Columbia University Libraries Digital Collections: The Real Estate Record

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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)