of a skyscraper. This skyscraper is the new Municipal Building. It is
just behind the tree-filled park in which stands New York's oldest bit
of successful architecture--its venerable City Hall. A long time before
New York dreamed that she might become the City of the Towers they
builded this old City Hall--upon what was then the northerly edge of the
town. So sure were those old fellows that New York would never grow
north of their fine town hall that they grew suddenly economical--the
spirit of their Dutch forbears still dominated them--and builded the
north wall of Virginia freestone instead of the white marble that was
used for the facings of the other walls.
"No one will ever see that side of the building," they argued. "We might
as well use cheap stone for that wall."
Today more than ninety-nine per cent. of the population of the immensely
populated island of Manhattan lives north of the City Hall. That cheap
north wall, hidden under countless coats of white paint, is the one
acute reminder of the days that were when the Hall was new--when the
gentle square in which it stood was surrounded by the suburban
residences of prosperous New Yorkers and when the waters of the Collect
Pond--where the New York boys use to skate in the bitterness of
old-fashioned winters--lapped its northerly edge. There was no ugly
Court House or even uglier Post Office to block the view from the
Mayor's office up and down Broadway. New Yorkers were proud of their
City Hall then--and good cause had they for their pride. It is one of
the best bits of architecture in all America. And an even century of
hard usage and countless "restorations" has only brought to it the charm
of serene old age.
But the City Hall long since was outgrown. The municipal government of
New York is a vast and somewhat unwieldy machine that can hardly be
housed within a dozen giant structures. To provide offices for the
greater part of the city's official machinery, this towering Municipal
Building has just been erected. And because it is so typical of the best
form of the so-called skyscraper architecture, let us stop and take a
look at it, listen to the story of its construction. In appearance the
new Municipal Building is a gray-stone tower twenty-five stories in
height and surmounted by a tower cupola an additional fifteen stories in
height. In plan the structure is a sort of semi-octagon--a very shallow
letter "U," if you please. But its most unusual feature comes from the
fact that it squarely spans one of the busiest crosstown highways in the
lower part of the city--Chambers street. The absorption of that busy
thoroughfare is recognized by a great depressed bay upon the west
front--the main _façade_ of the building. And incidentally that
depressed bay makes interior courts within the structure absolutely
unnecessary. So much for the architectural features, severe in its
detail, save for some ornate and not entirely pleasing sculptures. You
are interested in knowing how one of these giants--so typical of the new
New York--are fabricated.
This young man--hardly a dozen years out of a big technical school--can
tell you. He has supervised the job. Sometimes he has slept on it--in a
narrow cot in the temporary draughting-house. He knows its every detail,
as he knows the fingers of his hands.
"Just remember that we began by planning a railroad station in the
basement with eight platform tracks for loading and unloading
passengers."
"A railroad station?" you interrupt.
"Certainly," is his decisive reply. "Downstairs we will soon have the
most important terminal of a brand new subway system crossing the
Manhattan and the Williamsburgh bridges and reaching over Brooklyn like
a giant gridiron."
He goes on to the next matter--this one settled.
"There was something more than that. We had to plant on that cellar a
building towering forty stories in the air; its steel frame alone
weighing twenty-six thousand tons--more than half the weight of the
heaviest steel cantilever bridge in America--had to be firmly set."
The young engineer explains--in some detail. To find a foothold for this
building was no sinecure. Tests with the diamond drill had shown that
solid rock rested at a depth of 145 feet below street level at the south
end of the plat. At the north end, the rock sloped away rapidly and so
that part of the building rests upon compact sand. The rock topography
of Manhattan island is uncertain. There are broad areas where solid
gneiss crops close to the street level, others where it falls a hundred
feet or more below water level. There is a hidden valley at Broadway and
Reade street, a deep bowl farther up Broadway. Similarly, the north
extremity of the Municipal Building rests upon the edge of still another
granite bowl--the sub-surface of that same Collect Pond upon which the
New York boys used to skate a century or more ago.
"That bothered some folks at first," laughs the engineer, "but we met it
by sinking the caissons. We've more than a hundred piers down under this
structure hanging on to Mother Earth. You don't realize the holding
force of those piers," he continues. He turns quickly and points to a
fourteen story building off over the trees of City Hall park. Out in one
of the good-sized towns of the Middle West people would gasp a little at
sight of it--in New York it is no longer even a tower.
"Turn that fellow right upside down into the hole we dug for this
building," says the engineer, "and the rim of his uppermost cornice
would about reach the feet of our own little forest of buried concrete
piers."
That was one detail of the construction of the building. Here is
another; the first six stories of the new structure involved elaborate
masonry, giant stones, much carved. From the seventh story the plain
walls of the exterior developing into an elaborate cornice were of
simple construction. If the setting of these upper floors had waited
until the first six stories of elaborate stonework had been made ready
there would have been a delay of months in the construction work. So the
contractor began building the walls--which in the modern steel
skyscraper as you know form no part of the real structure but act rather
as a stone envelope to keep out hard weather--from the seventh story
upward. Eventually the masons working on the first six stories, working
upwards all the time, reached and joined the lower edge of the masonry
that had been set some weeks before. Time had been saved and you know
that time _does_ count in New York. Remember the Wall street man who
preferred to have his ribs crushed and his hat smashed down over his
nose in the subway rather than lose ten minutes each day in the
elevated.
Now you stand with the young engineer at the topmost outlook of the
tower in the Municipal Building and look down on the busy town. Before
you is that mighty thoroughfare, Broadway--but so lined with towering
buildings that you cannot see it, save for a brief space as it passes
the greenery of the City Hall Park; behind you is that still mightier
highway--the East river. Over that river you see the four bridges--the
oldest of them landing at your very feet--and crawling things upon them,
which a second glance shows to be trains and trolley-cars and
automobiles and wagons in an unending succession. Beyond the East river
and its bridges--the last of these far to the north and barely
discernible--is Brooklyn, and beyond Brooklyn--this time to the
south--is a shimmering slender horizon of silver that the man beside you
tells you is the ocean.
You let your gaze come back to the wonderful view which the building
squarely faces. You look down upon the towers of New York--big towers
and little towers--and you lift your eyes over the dingy mansard of the
old Post Office and see the greatest of all the towers--the creamy white
structure that a man has builded from his profits in the business of
selling small articles at five and ten cents apiece. It is fifty-five
stories in height--exquisitely beautiful in detail--and the owner will
possess for a little time at least, the highest building in the world.
You can see the towers in every vista, puffing little clouds of white
smoke into the purest blue air that God ever gave a city in which to
spin her fabrications. To the north, the south, the west, they show
themselves in every infinite variety and here and there between them
emerge up-shouldering rivals, steel-naked in their gaunt frames. If your
ears are keen and the wind be favorable perhaps you can hear the clatter
of the riveters and you can see over there the housesmiths riding aloft
on the swinging girders with an utter and immensely professional
indifference, threading the slender, dizzy floor-girders as easily as a
cat might tread the narrow edge of a backyard fence.
Off with your gaze again. Look uptown, catch the faint patch of dark
green that is Central Park, the spires of the cathedral, the wonderful
campanile at Madison square. Let your glance swing across the gentle
Hudson, over into a New Jersey that is bounded by the ridges of the
Orange mountains, then slowly south and even the great towers that
thrust themselves into almost every buildable foot of Broadway below the
City Hall cannot entirely block your view of the wonderful upper harbor
of New York--of the great ships that bring to an imperial city the
tribute that is rightfully hers.
Now let your vision drop into the near foreground--into the tracery of
trees about the jewel-box of a City Hall. Let it pause for a moment in
the broad-paved street at your feet with the queer little openings
through which humans are sweeping like a black stream into a funnel;
others from which the human streams come crawling upward like black
molasses and you are again reminded that some of the greatest highways
of New York are those that are subterranean and unseen. The sidewalks
grow a little blacker than before.
"It's lunch-time," laughs the young engineer.
Bless you, it is. The morning that you gave to one of the most typical
of the towers has not been ill-spent.
III
Thirty minutes before the big bell of Trinity spire booms out noon-tide
New York's busiest grub-time begins. A few early-breakfasting clerks and
office-boys begin to find their way toward the shrines of the
coffee-urns and the heaped-up piles of sandwiches.
[Illustration: The view of New York from the lunch club in the
skyscraper]
Of course, in New York breakfast is an almost endless affair--generally
a fearfully hurried one. But lunch is far more serious. Lunch is almost
an institution. Fifteen minutes after it is fairly begun it is gaining
rapid headway. Thin trails of stenographers and clerks are finding their
ways, lunch-bound, through the canyon-like streets of lower Manhattan,
streams that momentarily increase in volume. By the time that Trinity
finally booms its twelve stout strokes down into Broadway there is
congestion upon the sidewalks--the favorite stools at the counters, the
better tables in the higher-priced places are being rapidly filled. At
twelve-thirty it begins to be luck to get any sort of accommodations at
the really popular places; before one o'clock the intensity of grubbing
verges on panic and pandemonium. And at a little before three cashiers
are totaling their receipts, cooks, donning their hats and coats to go
uptown, and waiters and 'buses are upturning chairs and scrubbing floors
with scant regard for belated lunchers who have to be content with
the crumbs that are left after the ravishing and hungry army has been
fed. Order after pandemonium--readiness for the two hours of gorge upon
the morrow. The restaurants and lunch-rooms are as quiet as Trinity
church-yard and something like three quarters of a million hungry souls
have lunched in the business section of Manhattan south of Twenty-third
street--at a total cost, according to the estimate of a shrewd
restauranteur of a quarter of a million dollars.
* * * * *
You may pay your money and take your choice. The shrewd little newsboys
and office-boys who find their way to the short block of Ann street
between Park Row and Nassau--the real Grub street of New York--are
proving themselves financiers of tomorrow by dickering for
sandwiches--"two cents apiece; three for a nickel." They always buy them
in lots of three. That is business and business is not to be scorned for
a single instant. Or you can pay as high prices in the swagger
restaurants downtown as you do in the swagger restaurants uptown--and
that is saying much. When lunch-time comes you can suit the inclinations
of your taste--and your pocket-book. But the average New Yorker seems to
run quite strongly to the peculiar form of lunch-room in which you help
yourself to what you want, compute from the markers the cost of your
midday meal, announce that total to the cashier, who is perfectly
content to take your word for it, pay the amount and walk out. It seems
absurd--to any one who does not understand New Yorkers. The lunch-room
owners do understand them. New York business men and business boys are
honest, as a general thing--particularly honest in little matters of
this sort.
"It is all very simple," says the manager of one of these big
lunch-rooms, who stands beside you for a moment at the entrance of one
of his places--it boasts that it serves more than two thousand lunches
each business day between eleven and three. "I've been through the whole
mill. I've been check boy and oyster man, cashier--now I'm looking out
for this particular beanery. Honor among New York business men? There's
a lot of it."
"And you don't run many risks?" you venture.
"Not many here," he promptly replies. "But there was a man in here
yesterday, who runs a cafeteria out in Chicago. I was telling him some
of the rules of the game here--how when a customer comes in and throws
his hat down in a chair before he goes over to the sandwich and coffee
counters that chair is his, until he gets good and ready to go. My
Chicago friend laughed at that. 'If we were to do that out in my
neck-o'-the-woods,' says he, 'the customer would lose his hat.' And the
uptown department stores don't take any chances, either. At one of the
biggest of them they make the women decide what they will eat, but
before they can start they must buy a check--pay in advance, you
understand. They've tried the downtown way--and now they take no
chances."
The floor manager laughs nervously.
"It's different with the girls downtown. We've started one quick buffet
lunch on the honor plan, same dishes and prices and service as the men's
places, but this one is for business girls. They said at first that we
wouldn't make good with them--but we're ready to start another within
the month. The business girls don't cheat--no matter what their uptown
sisters may try to do."
* * * * *
As a matter of fact downtown business girls in New York eat very
sensibly. Sweets are popular but not invariable. They prefer candy, with
fruit as a second choice, to be eaten some time during the afternoon.
In big offices, where many girls are employed, "candy pools" are often
made, each girl contributing five cents and getting her pro rata, one
member of the staff being delegated to make the purchases. Eaten in this
way the candy acts as a stimulant during the late afternoon hours, in
much the same way as the invariable tea of the business man in London.
The business girl in New York takes her full hour for luncheon. It is
seldom a minute more or a minute less. She is willing as a rule to stay
overtime at night but she feels that she must have her sixty minutes in
the middle of the day. A part of the lunch hour is always a
stroll--unless there be a downpour. Certain downtown streets from twelve
to one o'clock each day suggest the proximity of a nearby high school or
seminary. There is much pairing off and quiet flirtation. This noon-day
promenade of girls--for the most part astonishingly well-dressed girls
and invariably in twos and threes--is one of the sights of downtown New
York. Some of the girls gather in the old churchyards of Trinity and St.
Paul's--in lower Broadway--on pleasant days. They sit down among the
tombstones with their little packages of food and eat and chat and then
stroll. No one molests them and the church authorities, although a
little flustered when this first began, have seen that there is no harm
in it and let the girls have their own way. There is always great
decorousness and these big open-air spaces in the midst of the crowded
street canyons are enjoyed by the women who appreciate the grass and
winding paths after the hard pavements.
All the business girls downtown are not content with sitting after lunch
among the tombstones of St. Paul's churchyard or of Trinity. He was
indeed a canny lunch-man who took note of all the girls strolling in the
narrow streets of downtown Manhattan, who remembered that all New York,
rich or poor, loves to dance and who then fitted up an unrentable third
floor loft over his eating place as a dancing hall. Two violins and a
piano--a gray-bearded sandwich man to patrol the streets with "DANCING"
placarded fore and aft upon his boards--the trick was done. Mamie told
Sadie and Sadie told Elinor and Elinor told Flossie and the lunch-man
began to grow famous. He made further study of the psychology of his
patrons. There were the young fellows--shipping and file clerks and even
ambitious young office-boys to be considered. There were the after-lunch
smokes of these young captains of industry to come into the reckoning.
The lunch-man placed a row of chairs along one edge of his dancing-hall
and over them "Smoking Permitted at This End of the Room." After that
Mamie and Sadie and Elinor and Flossie had partners and the lunch-man
was on the highway to a six-cylinder motor car. He has his imitators. If
you were in business in lower New York and your stenographer began to
hum the "Blue Danube" along about half an hour before noon you would
very well know she was gathering steam for the blissful twenty minutes
of dancing that was going to help her digest her lunch.
* * * * *
You, yourself, are going to lunch in still another sort of restaurant.
It is characteristic of a type that has sprung up on the tip of
Manhattan island within the past dozen years. You reach this
grubbing-place by skirting the front doors of unspeakably dirty
eating-houses in a mean street of the Syrian quarter. Finally you turn
the corner of a dingy brick building, which was once the great house of
one of the contemporaries of the first of the Vanderbilts and which has
managed to escape destruction for three quarters of a century and
face--the only skyscraper in congested New York which stands in a
grass-platted yard--the whim of its wealthy owner. A fast elevator
whisks you thirty stories to the top of the building and you step into
the lobby of what looks, at first glance, to be the entrance hall of
some fine restaurant in uptown's Fifth avenue. But this is a
lunching-club--one of the newest in the town as well as one of the most
elaborate.
Elaborate did we say? This is the elaboration of perfect
taste--unobtrusive rugs, hangings, lighting fixtures and
furniture--great, broad rooms and from their windows there comes to you
another of the spectacular views that lay below the man-made peaks of
Manhattan. To the south--the smooth, blue surface of the upper bay--in
the foreground a nine hundred foot ship coming to the new land, her
funnels lazily breathing smoke at the first lull in her four-day race
across the Atlantic; to the east, a mighty river and its bridges,
Brooklyn again and on very clear days, visions of Long island; to the
north the most wonderful building construction that man has ever
attempted, Babylonic in its immensity; to the west the brisk waterway of
the North river and beyond it, Jersey City, sandwiched in between the
smoky spread of railroad yards. This is the sort of thing that Mr.
Downtown Luncher may have--if he is willing to pay the price. On torrid
summer days he may ascend to the roof-garden, may glance lazily below
him at the activities of the busiest city in the world and sip up the
cool breezes from the sea, while folk down in the bottom of the Broadway
chasm are sweltering from heat and humidity. And in winter he will find
a complete gymnasium in operation on another floor of the club, with a
competent instructor in charge. The "doctor," as they call him, will lay
out a course of work. And that course of work, calling for a half-hour
of exercise each day just before lunch will make dyspeptic and paunchy
old money-grubbers alike, keen as farmhands coming into dinner.
And yet this club, typical of so many others in the downtown business
heart of Manhattan, is but a cog in the mighty machine of the lunching
of the workaday multitudes of downtown. Its doors are closed and lights
are out at six o'clock in the evening, save on extraordinary occasions;
while most of its hundred or more well-trained waiters go uptown to
assist in the dinner and the late supper rushes of the fashionable
restaurants in the theater and hotel district. Like most of its
compeers, it is an outgrowth of the wonderfully comfortable old Lawyers'
Club, which was completely destroyed in the great fire that burned the
Equitable Building in January, 1912. From that organization, famed for
its noon-day hospitality and for the quality of the folk you might meet
between its walls, have sprung many other downtown lunch clubs--the
Whitehall, the Hardware, the Manufacturers, the Downtown Association,
the new Lawyers--many, many others; almost invariably occupying the
upper floors of some skyscraper that has been planned especially for
them. These clubs are not cheap. It costs from sixty to a hundred
dollars to enter one of them and about as much more yearly in the form
of dues. Their restaurant charges are far from low-priced. They are
never very exclusive organizations and yet they give to the strain of
the workaday New Yorker his last lingering trace of hospitality--the
hospitality that has lingered around Bowling Green and Trinity and St.
Paul's church-yards since colonial days and the coffee houses.
* * * * *
Even the hospitality of the genial host seems to end--with the ending of
the lunch-hour. As he takes his last sip of _café noir_ he is tugging at
his watch.
"Bless me," he says, "It is going on three o'clock. I've got that
railroad crowd due in my office in fifteen minutes."
That is your dismissal. For ninety minutes he has given you his
hospitality--his rare and unselfish self. He has put the perplexing
details of his business out of his mind and given himself to whatever
flow of talk might suit your fancy. Now the hour and a half of grace is
over--and you are dismissed, courteously--but none the less dismissed.
With your host you descend to the crowded noisome street. He sees you to
the subway--gives you a fine warm grasp of his strong hand--and plunges
back into the great and grinding machine of business.
Lunch in your Day of Days within the City of the Towers is over. Three
o'clock. Before the last echoes of Trinity's bell go ringing down
through Wall street to halt the busy Exchange--the multitude has been
fed. Miss Stenographer has had her salad and éclair, two waltzes and
perhaps a "turkey trot" into the bargain, and is back at the keys of her
typewriter. Mr. President has entertained that Certain Party at the club
and has made him promise to sign that mighty important contract. And the
certain Party and Mr. President rode for half an hour on the mechanical
horses in the gymnasium. What fun, too, for those old boys?
Three o'clock! The cashiers are totaling their receipts, the waiters and
the 'buses are upturning chairs and tables to make way for the
scrub-women, some are already beginning to don their overcoats to go
uptown; but the three-quarters of a million of hungry mouths have been
fed. New York has caught its breath in mid-day relaxation and once more
is hard at work--putting in the last of its hours of the business day
with renewed and feverish energy.
IV
You had planned at first to walk up Broadway. You wanted to see once
again the church-yards around Trinity and St. Paul's, perhaps make a
side excursion down toward Fraunces' Tavern--just now come back into its
own again. Some of the old landmarks that are still hidden around
downtown New York seemed to appeal to you. But your host at luncheon
laughed at you.
"If you want to spend your time that way, all right," he said, "but the
only really old things you will find in New York are the faces of the
young men. You can find those anywhere in the town."