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No. I WALL STREET, the eighteen-story office building, on the south-east corner of Wall street and Broadway, stands on a plot 30 x 30 feet, which was bought in 1906 for $654,456, or $576 per square foot, or $4 per square inch.
The EXCHANGE BUILDING, 36 to 42 Broadway, one of the largest in the city, is of twenty stories, fronts T16 feet on Broadway and 115 on New street, and has 350,000 square feet of rental space.
Among the New York sky scrapers other building of immense proportions is the twenty-two-story home of the BANK OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, at Exchange Place and William Street. Adjoining it is the eighteen-story building of the Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company. The HANOVER BANK BUILDING, at Nassau and Pine streets, of twenty-three stories, 380 feet, is architecturally one of the most pretentious of the New York sky scrapers. The upper part is decorated with a series of Greek columns surrounded with an elaborate cornice, and the rounded edges give it the effect of a campanile. The intersection of Nassau and Pine streets is a banking and insurance center and the land is extremely valuable.
The BROAD EXCHANGE BUILDING, at Broad street and Exchange Place, fronting 236 feet on Exchange Place and lob feet on Broad street, with a wing of Too feet to Beaver street, has an area of 27,000 square feet to each of the twenty stories. There are forty offices on a floor, reached by eighteen elevators.
The twin domes of the twenty-one-story COMMERCIAL CABLE BUILDING on Broad street rise 317 feet above the curb, and the foundations go clown To6 feet below the surface. The floor of the engineer's room is 40 feet below the sidewalk. The letter carriers deliver mail to 3,300 people in the building, and the elevators carry 25,000 passengers a day.
The PARK Row BUILDING, on Park Row, facing the Post-Office, has thirty-one stories, with a height from sidewalk to cornice of 336 feet; to top of towers 390 feet; to top of flagstaff 447 feet; depth of foundation below street line, 75 feet; total height from foundation to flagstaff truck 552 feet. The weight of 20,000 tons or 40,000,000 pounds is carried on 4.000 piles driven into the sand 40 feet down to bedrock. There are 950 offices, 2,080 windows, 1,770 doors, 7,500 electric lights and 3,500 tenants. As shown by a count for a week (six days of ten hours each), the ten elevator cars travel 16.38 miles an hour, and carry up an average of 814 persons an hour, or 8,14o a day, or 48,860 a week.
The Park Row owners tell us that the building stands so firm that in the highest gales a plumb line test fails to show the slightest tremor of the structure. All the New York sky scrapers are braced to withstand wind pressures; in some of them vibration is perceptible in a storm, but as with bridges, this is not regarded as an indication of weakness. A pendulum clock on the top floor of the American Surety has been stopped by the vibration of the building in a storm; and the vibration of the top floors in a twenty-story building has been sufficient to move the water in a bowl.
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