September 15, 1888
The Record and Guide.
THE RECORD AND GUIDE.
191 Broadway, N. Y.
TERMS:
ONE HEXR, in advance^ SIX DOLLARS.
Comnniiucations should be addressed to
C. W. SWEET, 191 Broadway.
J, T. LINDSEY, Business Manager.
SEPTEMBER 15, 1883.
For the accommodation of well-to-do people who are looking for
apartments, we publish to-day a complete list of all the vacant suites
of rooms, with the rents asked, in all the first-class apartment
houses in this city. This list we propose to republish for several
weeks to come. Owners, agents and janitors will confer a favor by
notifying ue when an apartment becomes vacant and when re-rented.,
Tliis list is printed for the benefit of would-be tenants in first-class
apartment houaes. Instead of beiiig forced to run about the city to
see what is in the market, they can utilize the list in The Record
AND Guide so aa to learn Just where to go and what price they will
be expected to pay. The apartment houses are a distinctive feature
of Neiv York life, and are growing in favor. A journal such as
ours it theproper one to become the organ of this great real estate
specialty.
--------^—.—_-^
A Real Real Estate Exchange.
On Wednesday last there was opened, at 41 Broadway, what ie
called the "New York Real Estate and Trader's Exchange." Among
the epeakerB who took part in the exercises were Algernon 3. Sul¬
livan, Major Pangbotn, Park-Com mission er Viele, and other well-
known gentlemen. Real estate was the text of the speakers, but
it must have struck Mr. Sullivan and the other orators aa somewhat
singular that all the leading real estate dealers of New York and
Brooklyn were conspicuous by their absence from the opening
ceremonies'of the new Real Estate Exchange. The fact ia, this
so-called exchange was organized by aome sharp and enterprising
gentlemen who knew that New York ought to have an organized
market for the transaction cf a real estate business. After they
had completed their organization they tried to induce the leading
real estate dealers to become members, but Pine street Trinity
Building and the whole brokerage interest in realty would have
nothing to do with an organization which they had no hand in
creating.
On that same Wednesday afternoon a meeting waa held in tbe
office of The Record and Guide to organize a bona fide real estate
exchange. Among the gentlemen present were E. H, Ludlow,
Richard V. Harnett, H, H. Cammann, George H, Scott, of Scott <fc
Myers, Isaac Honig, Albert Bellamy, A. L Mordecai, L. Friedman,
J, F. B. Smyth, B, S. Levi, E. A. Cruikshank, S. F. Jayne, Wm,
Lalor, F. R. Houghton, and others. A committee was appointed,
with E, H, Ludlow as chairman, to organize an exchange exclu¬
sively devr-ted to dealings in real estate.
For years The Record and Guide has been urging the organiza¬
tion of such a body upon real estate dealera. We have pointed out
its advantages in every possible way. New York ought to be the
headquarters of real estate dealings for the whole country. Our
brokers should do ten times the business tbey have transacted in
the past. Were an exchange in existence it would lead to amend¬
ments of our land laws and save realty from the exactions of
legal harpies. But we were interested not so much in the dealers
as in the owners of real estate. Whatever would expedite transfers
of property and make a ready market would be of incalculable
benefit to the entire landed interest of the country.
It is to be hoped that the promoters of the proposed exchange
will be wise and liberal in the constitution they are framing. Any
attempt to exclude small dealers or to monopolize the business by
a few large firms will be resented and will kill the exchange at the
start. Nor must large property holders be excluded. An illiberal
constitution will inevitably bring another organization into exist¬
ence or may give life to the " Real Estate and Trader's Exchange,"
which seems to be run by very bright people though they have as
yet to learn the real estate business. The constitution of the new
exchange should be democratic and liberal.
property on earth, justly called realty, is made insecure by our pre¬
posterous laws, while securities, which represent good will or
faith, wires and poles, like telegraph stock, can be readily trans¬
ferred. He showed tbat if a bill of sale of a house waa as easily
negotiated aa a block of stock, that it would be of incalculable
benefit to the whole community. It would be worth more to the
trade of the country than a gold import of one hundred millions
annually. Every real estate dealer and owner should help forward
the reform in our land laws proposed by the society of which
Dwight H. Olmstead is the head,
Mr. Algernon S. Sullivan, at the opening of a new exchange last
week, made several very good points. He vigorously denounced
the present barbarous land laws, which made transfers of real
«8tate 80 tedious, costly and unsafe. The most tangibleand certain
Jefferson Market,
Mr. Douglas Smyth, the architect of the Department of Public
Works, Is the deaigner of the new Jefferson Market, now nearing
completion.
The court-house, bell tower and prison, which adjoin the new mar¬
ket and form parts of the same architectural scheme, are, aa every¬
one knows, among the moit successful pieces of architecture in New
York. Mr, Withers, the architect of these, prepared at the same time
and as part of the same scheme, a design for a new market. In a
community in which there was any real regard for architecture or
any standard of professional comity, the architect who was rec¬
ognized to have done so successful a piece of work as the court¬
house and jail would have been selected, as a matter of course, to
complete his own work, or, if it were desirable to give "the job"
to some other architect, the architect so chosen would have felt
bound to carry out the design of his predecessor. In the present
caae the new architect has carried out au entirely different design
of his own, and there is no evidence in the architecture of the
market that the original architect has been consulted at all.
This is not only a violation of professional comity; it is, in thia
case, a distinct architectural misfortune. Nobody can have studied
the original work without feeling tbat the chief defect, the only
noticeable defect in fact, in its general composition, was the
absence of any "middle term" between the mass of the court
house and that of the prison. In the southern view, from which
this defect ia chiefly noticeable, tbe incompleteness of the group is
very manifest. It is not a group, but two detached buildings,
which call for the interposition between them of a striking feature
to connect them and to complete the composition of an architec¬
tural organism of members subordinate to the whole. This had
been carefully looked out for in the design of the market. A poly¬
gonal dome of iron and gla^s in the centre of the market, which
served a practical purpose in lighting the central part of the mar¬
ket, "came in" exactly where it was wanted architecturally to
complete the group. It does not seem even to have occurred to the
designer of the new market that any feature waa needed at thia
point. H« has lighted his interior by means of glass roofs invisible
from the outside, and the feature of his work is a two-atory build¬
ing at the corner which does nothing to supply the defect which
the dome was designed to supply in the general composition of the
group. In fact, the market is designed without any visible refer¬
ence to the buildinga it adjoins, and of which it forma part, except
in the adoption of what the designer supposes to be the same style.
The new work is Gothic, if Gothic be held to reside in pointed
arches, and that is all. The material is not even the sarae. The
old work is of brick with wrought work of Ohio sandstone, the new
of red brick and rod terra cotta, with a sparing use of brown stone.
Abstractly, the newer material may be the better, though it is not
true that baked clay can properly be used as it is used here, as a
substitute for stone, in the same quantities and with the same
forms. If the manufacture of i erra cotta had advanced ae far here
when the building was built as it haa now, the original designer
might have made a free use of it. But as a matter of fact he did
not, and when an architect is dealing with a monument of recog
nized merit, it behooves him to conform to it unless he can
improve upon it in its own line.
This is really a consideration of some importance. If we are to
have an architecture it must be understood that an architect is an
artist with some rightf in his work, even after it is done and paid
for, and that the owner ia as much of a vandal for calling in another
architect to tinker the architecture of a good building, as he would
be for calling in another painter to paint over a foot or two of a
good painting. And yet we a^e private owners doing all the time
what the city has done in the case of Jefferson Market without any
suspicion that they are vandala.
Judged by itself, the new Jefferaon Market ia not at all a bad
piece of work. It consists on each of the south and east sides of
five bays, each of a wide pointed arch in the flrst story, of a pair of
lancets in the second, and of a wooden dormer in the roof. Be¬
tween the two stories ie a belt of foliage in terra cotta. On the
corner which is truncated to dissemble the acutenesa of the angle, are
three more open arches, being the basement of the two-story build¬
ing which ia the features of the composition. It has two pointed
windows in the second story and a steap roof with an excessive
chimney dividing the gable. The style is^deferred to^not_only in