254





RECORD   AND   GUIDE





August 19, 1916





ZONING   RESOLUTION   IS   LOGICAL  SOLUTION
OF   PRESENT   CHAOTIC   CONDITIONS





As civilization has advanced and men
have lived closer together in cities,
thev have lost perspective and with it
a decent sense of respect for the liber¬
ties and rights of their neighbors, until
selfish interests have appropriated not
only all the liberties that could possibly
be said to be their own, but have gone
far in appropriating the rights and priv¬
ileges  of their neighbors.

For many years we have seen neigh¬
borhoods ruined by the placing of per¬
fectly proper buildings in perfectly im¬
proper and unnecessary localities. A
grocery store in the midst of fine resi¬
dences, a coal yard or livery stable or
garage in some quiet home street, a tall
tenement, or even a factory where it
meant lost factory value and character,
are not unusual sichts. Everybody real¬
izes that the loss of respectability and of
character is a serious matter to property,
and it is a mild form of assassination to
rob the neighborhood of its character
and respectability though never for a
moment did the long suffering public
think of preventing this form of wrong
doing.

The Old Hold-Up  Game.

It was not illogical that there devel¬
oped a class of real estate blackmailers
who fattened on their liberty to black¬
mail a whole neighborhood by buying a
property in some well-to-do street and
announcing that an undesirable improve¬
ment would be contemplated unless a
suitable price was obtained for the hold¬
ing. It was largely for this reason mat
neighborhood and block restrictions
were made by voluntary agreements, but
as time went on it became more difficult
to enforce these restrictions owing to
changes   in   the   surrounding  sections.

A valuable hint may be gained by the
real estate student in tracing the history
of upper Park avenue in the past five or
ten years. Here was a great and in¬
viting street splendidly adapted to the
purpose of providing a beautiful avenue
for fine homes, almost equal to Fifth
avenue and far superior to Madison ave¬
nue, in its freedom from surface car lines
and its greater width, yet upper Fifth
avenue was easily four times as valu¬
able as Park avenue and a Park ave¬
nue lot was worth perhaps only two-
thirds the value of a Madison avenue lot,
while a lower Park avenue lot was worth
perhaps three times the value of an
upper   Park  avenue   lot.

Powers in the Reform.

The reason for this strange disparity
was a simple one and its early inter¬
pretation held enormous profits for
those real estate dealers, operators and
owners who were quick to realize the
situation. Almost all of us rememhet
upper Park avenue before the New York
Central and the New Haven Railroad
changed its motive power from steam to
electricity and when every passing train
emitted its offensive smoke and gases
through openings in the middle of the
roadway even though beautifully hidden
by bushes. When the railroads an¬
nounced their purpose of abolishing the
nuisance there was a moral as well as
physical power in the reform, and from
that time breweries, livery stables and
tenements were doomed to give way to
a better destiny and the march of prog¬
ress began toward being (next to Fifth
avenue) New York's finest residence
avenue, and will continue until its too
great popularity with autoists, truckmen
and bus lines may rob it of much of its
exclusiveness and value. A. property on
Park avenue was recently sold for about
$71,000 which ten years ago might have
been bought for $30,000, or six years
ago for $40,000, and it will be of great
value to keep in mind the lesson, in view
of what New York is aiming to accom¬
plish through its zone restrictions.

Some   years   ago   the   Mayor   of   New





By FRANK LORD, of Cross & Brown Co.

York ordered a municipal house clean¬
ing and as a result many thousands of
cartloads of refuse, rubbish and filth
were taken to the dumping scows and
planted out at sea. This had no con¬
nection with the present plan, but it was
an event which was prophetic of a time
when the old rule of riotous license and
the right of "eminent" damage should
cease and the community as a whole
would demand its larger right to deter¬
mine the welfare of the city as a whole
as against the profit or whim of an indi¬
vidual or group of adventurers known
as the speculative builders.

Putting Your House in Order.

The present plan to restrict areas,
zones and heights about to be estab¬
lished as municipal law is in reality a
simple question of self-restraint and of
orderly housekeeping. A place for ev¬
ery thing and every thing in its place,
The city is to be put on a basis of rea¬
sonable comfort and healthfulness, of
self-restraint and good manners.

It is a well known fact of city develop¬
ment that wherever the wealthy make
their homes, real estate values increase
to a fabulous extent and that close-upon
this rich residence district the fine shop¬
ping district crowds as close as possible
to supply the personal and household
wants of the rich patrons. Here hotels,
banks, theatres, clubhouses and every
possible trade or profession or occupa¬
tion, catering to the luxurious wants or
ordinary necessities of the rich, crowd
in and a district is established that seems
to promise permanence and security
from the very fact that its high values
exclude the mean and the objectionable.

But the wealth and desirability of an
established locality, xroupled with the ab¬
solute and undisputed right of every man
to do as he pleased with his own prop¬
erty, has heretofore proved the undoing
of these splendid districts, and, so long
as men are free to put their property
to any use they please, this process of
destruction will go on. vast fortunes in
real estate values will periodically be
swept away and long periods of real es¬
tate depression and panic will follow. It
is a sad paradox for New York real estate
that there can be nothing more secure
and nothing more insecure than real
property in the City of New York.

The process of disintegration of these
great districts has become familiar to
all who have watched the battle royal
that has been going on in the Murray
Hill district where J. P. Morgan and
others for the past ten years have been
only partly successful in holding the tide
of business back, Madison avenue is
already scarred and lower Park avenue
district is wondering what will be its
fate if manufacturers hedge it in and
its cleanliness and healthfulness are
menaced.

Accomplice in the Destruction.

When a broker, agent or owner helps
to place an art dealer or fashionable
dressmaker or upholsterer in a high class
residence neighborhood, he becomes an,
accomplice of the destruction of that
neighborhood and the fall of that section
is assured. It is not the one act that is
responsible but the loss of confidence that
is created, the further encroachments of
trade that is invited and made inevitable,
and the process, once begun, goes swift¬
ly on to the end. Shabbv boarding
houses filter in as fashionable residents
move out, and the very art dealer and
dressmaker who began the invasion like¬
wise move on to keep in the process of
destruction elsewhere.

This same process and tragedy, with
the same result, goes on in the business
districts where manufacturers eager
to get close to the big hotels and
incidentally near the retail district crowd
in, regardless of the destruction they
entail, and the game of 'beggar your
neighbor" goes on.





It has come as a revelation and a re¬
lief that this sad condition is to end, and
even the manufacturer is glad the op¬
portunity to get back to a business basis
and to know that in future he may plan
his affairs with some promise of perma¬
nence.

The manufacturer has been the slave
of competition striving to be at the top
because some competitor has moved his
factory into high class surroundings at
a rental of a dollar a square foot, hoping
to get 50 per cent, more business or
more money for his goods. Too late
many of them have longed for the dear
old 40-cent space downtown, where ship¬
ping was easy and help readily obtained
from convenient nearby dwelling dis¬
tricts, and where the appropriateness of
their fi.xtures enabled them to avoid a
fancy fixture bill of $3,000 to $10,000,
with  all  that this  entailed.

Downtown Rehabilitation.

Downtown the deserted districts are
singing a song of hope and uptown is
breathing sighs of relief as the zoning
project and the "Save New York" move¬
ment are working together to prevent
another tragedy such as those which in
recent years have reduced realty values
to the scrapheap. There is no denying
the fact that the remedy proposed will
cause a disturbance and some loss in
carrying out the reform, but it will be
trifling compared with the otherwise im¬
pending destruction of the district be¬
tween 23rd and 59th streets. It is fair
to believe that mercantile businesses
that did not know where to go a year
ago will be established with confidence
in the uptown neighborhood. Investors
who hardly dared to build in the path
of the old destructive forces will be em¬
boldened to erect better things than fac¬
tories, and the harassed manufacturer,
who was being forced to move uptown
because everybody was doing it, will
take a fresh grip on his legitimate prob¬
lems of producing under the lowest ex-i
penses and the most favorable condi¬
tions. The city will find itself working
toward solvency and prosperity instead
of bankruptcy and another of those trag¬
edies which has brought whole blocks of
valual)le real estate to confusion.
Profits in the Long Run.

In the long run the result will be profit
to everybody, profit to the shopkeeper,
profit to the housekeeper, profit to the
owner and the tenant, to the city, and
the State will profit through lives pre¬
served and health restored and retained.
Children fitted for living and given some
of the vim and power of health which
has always made the country boy thf
superior of his puny city-bred cousin.

Probably the most puzzling question
of the zoning project is what the ulti¬
mate effect will be on the streets be¬
tween Broadway and Madison or Fourth
avenues, from 23rd to 38th streets, where
already many buildings have been de¬
voted to manufacturing purposes and the
damage has in a large measure been
done. The proposed law does not aim
to drive the manufacturers out of build¬
ings already devoted to these lines, and
even permits new buildings hereafter to
devote 25 per cent, of its space to manu¬
facturing so that a 12-storv building 100
X 100 may utilize only two floors (or if
a full 25 per cent, of 110,000 superficial
feet ill such a building then nearly three
floors) for the purpose of manufactur¬
ing.

This situation would seem to continue
the evils of congestion in the shopping
district before 42nd street, and even to
permit its increase, but just here the
"Save New York" movement would
seem to promise a valuable moral lever¬
age to pull the district out of the mire.

It is  probably  true  that the manufac¬
turers  care but little for the  small per¬
centage of business obtained from Fifth
(Continued on page 259)