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LOWER BROADWAY, NEAR TRINITY CHURCH.

Looking north, on Sunday, when downtown is supposed to be deserted. There is a population, unnoticed on the busy week days, that keeps the streets always alive. It is made up of employees of high buildings.

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This one is in a comparatively old building and has paid well without suggesting imitation in other buildings till now, when several proposed structures are to have them. They are popu lar and profitable in many European cities, and in high buildings here are the shopping quarters for the tenants and their customers.

fathers did to the steam-cars, and now the top stories of high buildings bring in more rent than the middle floors. There are men called "high livers" who will not have an office unless it is up where the air is cool and fresh, the outlook broad and beautiful, and where there is silence in the heart of business.

The first builders, trusting that something like this would come to pass, drew the elevator shaft in their plans, and put up eightstory buildings regardless of the gasping scepticism of the crowd. On every trip of

the car was an unseen passenger, the value of property in the financial and other centres where the commercial fight was thickest. A lot that was worth forty dollars a square foot rose to fifty, sixty, seventy-five dollars, and owners of low buildings in good locations found themselves receiving an income, fair for half a million, on what was worth a million. They were tempted to sell or rebuild. Those who could afford it held on for a further rise, encouraged by the slower but equally certain advance of rents. Many sold, however, and the new owners had bought to make the property pay, or, if they sought primarily a permanent location for their business, they listened to proposals to improve the property into an independent paying invest

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ment.

This was the financial problem,

and it is the same to-day that it was twenty years ago, and it will be the same twenty years hence. In general terms its purpose is to make a good security also a good investment; to buy something that has a value above its earning powers because it is firstclass security for a loan, like a government. bond, and is in demand as a perfectly safe investment for trust funds, and then try to make it pay as a business enterprise. In most of our greater cities a man can borrow money at nearly as low a rate on real estate in the financial centres as he can on high

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THE RUGGED SKY-LINE OF LOWER NEW YORK FROM THE JERSEY SHORE AT NIGHT.

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class bonds, and the difference is disappearing. The bonds have the advantage of their divisibility; the holder of a million dollars' worth can hypothecate them in any number of parcels at even rates, while the owner of a piece of real estate of equal value has to put a mortgage on the whole to secure a loan however small, and the first lien lowers the value of all subsequent mortgages. To obviate this difficulty, companies are incorporating to fund real estate so that its value can be handled in the form of stocks and bonds, just as the securities of railroads and manufacturing companies are handled in the financial markets.

Thus stated, the financial aspect of the high-building problem may look like another perpetual motion quest. But the financiers, fortunately, do not take that view of it, and their approximations to the solution have been productive at every step. They began the rebuilding of cities the moment the elevator led the way, exercising little mental power in exact calculation, but showing all the more courage and experimental curiosity. Perhaps there was some recklessness in the first ventures. They spent large sums of money, and could

not tell whether they would get back any fair portion of it. It has been said that the earliest builders were corporations, the custodians of other people's money; but the exceptions where individuals, however few, entered the field, some in New York and many in Chicago, indicate that it was a natural, general movement, caused by the chase of brains after the rent-ridden rise of real estate values.

In Chicago the great fire of 1871 forced property-owners to reconstruct from the ground up. Having had some experience with values that outstripped the capacity of their old buildings, they rebuilt either temporarily or as permanently as they knew how. They meant to erect structures so cheap that they could be torn down without much loss, or so high that they would be up at any height to which land values might ever rise. They did not build quite as wisely as they thought, it turned out, but they found out how to do it, and as the demand continued to grow, and architects kept on building, the Chicago builders long held their lead in the solution of the structural problems.

The first "high" buildings, which were from eight to eleven stories high, served only to increase the demand for higher

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construction, for values kept pace with their growth and the elevator did not stop. It could go on up to any height, and the success of these buildings proved conclusively that tenants would not balk. The financial outlook was clear, but capital waited on the ingenuity of the builders.

From 1865 up to about 1875 the architects planned for solid masonry walls and heavy beams and pillars. The walls carried the weight of the floors and supported themselves. With each additional story, therefore, the walls at their base had

to go higher with the solid masonry method was to lose more income at the bottom than was won at the top. Adding the everincreasing cost of the foundation and the walls, the financiers saw that their upward course was coming to an end; the beckoning elevator, with its load of rents, had to be disregarded.

There was no time, of course, when either financiers or architects confessed that progress was checked. Nor did the problem set forth here ever appear with the definiteness that it has in the retrospect.

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ENGINE AND DYNAMO-ROOM IN THE BASEMENT; TO THE COMFORTABLE TENANT A SECRET SERVICE.

to be increased in thickness and strength, so that as the demand for height grew and was satisfied, the lower structure became more and more bulky and costly. The material that went into these sustaining parts was enormous in amount and expensive in quality. It is estimated that the material in a certain high building, erected in 1869, would supply masonry for six modern buildings of its size.

Then, too, most of the high buildings were put up in the streets where ground space was so valuable that even rich men and large corporations could not afford to have very much of it, and one lot or two was so small a space that the thickness of the fattening walls cut appreciably into the rentable room. There came a time when

Men were working on particular buildings; they were studying out devices to overcome the minor difficulties that beset them, and they made progress slowly, step by step. They began early to use metal, for instance. Probably there is not a building anywhere that rises eight stories without cast-iron or steel somewhere in its frame. It was applied as floor beams, as pillars, later for all interior columns, and by and by was recognized as the key to the building problem. But it was new to architects as a means, and was not the material contemplated in the art they had studied; hence they hesitated.

Another expert was needed, if the art of building was to go on supplying the insatiable demands of the real estate market

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