Columbia University Libraries Digital Collections: The Real Estate Record

The Record and guide: v. 38, no. 961: August 14, 1886

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August 14, 1886 The Record and Guide. 1025 THE RECORD AND GUIDE, Published every Saturday. 191 Broad-TArav, IST. "S". Onr TeleplLoue Call Is.....JOHN 370. TERMS: ONE YEAR, in adyance, SIX DOLLARS. Communications should be addressed to C. W. SWEET, 191 Broadway. J. T. LESDSEY, Business Manager. Vol. August 14, 1886. No. 961. A volume which should be in the hands of every huilder, con¬ tractor, architect, and owner and dealer in real estate, is now ready and can be procured at the offlce of The Record and Guide. It is a new edition of the law relating to huildings in the City of New York, with added matter, marginal notes and colored engravings to illustrate the subject. It contains the law limiting the height of dwelling-houses, also the existing Mechanics^ Lien Law. This work is edited hy William J. Fryer, Jr., whose original and well-thought-out comments give it a special value. The volume tvill also contain a complete directory of architects in New York, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Newark and Yonkers. The book is handsomely hound in cloth, and is sold at the low price of seventy-five cents, hy mail eighty-five cents. The business situation has taken on a new phase during the past week. Money has suddenly become tight—that is to say, loans which could have been made at 2% per cent, last week have been ruling at 5, 6 and 7 per cent, during the last few days. Some of this increase is entirely legitimate and is due to the greater demand for money in business circles to start new enterprises or extend industries already established. Should the use of money continue high we will doubtless soon see shipments of gold from abroad, for the rates of interest rule low on the other eide of the water and money would come over here for more profitable employment should it seem probable that the rate of interest here would con¬ tinue at the present rate. --------•-------- It seems that what the banks have lost in reserves during the past year, about $55,000,000, has been gained by the treasury. Money is being made artificially scarce by being locked up in the government repositories. No one is advantaged by this abstraction of money from circulation but the national banks, which are now able to ask from 5 to 7 per cent, for loans, and if the present government treasury policy is continued money will rule at a pre¬ mium over the legal rate of interest, as the business community are all borrowprs. Practically they are taxed for the benefit of the national banks and the-money lenders, hence the popularity of the Morrison surplus resolution in the last Congress. The complaint of the West and South is that it is national bank officers, Messrs. Manning and Jordan, who control the policy of the treasury in the interest of the national banks. How strange a fact it is that our Eastern press in this matter, as on the wlver question, work in the interests of the banks and not in that of the commercial com¬ munity. -----------a----------- Still, no matter what the policy of the Treasury Department, the rate of interest on money was certain to rise during the coming business season. Not only is there a better demand for money for industrial enterprises, but there is a steady shrinkage of the volume of national bank currency. Were it not for the relief given by the continued coinage of silver, and the issue of certifi¬ cates thereupon, money would soon become very tight and com¬ mand an excessive rate of interest because of the steady contrac¬ tion of the paper circulation. One good effect would follow were money to command 5 or 6 per cent. It would draw gold from Europe. Another good result might be a check to speculation in Wall street, for 3 and 4 per cent, securities will not look so attractive if money can be loaned out at 5, 6 or 7 per cent. This is a matter Wall street people should bear in mind. never exacted any such commitments from his candidates for Mayor, from the fact that all of them—Wickham, Ely and Grace, etc.—went back on him after being elected. Our city politics is a very dirty puddle which it d.^es not seem possible to purify. Senator William M. Evarts delivered himself of a short speech on the silver question just before the last session closed, in which he urged that our government should sound other governments as to what they were willing to do in establishing a metallic currency to which all the commercial nations could abide by. Mr. Evarts tried to correct a very curious hallucination common among thinkers and writers on this subject, that adding to the number of grains of silver in a dollar would restore the parity between the two metals and solve the problem of the standard of value. In the absence of any ratio being established for the coinage of both metals it is clear that the two will keep on " parting company" and that gold will steadily appreciate, a fact which will show itself by the continuous decline in silver as well as the price of all articles which gold measures. Certain papers have criticised the New York Senator as a fiat money advocate, because he said that it would require a positive law to uphold the price of silver as com¬ pared with gold. Yet that law can give a value to silver is Rhown by the willingness of every trader to take silver dollars of 4123^ grains and the universal rejection of the trade dollar weighing 420 grains. Mr, Evarts is quite right. Adding to the weight of the silver dollar would create endless confusion and would not prevent the continuous decline in the value of the white metal. Notwithstanding the assumption of virtuous indignation by the press in the unearthing of the Squire-Flynn le:;ter it is notorious that similar documents have been employed to keep politicians who have been given profitable offices in the traces. Chester A. Arthur, John Kelly, as well as Hubert O. Thompson must have made the appointees to lucrative positions which they controlled sign papers which put them in the povs^er of their patrons. Of course neither Kelly's or Arthur's name ever appeared in those documents. There was always some go-between, like Plynn in Thompson's case. This Squire-Flynn letter was undoubtedly modelled upon hundreds of letters of the same character. It is also clear that John. Kelly The commission appointed by the Tory government of last fall to inquire into the cause of the depression in trade in Great Britain have found that the distress has been caused not by any diminution in the volume of trade, but because of the falling off in prices. Great Britain manufactures and exports more goods than ever before in its history, but the return in the money it receives there¬ for is not nearly so large as it was ten, or even five years ago. The commission, however, reports that tho condition of tho working classes have improved during the last twenty years, due to the cheapening of goods without a reduction of wages, which last fact they attribute to the infiuence of trades unions. These work¬ ingmen's organizations, by the way, are commended, and a plea is made against any extension of the hours of labor; this last because there has been overproduction. Hence this Tory commission agrees with the extreme labor reformers that a reduction in the hours of labor would be desirable, in that it would put a check to the multiplication of goods which the market cannot absorb. The commissiftn carefully avoids discussing the question of bi-metal- lism, yet it is as clear as the sun in the heaver s that the adoption of gold monc-metallism by the commercial nations has been the main cause of the steady lowering of prices for the past fifteen years, and that the failure to rehabilitate silver as a money metal will cause poignant distress among all who deal in the commodi¬ ties required in the international trade of the world. The interviews with our architects, apropos of our puWic build¬ ings, emphasizes a defect which New Yorkers should be ashamed of and should try and correct in the future. Our school buildings, police stations and some of our courts are very unattractive and in many cases are very shabby structures. People in the West take a special pride in having handsome school houses. A well- proportioned edifice is not necessarily any more costly than is a building rnodelled upon the lines of a barn or an out-house. St. Luke's Hospital, for instance, is one of the most imposing build¬ ings in the city, yet it is of cheap construction and without orna¬ ment. We employ policemen to plan our station houses, while our schoolhouses are put up in so penurious a spirit tiiat they discredit our educational system. The interviews on this subject with lead¬ ing architects, which we give elsewhere, touches upon this and other interesting topics. ------------o------------ Among the most remarkable events of this century must be accounted the arrival of the air-ship Torpillier in London, after a voy-age across the British Channel from Cherbourg. M. L'Hoste, the inventor and navigator, will hereafter rank with Mongolfier, if not with Watt, Fulton and Morse. It may be set down as a demon¬ strated fact that an aerostat or flying-machine can, under favor¬ able circumstances, be driven or guided through the air from one spot on the earth's surface to another. There are many and very great difficulties to overcome, but enough has been accomplished to show that man will, in time, navigate the air as successfully as he has heretofore propelled himself over the land or floated over the ocean. How curiously blind are our daily journals to the vast importance of this conquest of the air; yet,we should have been pre¬ pared for it by the balloon and by the successful experiments of Renard in France, Baumgarten in Germany, and Baronovski in Russia. This is not the place to describe the kind of vessel that will navigate the air. It must not be a balloon, however, which