January 7, 1888





The   Record   and   Guide.





9





203 Eaat side, below SSth street.   Single or double Sat.. .tl'>,000 to 30,000
^516 East or Horth River,   Six or eight lota, with one or two on

waterfront, for business purposes.........................

L316 City real estate iu exchange for sixty acres at Islip, L I.   Has

1,000 feet p«bblv and sandy shore; handsome buildings,

&c.   Value increasing yearly..............................    35,000

167'!^ On Canal street, west of Broadway, or near Broadway east of

Canal street.   Store,   Price reasonable....................

OFFSRSD.

73 St. Hicbolas avenue.   Plot of about six lots..............—    48,000

17S Weat I5th street, between 7th and Sth avenues, 50x103, with

tbree-story brick buildings................................    40,000

184 On Front, Water, Pearl and  Beaver streets. South William

and Broadway.    Stores and offices.    Ranted......20,000 to 300,000

316 Water street, near Coenties slip.    Two old buildings.........     23 ,(J00

203 Hear 3d avenue and 86th street   Twenty family apartment

houses.   Rent |3,880,   Cash $7,000.......................   33,030

316 109th and llOtb streets, near 9th avenue.   Lots 50x200.   Easy

terms.....................................................    35,000

318 Brooklyn, H. Y,   Hear Sumner Avenue Elevated Station,

New twostory and basement,  brown stone, 1S.9 front.

Mortgage $4,OJ0 at 5 !(....................................      6,700

1073 West 4bi.h street, between 6th and 7th avenues.    Three-story,

brick house, 18.9x1)4x100.5.   In fine order throughout......   20,090

1073 Private dwellings on west side.   To exchange for tenements or

Iota........................................................

PEOPKRTT FOR 8AI.K OR TO RENT,

Fifth avenue, corner of 59th street. Plot 50.5xlt0. To lease for long or
short term, with renewal. Present structure commencement of large
hotel. Foundation laid for heavy building. Address, Owner, 249 West
Slst street.

Valuable water front on the East River, between lOStb and 109th streets.
For sale or to lease for a long term of years; owner will make improve¬
ments to suit tenants. The St. Nicholas avenue borse-cars afil'ord easy
means of transit from the west side of the city, Addreas, Owner, 249 West
Slst street.

SOth street, near Sth avenue. Desirable plot, comprising about three
lota. Elegant site for publishing house. Address, No, 49a, care Real Estate
Exchange.

----------•----------

A Mortgage Index.

We will issue, about February lat, an Index to the Hew York Mortgages
published in Volimae XL. of The Rkcobd and Guide. This publi¬
cation will be invaluable to all brokers, capitalista and institutions who
negotiate or make loans on city realty. It will enable tbe possessor to
easily find out whc- are loaning money on any street or avenue and at
what rate such loans are being placed, as well as the term they have to
run. As only a limited number will be printed, subscribers who desire a
copy should send a postal to that effect to this ofBce at once. The price
will be 11.00 per copy.   The price for copies not ordered in advance will

be $1.50 each.

----------•----------

Protection and Building.

A short time ago The Recobd and Guidh: published au interview with
a free trade builder who had made calculations showing that protection
increased the cost of building a $24,000 dwelling nearly 10 per cent, in the
matter of materials alone. He estimated that were it not for the tax
imposed by the tariff the bricks used would cost less by $300; stone, $300;
lime and cement, $150; iron work, $500; glass, $435, etc.

At the last meeting of the Commonwealth Club, Mr, Everett P. Wheeler
touched upon the same subject, in tbe coiu^e of an important address, in
which he rather ruthlessly dissected that rara avis of ours—the tariff.
But he estimated the increased cost of building cheaper houses, costing
about $13,000 each, due to protection, as high as 25 per cent.

" I have done considerable building in Hew York," said Mr, Wheeler to
a representative of The Record and Guide, "and I can think of scarcely
a thing used in constructing our bouses which is not taxed—in many cases
absurdly; for instance, there is plate glass, on which there is a duty of
about 148 per cent. Yet, in spite of this the foreigner manages to sell us his
goods. Our manufacturers scarcely dare claim that this 148 per cent, ia
required by the higher money value of wages in America than in Europe.
In truth it is simply an enormous bonus paid to one or two manufacturers
to enable them to compel our people to use an inferior article at a cost
one and a-half times as great as the Belgian, Frenchman or Englishman
would be content with. How much better it would be for us to take the
foreigner's glass and give him in exchange for it some of the many things
he needs of ours, and which wa can produce with the minimum of labor.
The same remark applies to.lead-pipe, copper, materials for paints, marble,
and common window glass. The duty on these ia prohibitory, and there
are millions of people who have to use and pay for them while the number
who make tbew. are a few thousand.

"Let me give you an example of how the tariff works, even]to the detri¬
ment of those it ' protects.' Formerly vessels engaged in the South
American trade returned to this country with copper ore in ballast.
The mineral was smelted here, aud thus sailors and mechanics found
employment. Then, to prevent its importation, a duty of 3J^ cents a pound
was imposed on copper ore. This was prohibitory. The vessels that carried
our products to Chili, Peru, and elsewhere in the South, didn't pay, for
lack of a return cargo, and ao ceased to run, while, of course, the smelting
establishments had to close. Take another case—that of nickel, A duty
was imposed .on this article to enable the owner of one mine in Pennsyl¬
vania to compete with foreigners. This raised the price of nickel so that
the Meriden Britannia Company were unable to export their manufac¬
tures, and were compelled to invest capital and establish a factory in
Canada, where nickel is free.

" To return to the building trade; lot me ask, what is the use of the duty
on marble ? Years ago this stone could be quarried in Italy cheaper than
in thia country, but to-day the work is principally done by machinery,
and costs no more to the Vermonter then to the foreigner; yet the tariff
exists to increase the price of a very important material in the construc¬
tion of our houses."

"But, Mr, Wheeler, would not the abolition of our tariff cause this coun
try to be flooded with tbe cheaper foreign goods, and would not our work¬
men be thrown out of employment I"





" That would happen if the foreigner would give us his goods for noth¬
ing; but he is not likely to go so far "as that. For every dollar's worth of
merchandise he sends to us he will demand payment in a dollar's worth of
our products. The more he sends the more we will have to produce. An
exact ratio must be maintained. Each will makg mcn^y out of the
exchange, for each produces what the other wants. If we produced noth¬
ing the foreigner would send us nothing,

"Some time ago I built four houses. I have calculations here showing
how much tribute I had to pay to our god—Protection, You will see it
amounts to nearly 25 per cent.

Four houses, 28x50, coat $12,500 each...............................$,50 000

Wages, half of cost, or............................................  25^000

Cost of material..................................................  $25 000

Duty on material about......................................!!'.',*.      8)500

Material, if no duty.........................................





............................................   $16,500

Wages on each bouse.............................................    $6,250

Material on each house, if duty free..............................      4,100





Cost of each house without duty..................................  $10,350





The World of Business.

Railway Builders Turning Southward*

Vice-President T, F. Oakes of tha Northern Pacific Railroad baa been
talking about the immediate future of railroad buildmg. He realizes that
the Northern States east of the Mississippi River are carrying all the rail¬
way business they can support, while beyond the river, especially in the
Northwest, there are more railroads than the present condition of the
country will warrant. The expansion is now in the South, and there the
railroad extension for tha immediate future will take place. Mr. Oakes,
as reported by the Chicago Tribune, said that there would be a let up on
railroad building in the Northwest next year, but it would be booming
in the Southern States. He said that capital was ready to embark in
this kind of enterprise in the South because that section of the country
demanded more railroads. It was developing its wonderful resources ou a
scale of great magnitude. Its manufacturing establishments were spring¬
ing up in heretofore comparatively unknown places. Investors saw that
there was profit in Southern railroads, Another cause for thia new work
in the South was the reduced price of steel rails. It had fallen consider¬
ably on the ton of late, and would probably be atill further reduced.
There were too many parallel lines between Chicago and St. Paul and the
Horthwest, and this was being realized every day. States like Ohio, Indi¬
ana and Illinois have railroads penetrating every county and neighbor¬
hood. In tha Southern States there are extensive areas without railway.
communication, and yet every acre of the land is valuable for agriculture
or is rich in mineral deposits, or else bears a heavy growth of superior tim¬
ber. In every part of thia undeveloped country the aoil is full ot wealth of
one sort or another, and if railway builders have been found to push their
lines across the blizzard-swept plains of the Northwest to handle the busi¬
ness of the Rocky Mountain mines, and of the summer farming in Dakota,
they will soon be brought to appreciate that railways into the undeveloped
regions of the South will be rewarded with magnificant results in the way
of agriculture, mining, lumbering and multifarious manufacturing indus¬
tries. The future of railway construction must find its grandest realization
in the South in the early future,—New Orleans Picayune.

The Only Way to Break the Coal Combinations.

In 1877 Franklin B. Gowen consummated a scheme by which he united
all tbe anthracite coal-carrying companiea for the purpose of maintaining
coal prices. Prior to 1875 the Reading Railroad Company had bought 143
square miles of anthracite coal land—though it could not exhaust one-
twelfth of that property during ten years—aud the rivals of that company
had obtaiued control of all the other tracts of anthracite coal land that
were purchasable. When this scramble had ended, because of the absorp¬
tion of all available coal lands, the officers of these companies began
soberly to count the cost of their greed. They had borrowed wherever they
could. Everything rolled along merrily until the interest payments began
to become due. Tha Reading Railroad Company had lost $15,(J00,C0O in
the five years from 1870 to 1875, and its oflicers soon realized that they
would be called upon to pay the interest on $4l,000,oo0 that had been bor¬
rowed to further their scheme of land absorption. The other coal-carryiug
companies found themselves similarly situated, und they readily assented
to Mr. Gowen's suggestion of a combination. The representatives of the
coal-carrying companiea held regular monthly sessions for four or five years
and persistently ordered advances in cial prices. They increased the trans¬
portation charges to more than three times the actual cost, but they were
still unable to carry the heavy loads of debt which they had shouldered.
They restricted production and imposed fines, but still they found that coal
consumers could not be squeezed to their complete satisfaction. When the
prices of manutactiiring sizes had been raised above a given figure they
discovered that soft coal was supplanting the anthracite, and that manu¬
facturers were in a measure able to resist further exactions by changing
their furnace grates and burning bituminous coal. It mattered little to the
large consumer of coal whether he usad anthracite or bituminous. He
bought that fuel which made the most steam for a dollar. In 18S4 anthra¬
cite was displaced by bituminous to the extent of 800,000 tous, and it
then dawned on the minds of the coal kings that their combination
could not be successful without the co-operation of the carriers of soft coal,
who had also combined to advance prices. For a time the competition of
the two qualities of coal was maintained with vigor, but the mismanage¬
ment of the Reading Railroad Company and the financial necessities of
the Baltimore & Ohio Company brought both companies into the clutches
of a powerful syndicate of money lenders, and through the discipline of
that coterie of capitalists the two combinations, comprising twelve com¬
panies, have been induced to work together to increase the price of coal to
the consumer. Manufacturers and householders in the East pay over
$40,000,OJO a year in excess of the sum they would have to pay if
healthy competition prevailed. They are taxed $40,000,0 lO a year to
sustain railroad companies that are carrying hundreds of millions of
watered capital. The only hope of relief from the oppressions of
these combinations lies in competition, and as the companiea in the com-
binationa control all avenues of communication with the sources of coal
supply in thia country it is apparent that the needed compptition must come
from without. It has been shown that twelve companiea restrict produc¬
tion and mark up prices within our own borders, but it would be an impos¬
sibility to extend that combination so that it should include the coal opera¬
tors of Nova Scotia, of England and of the globe. In that direction lies
our only hope of permanent relief from the exactions of the coal combina¬
tions; and the question that presents itself to the manufacturing and con¬
suming claases uf tbia country is the choice between cheap coal and expen¬
sive coal. By maintaining the tariff barrier the coal combinations can
dictate prices. If coal should be put on the free list these combinations
would be broken by the pressure of outside competition. The tariff on coal
protects combinations. Free coal would protect the manufacturer and the
workingman along the Atlantic sea-board, and would reduce the cost ot





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