Читать книгу The Personality of American Cities - Edward Hungerford - Страница 9

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New York is the City of the Towers.

Sometimes a well-traveled soul will arise in the majesty of contemplation and say that in the American metropolis he sees the shadowy ghost of some foreign one. Along Madison square, where the cabbies still stand in a long, gently-curving, expectant line he will draw his breath through his teeth, point with his walking stick through the tracery of spring-blossoming foliage at Diana on her tower-perch and whisper reverently:

"It is Paris—Paris once again."

And there is a lower corner of Central Park that makes him think of Berlin; a long row of red brick houses with white trimmings along the north shore of Washington square that is a resemblance to blocks of a similar sort in London.

But he is quite mistaken. New York does not aim to be a replica of any foreign metropolis. She has her own personality, her own aggressive individualism; she is the City of the Towers as well as the City of the Sleepless Eye—and no mean city at that. Take some clever European traveler, a man who can find his way around any of the foreign capitals with his eyes shut, and let him come to New York for the first time; approach our own imperial city through her most impressive gateway—that narrow passage from the sea between the ramparts of the guarding fortresses. This man, this traveler, has heard of the towers of the great New World city—they have been baldly pictured to him as giant, top-heavy barracks, meaningless compositions of ugly blank walls, punctuated with an infinity of tiny windows. That is the typical libel that has gone forth about New York.

He sees naught of such. He sees a great city, the height of its buildings simply conveying the impression from afar that it is builded upon a steep ridge. Here and there a building of still loftier height gives accent to the whole, emphasis to what might otherwise be a colorless mass; gives that mysterious tone and contrast which the artist is pleased to call "composition." Four of these towers already rise distinct from the giant skyscrapers of Manhattan. Each for this moment proclaims a victory of the American architect and the American builder over the most difficult problem ever placed before architect or builder.

The European traveler will give praise to the sky-line of New York as he sees it from the steamer's deck.

"It is the City of the Towers," he will say.

*****

In this, your Day of Days in New York, come with us and see the making 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.