The City That Died of Greatness

An Alarmed New Yorker Discusses What the Skyscrapers Are Doing to His Home Town

DEEMS TAYLOR

IF, emerging from the Grand Central Station in the city of New York, you will turn slightly to the left, so that you face the southeast corner of Forty-second Street and Lexington Avenue; and if, having done so, you will look upward, twisting your neck back as far as it will go, you will probably be able to see to the top of the tower of the new Chanin Building, to which the workmen are putting the finishing touches and whose fifty-two stories attain a height of 625 feet.

Directly opposite you is the Pershing Square Building, a comparatively squat structure whose thirty stories reach a mere 363 feet into the air. Look slightly to the right and you will see a gaping hole beside the Hotel Belmont. Here will soon arise a fifty-three story structure that will stand about 600 feet high. Step to the curb and look to your left, toward the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street. This time next year that corner will be occupied by the new Reynolds Building, the tallest building in the world, whose sixty-seven story tower will rise 808 feet above the street level. Further up Lexington Avenue, a block to the north, is the Graybar Building, another monster. A block or two still further north, spanning Park Avenue, the new Grand Central Building has sprung to a height that would have necessitated a balloon ascension a halfcentury ago. About you, in other words, in a district less than 200 yards square, stands— or will stand, shortly—a group of skyscrapers whose floor space totals nearly 100 acres and whose tenants outnumber the combined population of Cheyenne, Wyoming; Brownsville, Texas; Reno, Nevada; Emporia, Kansas; and Albuquerque, New Mexico.*

JUST what is going to happen when all these new congeries discharge their inmates upon streets already stuffed like a Strassburg goose is a question that has at last caused a certain amount of uneasiness in high circles. There was a meeting not long ago of an organization called—aptly enough—The Forty-second

Street Property Owners and Merchants Association, to discuss traffic problems. One member reported that it had taken him twenty-eight minutes to go from Seventh to Lexington Avenues—a distance of half a mile—in a taxicab. Another more conservative soul had taken a crosstown car, and had spent twentyfive minutes in traversing the three-quarters of a mile between Second and Eighth Avenues. These adventures, they pointed out, had befallen them in the middle of the afternoon, when traffic was by no means at its most acute stage of congestion. But Mr. George W. Sweeny, president of the organization, supplied the optimistic note without which no meeting of any group in America to discuss anything could ever properly end.

* This comparison is not fantastic. The combined population of the cities mentioned, according to the census of 1920, was 64,066; by no means an exaggerated estimate of the skyscraper population in the crowded Grand Central District of New York City

"However," said Mr. Sweeny in part, "I have faith in the future. A way will be found to solve this and other problems arising from the magical developments of this district, when the time comes that they must be solved. Forty-second Street is on its way, and nothing can stop it."

To which I can only venture the timid opinion that Mr. Sweeny must have a sunny nature whose capacity for optimism has doubtless never been exceeded since the days of Voltaire's Candide; that while Forty-second Street may be on its way, that way is at the present dizzying rate of one mile an hour; and that, far from nothing's being able to stop it, the very inhabitants of Forty-second Street are going to stop it before very long, by the simple expedient of being piled three deep from curb to curb.

Forty-second Street is no exception, of course. Anyone who has ever tried to get anywhere on Manhattan Island below Seventysecond Street knows that New York is one of the few great cities in the world where the pedestrian reaches his destination faster than the occupant of any vehicle except an airplane. I dimly recollect reading several comments upon New York traffic congestion during the past ten years. But I wonder if even the commentators realize with what appalling rapidity the city has slowed down, and how glacier-like appears the future of its inhabitants.

AS one of a handful of New Yorkers who were actually born in the city, I remember New York when it had no skyscrapers; when the steeple of Trinity Church and the gilded dome of the Pulitzer Building were two towering landmarks on the skyline; when the new cable-cars whizzed up and down the streets at fifteen miles an hour, bidding fair to render horse-cars obsolete and causing the corner of Broadway and Fourteenth Street to be known as "Dead Man's Curve"; when Daly's Theatre, in the late Twenties, was at the outermost fringe of the theatrical district, and the reservoir stood on the site of the present public library, and a reference to the goats of Harlem was no figure of speech.

In those days, if you wanted to make the long trek from Washington Square to the Grand Central Station, you hailed a hansom cab, which landed you at your destination after an endless journey lasting twenty minutes. One afternoon last August, during the hottest, deadest period of the year, when simply nobody is in New York, I had occasion to go from Washington Square to Fortieth Street and Park Avenue. I leaped into a passing taxi, telling the driver not to spare the horses. That leap was the last burst of speed that marked the journey. Fifty-two minutes later, after jumping two traffic lights and attracting the hostile attention of four traffic policemen, the taxi, breathless and triumphant, completed its journey of one mile and three quarters.

The skyscrapers, New York's invention and America's proudest architectural boast, may yet be the ruin of New York and many another American city unless we do something about them. They are another proof of the fact that man's cleverness is generally far in advance of his intelligence, that his ingenuity in devising new instruments of civilization is by no means accompanied by any resourcefulness or imagination in handling them. The skyscraper was born of the sudden realization that if you pile floor-space vertically, instead of spreading it horizontally, you can easily house an acre-full of people in a hundred-foot square. (The daily population of the Woolworth building, for instance, would ordinarily be a city of ten thousand population, covering several square miles of territory.)

Like all brilliant discoveries, this was a simple one; and if it had been intelligently handled, would have made New York or any other city a paradise to live in; for if only part of the space so liberated had actually been left free, if the skyscrapers had been spaced five hundred feet apart, as they should have been, the American metropolis would have comprised a series of towers surrounded by vast areas of parks, gardens, and drives. Indeed, if the skyscraper had been, say a French invention, the city of Paris would present just such an appearance today; for the French, being a realistic people, well aware that the average man knows and cares nothing about the common good, have laws telling him just where and how and what he may build.

But this is a free country, wherein any man, provided he does not actively annoy his neighbor, may lay up as much future trouble as he pleases for his neighbor's grandchildren. So the skyscrapers, with their enormous housing capacity and consequently enormous rent-producing potentialities, were allowed to go up as close together as they could be built. The final result being a street like Fortysecond Street between Lexington and Fifth Avenues, three blocks whose sidewalks can accommodate perhaps 10,000 people and upon which 50,000 people are discharged at five o'clock every afternoon.

WHAT is going to happen when still more and bigger skyscrapers go up, no one, not even Mr. Sweeny, seems to know. At present, except for the floating population in the hotels and the dwellers in the endless and dreary rows of skyscraper apartments on Park Avenue nobody lives any more in the heart of New York. The streets are too full of people going to business and the buildings are too full of people doing business, to allow any space to be wasted in mere living. It is safe to say that the average New Yorker lives from five to thirty miles away from the office in which he earns his living, and spends from one to four hours a day simply in getting to and from his place of business. His means of transportation are becoming consistently slower. Buses are useless, except for sightseeing; the street-cars are not even good for that; and even taxicabs are forced to a rate of speed that any moderately healthy perambulator can exceed.

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He still has his subways, the New Yorker, and the elevated; but the latter, badly as it is needed, cuts off so much of what little light and air the skyscrapers have left that it will inevitably have to go. As for the subways, however fast new ones may be built, the skyscrapers outstrip them, so that every new line is jammed to twice its theoretical capacity within a week after its opening.

There are plenty of other proposed remedies for this congestion, of course. The city abounds in stable-door lockers. Even the cheery Mr. Sweeney envisages, in due time, such blessings as "a separation of grades at street crossings, underground or overhead pedestrian sidewalks, the elimination of street cars and the substitution of buses, the exclusion of unnecessary vehicles during business hours, the widening of roadways, the establishment of parking facilities on private ground or at least off the streets; the elimination of left-hand turns . . . possibly in the construction of multideck roads from river to river."

The trouble with many of these panaceas—the widened streets and the private parking spaces, for instance— is that there is no land left available for them. The trouble with the rest is that by the time any of them can he installed the populace of New York will probably have trampled itself to death, or have been run over. The only thing that will cure the disease of the skyscraper is to stop building skyscrapers, or else space them a decent distance apart. And we will never do that until we realize that trespassing on another man's air is as bad as trespassing on his land.

Perhaps the best thing to do, after all, would be to wait ten years, until New York is so hopelessly congested that no one can move at all. The population will then migrate in a body, and New York can be set aside by the government as a national park—the city that was so prosperous that nobody could afford to buy real estate, that was such an ideal place of business that nobody could transact any business, the metropolis so greedy for population that it choked itself to death.