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Real estate record and builders' guide: v. 81, no. 2088: March 21, 1908

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March 21, 1908 RECORD AND GUIDE 475 ESTABUSHED-^ MWCH21V.^1B68. DE^TED P f^L EsTAn.BuiLDIlfc A,R,Cl(rrEeTUR.E ,h(cUSnJ011i DESOfiATlOtl, Bi/sti&ssAffoThemes orGEjiEfVil Interest. PRICE PER YEAR IN ADVANCE EIGHT DOLLARS Communications should he addressed to C. W. SWEET Vnblished Every Saturday By THE RECORD AND GUIDE CO. President, CLINTON W. SWEET Treasurer, P. W. DODGE VIco-Pres. fi Genl. Mgr,. H. W. DESMOND Secretary, P. T. MILLER Nos. 11 to 15 East 24tli Street, IVew YorU City *' {Telephone, Madison Square, 4430 to 4433.) "Entered at the Post Office at Vein York, N. Y., ns second-class matter." Copyrighted, 1907, by The Record fi Goide Co, 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-