March 23, 1907





RECORD   AND   GUIDE





577









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Communications should Ijo addrossod to

C.  W.   SWEET

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Copyrighted, JilOT, by C. W. Sweet.





Vol. LXXIX.





MARCH 23, 1907.





No. 203G.





INDEX TO DEPARTMENTS.
Advertising Section.

Page                                                Page

Cement   ....................xvii Lumber.....................xx

CoDsulting  Engineers   ...........v Maciiinery...................vi

Clay  ProducLa   ................viii McLal  Woi'lv   ....................ix

Contractora   and   Builders......iil Quiclc Job   Directory.........xxill

Electrical Interests   ...........vii Real  Estate   ...................xi

Fireprooflng   ...................li Roofers & Rooflng Materials.xxii

Granite   ...................xviii Stone....................xviii

Iron   and   Steel   ................x Wood Products...............xs





WALL Street this weelt cannot be said to be "suffering
a recovery." Changes have been rung on activity,
great irregularity and dulness. These have beeu daily char¬
acteristics, the niarlfet being each of oue of these by turns
and nothing long, conseciuently doubt and anxiety may still
be said to reign. Reports of large firms in difflculties have
been shown to have no foundation in fact, which is a great
disappointment to chronic bears who contended that fail¬
ures were in order aud would have cleared the atmosphere.
The first decade of the twentieth century has clearly proved
that former experiences and precedents in Wall Street go
for nothing, for no such decline, or what practically amount¬
ed to a panic, ever took place without a record of disaster
to banking or stock exchange houses. Yet they have all
apparently weathered th6 storm, which serves to show the
generally sound condition of business and the financial sit¬
uation. An interview given hy John D. Rockefeller to a
daily newspaper did not take a roseate view of the situation,
and undoubtecily caused some considerable selling of stocks
from all parts of the country. Views of a man of such
monumental prominence have great weight and are naturally
to some extent authoritative, but a curious feature of the
Standard Oil monarch's utterances is that other members of
that powerful institution do not seem to be in accord with
their chief. At any rate, stocks iu the Standard Oil group
aud others declined all along the line. American Smelting
dropped from 1221/2 to 115 aud did not recover its loss.
An attack was made on Tennessee Coal and Iron, hut it
failed to succeed, and the stock quickly rebounded to its
former figure. It is said that the bulk of this stock is
firmly held by one concern in a safe-deposit vault without
a single dollar loaned on it, which would account for the
failure of the traders to break the price. Opinions among
Wall Street men differ as to the future course of the mar¬
ket. Bears certainly have made money and are not easily
cowed, but their manipulations for the decline cannot be
prolonged indefinitely. Money, after all, is the all impor¬
tant question. As a well-known stock exchange says,
"money does not discriminate between weak positions in
railroads and those in industrial issues, and we have seen
stock coming out which had to be liquidated because loans
w^re called by certain institutions in order to put their af¬
fairs in shape for the money demand of April." Call and
time money worked easier in this market though there was
some anxiety displayed araong bankers regarding the rais¬
ing of the Bank of France's discount rate.





OPRING has arrived, and if bnilding and real estate in
vJ New York san be said to still have their special sea¬
sons, it is time for another round of building operations.
At this writing steamers are forcing open navigation on the
Hirdson, and brick will he coming in next week. A slight
advance in the price of brick accompanied the advent of fair
weather, but even so, the best price is low compared with
last Spring's. On the whole building materials will be
cheaper this year than last, and wages are no higher.    As to





the character of the building to be undertaken, there is a
strong likelihood that builders wil! return from the northern
parts of the city to some of the older sections, particularly
on the East Side, where there is a great field for larger and
better apartment houses than the prevailing type at present,
and WiLh aH the assurances in favor of financial success.
When the projects of the present year are compared, not
with those of 1906, but with the record of plans filed in
1905, it will be perceived that the building outlook is fairly
good. The year 19 0 5 was the greatest building year on
record, and projects in Manhattan are only about four mil¬
lions short of the record for the corresponding period in
1905; whereas, the Spring of 1907 was sensational in prom¬
ises, but deficient in performance and execution. A great
many buildiugs for which plans were filed in 1906 were not
built. If these plans should be worked out this year, 1907
will he a bigger year than a record of plans filed will reveal.
Furthermore, a large number of skyscrapers, whose esti¬
mated cost swelled the total for 1906, are still iu course of
construction. The New York Central and Pennsylvania sta¬
tions alone will be employing nearly half the available me¬
chanical force of the borough before many months have
passed. Tenement alteration work is going to be very heavy
this year in all the boroughs, and in Brooklyn the new build¬
iugs planned exceed ia value those projected up to the
corresponding date last year by nearly three million dollars.
Wall Street reactions ought to help rather than harm real
estate interests. They ought to have the effect of making
mortgage money easier to obtain for sound propositions.
This is the way builders now view the situation. One great
thing to their advantage is the peaceable labor situation.
Most wage schedules are settled for a year or more to come,
and all the signs in the industrial sky is for continued fair
weather.





THE report of the committee of the Retail Dry Goods
Association calls attention agaiu to the curious and
significant fact that, whereas the population of New York
doubles itself in less than twenty-five years, the number of
passengers carried by the local transit companies doubles
itself in a little over ten years. Travel, that is, increases
twice as fast as population. In 1S95 there were about
1,850,000 passengers transported daily in what is now the
greater city. In 1906 the total for the Greater New York
was a little over 3,400,000. In Manhattan and the Bronx
alone 2,500,000 passengers were carried each day on the
surface, elevated and subway lines. An extraordinary as¬
pect of this increase is, there has been no improvement in
means of transit corresponding to the increase in its amount.
One new bridge has been opened between Brooklyn and
Manhattan; but its terminals are so badly connected with
the rest of the boroughs, that it has been of comparatively
little use. The subway has been added to the Manhattan
transit system, but it carries only 400,000 passengers a day.
In Manhattan the surface lines have been very little im¬
proved during the past ten years. The use of electric power
on the elevated roads has made that means of transit very
much more useful, but when every improvement is counted,
it can hardly be claimed that the twice-told trafflc of 1906
has been created by the encouragement which it had re¬
ceived to travel more conveniently. The number of passen¬
gers travelling every day in the greater city could probably
be increased withiu six mouths by 700,000, in case the
means of communication were suddenly and largely im¬
proved. The interest in these facts consists in their bearing
upon the plans for new subways and tunnels. In the first
place, such figures indicate plainly that the Interborough-
Metropolitan Company would show a very small uuderstand-
ing of rapid transit conditions and opportunities in case it
refused to accept the proposed leases for forty years. By
1917 the Manhattan traffic alone will be not far from 5,000,-
000 a day and by 192S it will be almost 10,000,000 a day,
three times as much as the total existing traffic of the Great¬
er New York. With travel increasing at such a rate, it
would be criminal negligence on the part of the municipal
authorities to lease the subways for a longer period than the
one proposed. In the second place the assurance that such
au enormous increase in traffic awaits the opening of new
transit routes makes it desirable that not merely a part but
the whole of the plan.^ for new subways, should be carried
out at any early date. The mere exteusion of the present
subway north from Forty-second Street along Lexington Ave¬
nue and south from Forty-second Street along Seventh Ave¬
nue is not enough. These extensions would probably some¬
thing more than double the capacity of the existing subway,
but inasmuch as the existing subway carries only  400,000