Where height will stop the butkdling designers admit they cannot tell. There literally seems to be no Vimit. "New York toms with buildings which, in any city in Europe, would stand far up. above the highest, Plans were filed yesterday cly the City Bank Farmers Trust Company for a TI-storey bank and office building: valuable block bounded by Exchan, Place, William, Beaver and Hanover 'Streets in the financial districts. So far as the city is concerned, however, this announcement will be marsly seven-day wonder, for its glory will be fleeting. AA corporation hended by former Governor Al. Smith ix already tearing down' the Waldort for the mammoth 1,000. ft-high structure of the Empire State Building, which builders freely predict will be eclipsed before the year is out.
This new Farmers Trust Company. building will be of limestone and of the pleasing set-back type, with a tower eight feet square rising from the 26th floor, This tower will taper off from the fiftieth floor, and at the top will be an illuminated globe fifteen feet in diameter, supported by four eagles of heroic size, and the general style of the building will be conservatively modern. I read in the ""North-China" recently tthe trouble which the local telephone company had experienced with regard to additional and quite unexpected demands made upon it for telephones when new buildings in the Model Settlement went up, but it is likely that this new skyscraper will require probably half as many telephones as there are in the whole of the Central District of Shanghai.
Tread that "the largest individual telephone exchange in the world will de installed in the new building, according to the plans." It will have "1,000 trunk Tines, about one-tenth of the number found in the average telephone company wx-'There are to be thirty high-speed elevators—(since leaving Shanghai one does not use the word qift" any moro)—with a.new level ing device, each of which will run express to the 67th floor!!
The Work Above Ground, One can close imagine these 71. ground, quite a fascinating picture to visualize, but the average person has no iden of the work that has to be curried out below the surface of the ground in the building of these great structures. Por example, 12,000 feet of vault space will be built into two of the four sub-street floors. I see that the operating quarters of the Farmers Trust Company will be on the first floor, the main bank entrance being at' the joomer of William Street and Exchange Place. The lower banking room will be done. in Empire style with mahogany and ebony, and the main banking room will be Renaissauce style, "with the modern touch." This probably. means that the clients will be "touched" for their deposits and their business in the most acceptable modern, fashion, for all banks nowadays—most of them in America, however, seemingly merely waiting for the captains mergers to come along—conduct all sorts and conditions of business that in my youth would have been heartily pooh-poohed by the strictly correct British banker.
And they rush things along in New York. No grass is allowed to row underfoot when once the name Appears on the dotted line, This il be ready to receive all and sundry by January of 1931, being eleven months utter the date'when the foundation is expected to be finished, The Age of Cement But, looking back over the years, 0 fat as this writer is personally. concerned, he would far rather spend his working days in one of the buildings of lesser greatness scattered down the Bund of Shanghai than in the most sumptuously ited motlern skyscraper which its head to pierce the very heavens in New York.+ If things go on as they are, the time will come when New York's downtown section never receive " ray of direct sunshine unless at and around high noon, for the reason that the streets where the people wark, look: ing like a colony of busy ants their narrow alleyways, will for ever be in the dark shadow of adjoining buildings. The modern skyscraper is gradually producing a new species of human beings. Firat of all, he is n species which lives almost entirely' in artificial light; many of his kind live.underground; they' toil from morn till eve in." buildings where conditions, though eminently comfortable, are as far from strictly natural conditions as they can be. For example, the feet of this new species rarely touch the earth. lives up somewhere in the middle of 4 skyscraper apartment house, standing on and hemmed in and around by cement. He descends to the street, but not to touch the sarth—only again to contact cement, rom his home to his ofice he is all the time contacting cement, and the only time he gets to a park or other place where he can actually touch Mother Earth is on the Sabbath, when he is at the mercy of a climate that, on general principles, is no better than that of England, (0, Heaven deliver us from the skyscraper, with all its falda-rals and assumptions of comfort and convenience!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.