the common tale. With this in mind some men build, giving their name to what is called the monumental building; and corporations, seeking, however, the more immediate form of fame-advertisement -put up structures on a scale of expenditure that precludes the possibility of a fair, direct income in rent. The prophecy that the present will be known hereafter as the period of high building in the United States is not absurd, for while other countries have great banks and factories, department stores and hotels, none of them has "sky-scrapers." The modern high building, whether it be ugly or beautiful, whether it express pleasant or disagreeable traits and truths, is distinctively of this day and this country, and, containing all the other modes of enterprise, it is comprehensively typical. The men who are raising these new structures are rebuilding cities. That is the scheme of magnificent proportions which the broken sky-lines sketch out roughly for the imagination to fill in, and the sharp angles of the outline that offend the sense of form now give æsthetic pleasure to the mind by their suggestion of problems solved and to be solved. For mind sympathizes with the efforts of brain labor. The sudden peaks that scrape the sky are not so hideous when the complication of difficulties they overcome is realized. Then it is the gaps of blue sky between that seem unlovely; and they, too, have an appeal for toleration, since the art of high building is new and crude, and these spaces are opportunities for the builders of to-morrow to perfect the architecture of to-day. To the minds that are "rebuilding American cities" the work does not appear on the grand scale suggested by that phrase. the greater architects, spreads through the profession and meets a responsive spirit among the other callings engaged in modern construction. Heretofore the architect has not always been the master mind, and his considerations have not been the only ones that weighed. The financier, the real estate expert, the engineer, the machinist, the contractor or builder, and the business manager have all worked with the architect, and sometimes one, sometimes another, has been the predominating influence. Capital and labor have also played important parts. But capital, though an essential, is a small element, and receives little of the reward; as an investment, an office building ranks with and pays not much more than a giltedged bond. Labor is the most expensive factor, getting from eighty to ninety per cent. of the total cost of construction, but, like capital, it does none of the brainwork. And the subject of this article is the brains that go into high buildings; we have to do with capital as the financier handles it, and with labor as the contractor directs it. For the rest, our interest is in the foresight, the imagination, the thought, the originality, and the knowlREAR VIEW OF A NEIGH. edge of these and other experts in this BOR ACROSS AN AIR From roof of high build business. Originally the demand for high building at Broadway and Bowling ings presented a purely financial problem. Owners of property in the business parts of cities found they could rent more space than their buildings of two, three, and four stories contained, and they wanted new buildings of five or six stories, or addi-i tional floors above the old roof. To finance this operation was easy, and any intelligent carpenter or mason could do the job. After awhile, however, the need in the larger cities for space in the centres where business was most progressive and profitable passed beyond the capacity of the six-story buildings, and a better man than the master-mason was needed. the interest of beauty, do not often strive for unity and proportion in the completion of a block, to say nothing of a street or a district of the city they are making over. Each man builds for himself, according to his own taste; and Greek seldom meets Greek. But that is one of the problems still to be solved, and there is time yet if the willingness to co-operate, found in two or three of "Down-town," as the great city marketplaces are called, became overcrowded. It could grow and expand as a whole, but certain parts of it could not move. Some lines of business had taken possession of ground space enough to accommodate them when they settled, and others grouped themselves close around till they hemmed one another in. Then traditions and the habits of customers fixed the limits more and more definitely, making changes almost impossible. To cross a street might mean failure, and the turning of a corner would not be thought of. The wholesale dry-goods firms of New York succeeded in getting out of Cedar, William, and Pine Streets, but it was done with fear and trembling after years of hesitation, and nobody was certain for many months after the moving that a fatal mistake had not been made. Every effort of the jewellers of Maiden Lane to leave their street has been unsuccessful. Their rent is high, the location is not convenient, and other businesses would pay well to be so near the financial centre, but the jewellers are afraid their customers would not find them elsewhere than in Maiden Lane, and that street as an address is invaluable to the firm that writes to the country with it on its letter-head. Then, for a last example, there is "Wall Street; " how far can the stock-brokers go from Wall Street? Confined on all sides round, the only way out was up. Limited as to the ground, business sought the air. It had to be done; but how? That was the question. To pile more stories on the sixth was useless, since no one would climb up to them; the young brokers and lawyers might be willing to do it, but their customers would not follow. The problem became mechanical, and the financier and the architect were as helpless as the mason. The passenger elevator was the solution. It was a clumsy hoist moved by a handwindlass when inventive genius began to study its possibilities, and no one could have foreseen in any of its earlier forms that it was to be to modern building what the steam-engine is to transportation, a rev successfully, and now there are several systems that satisfy all the requirements of the highest buildings and the most impatient of human beings. With the elevator, long before it was perfected, rose all that made the problem of high building high rents, high prices for ground space, and high hopes. There was great risk in the first application of the elevator to the office building, but it is capital that is timid, not the financiers, the brains that handle it; they are cautious, but daring. They saw that the new device for lifting passengers to the unbuilt upper stories brought the unclaimed space above the costly ground within easy reach, but no one could foresee how the tenants and their customers would take this mode of transit, nor was there any basis for estimating the rents that would be paid. The whole financial question rested on these unknown elements. THE ROOF-HOUSE, 290 FEET HIGH, WHERE THE JANITOR BRINGS UP HIS FAMILY. Broadway and Bowling Green. THE HEAD-PORTER, SOME TIME JANITOR. olutionary agent. Steam-power was applied to it in 1866. The result was an apparatus with so many faults that it presented clearly all the necessities for success. It was slow, jerky, and dangerous. To overcome these defects the experimenters turned to hydraulic power, in the water-balance elevator. A car was carried up by the weight of a water-vessel filled at the top of the shaft, and was let down by emptying the water at the bottom. Speed and smoothness of motion were thus secured, but the control was doubtful, and though the accidents that occurred were not fatal, they were wet and disagreeable. Absolute safety was first achieved in the directacting ram hydraulic elevators; but they, too, were slow and, for high structures, impracticable, since the cylinder had to be sunk as deep below ground as the shaft rose high above it. Having safety, however, the makers clung to the hydraulic power till they eliminated one by one all the defects of their machine. Mean while electricity was applied The prices charged for a given space in one of the earliest buildings called high in New York will show how speculative and how far astray were the first reckonings on the effect of the elevator. The building was finished in 1868, and the manager let a suite on the top floor for $850 a year. He raised the rent the next year to $1,250, and, thinking the limit reached in that figure, signed a contract for a five-year lease. Bound by his agreement, he had to refuse offers rising gradually to $4,500, which he got readily at the end of the sixth year. People became accustomed to the elevator as their |