March 21, 1908





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Vol. LXXXL





MARCH 21,  390S.





No,  20S8.





OUR FORTIETH BIRTHDAY.

FORTY years ago the first number of the Record and Guide
__or, to give tiie full title it bore then and still bears—the

Real Estate Reeord and Builders' Guide, was issued from its
humble birthplace in the old World Building. March 21 of
that year also fell on a Saturday. Already the building was
dingy and shabby, without being in the least venerable, and
it was so flimsy aud combustible that wiien it succumbed to
flre in the early eighties it did not leave enough debris to fli!
tlie cellar. The contrast between those quarters and those
from which the present number is published is an epitome
of the growth of New York, of which growth that o£ the
journal then begun has been an unfailing and perhaps the
most trustworthy index. For, as Henry George accurately
laid it down, however disputable the deductions he drew
from it, the advance in land values is the most unmistakable
of all the symptoms of material progress, and tbe real estate
market the most infallible barometer of prosperity. So long
as New York retains the commercial primacy which bids fair
to last until that distant and almost unimaginable day when
the Asiatic shall supersede the European market in the in¬
terest of American producers and consumers, so long will
its growth be the infallible index of national as well as of
merely municipal wellbeing. And the growth of New York
during these forty years is not only typified, but is expressed
in a comparison between the sixteen pages, rather meagrely
filled, of the first number of the Record and Guide, and the
number, by no means exceptional in point of size, which
is the occasion and the vehicle of these remarks. That is a
consideration which, in a season of financial and commer¬
cial depression like tlie present, it is very well to bear in
mind. "Wait till yoi! come to Forty Year," sings Thackeray
in the ballad which he entitled "The Age of Wisdom." It
is, at any rate, the age of experience, for an institution as
for a man. It seems to be a law of nature in the modern
commercial world that no commercial enterprise can come
to it without liaving weathered more than one of such
stresses of weather as the business world is now undergoing.
At any rate, such an experience carries the subject of it
far beyond the experimental stage, converts it, in fact, from
an undertaking into an institution. How many ventures
proclaim their confidence that they have come to "meet a
long-felt want"? How many show by failure that they have
misjudged either the extent and the reality of the want or
else their own capacity for supplying, it. The highways of
general journalism, the by-ways of special or trade jour¬
nalism, are alike strewn with the wrecks of these projects.
Tbe special path which the Record and Guide began to break
forty years ago to-day was then quite untrodden. But natu¬
rally it was not long before there appeared here also the
cheerful speculative optimist, confident that he could meet
the want of which the existence had clearly enough been
demonstrated by the pioneer that he could do it cheaper, or do
it more acceptably, or do it somehow better by doing it some¬
how otherwise. But the recollection of the latest of these
rivalries has already become a misty memory. Not that
they may not have had their uses, and called attention to
some parts of the field which otherwise would have been in
danger of being overlooked or slighted. It is at once one
pf the trials and one of the glories of American business
life that no business institution is "established" beyond the
wholesome danger of competition.    Many such seem to be





so in older countries, in spite of such vicissitudes as the
leading journal of the world has just been passing through
iQ England. In this country, at any rate, a journal can hold
its ground only while it fulfils the purpose of its existence
better than that purpose could be fulfilled in its absence.
An "establishment" of forty years does not count for much
more than one of lour, if this primary condition be not ful¬
filled. The Record and Guide, at least, is quite aware of the
conditions of its tenure, and that eternal vigilance is the
price of the favor it enjoys among the classes to which it
makes its appeal.

But "the past, at least, is secure," and the record of the
increasing public recognition of the service it has tried to
render something to be not boastingly, but as humbly as
gratefully acknowledged. It is a rare thing indeed in the
swift and violent vicissitudes of American business life for a
business enterprise to go on steadily for forty years under
virtually the same ownership and direction, and with so
singularly little of change in the more responsible places oE
its staS, with none, it may almost be said, excepting what
have been caused by expansion or by death. This journal
bas grown under the same auspices under which It was
planted, has grown and branched out until it has come to
deal with matters far beyond the original contemplation of
its founder, though always entirely germane to its original
purposes, Por, indeed, to a journal which professes to be a
"real estate record and builders' guide," and aspires to be
the organ of the "landed interest" of what long since its
foundation has come to be Greater New York, no question of
municipal government or municipal improvement is foreign.
To fulfil its mission it must form and express opinions on
building laws, including not only legal safeguards against
the danger of flre, but laws intended, like the tenement house
laws, to enforce a higher sanitary and even a higher social
and moral standard of living among that great majority
which cannot choose how it will live, but must accept the
least desirable, which is to say the cheapest abodes which
the law will allow to be used for human habitation. It must
form and express opinions upon all manner of public im¬
provements, upon park reservations and park-making, upon
school-house building, upon new systems of intercommu¬
nication, in so far as these are dependent upon municipal
construction or municipal credit, upon municipal expendit¬
ures which are not expected to make immediate or direct
pecuniary return as well as upon those that are, and that
are therefore advocated as in the nature of municipal in¬
vestments. In a word, it must have a voice in those "local
politics" which have nothing at all to do with politics prop¬
erly so called, but which are merely matters of municipal
economy, of municipal housekeeping. And it must, in the
interest of its constituency, especially form and express opin¬
ions upon whether the time is ripe to prosecute improve¬
ments of which the abstract desirableness is unquestioned,
and of which it is not denied that they should be done "some
time." And, inevitably, inevitably if such a journal fulfils
the purpose of its creation, its special function and its special
constituency attract to it the attention of the specialists
in these matters, who seek in it a hearing from others in¬
terested in the same municipal problems as they themselves.
So that, in the course of time, it becomes a sort of witness-
box for "expert testimony," and comes to speak upon its
own subjects with an authority beyond the reach or the
scope of the general press. And exposition and discussion
of all these matters, however they may seem to transcend
the original purpose of the publication, and however far they
may, in fact, transcend the original expectations of its found¬
ers, are not only legitimate, but inevitable developments of
an organ of the real estate and building interests which
succeeds in finding acceptance as such an organ.

One development there has been which has transcended
not only the expectation of the founder, but the local limi¬
tations of the original plan, one scion which has been trans¬
planted from the parent stem and attained an independent
existence of its own. Curiously enough, one of the editorial
articles in that initial number of forty years ago treated of
lhe relations between "Architecture and Building," But
not for fourteen years was architecture one of the topics
of the paper. In the number for October 7-14, 1SS2, ap¬
peared a genera! and introductory article on "New York
Architecture," which announced the intention of discussing,
from time to time, and judging in the light of architectural
principles, the erections of Manhattan which might seem
to be worth such discussion. From that time onward such
discussions became a frequent feature, almost a regular de-