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An office building is a city in itself, with its railway in the elevators, its water system, fire extinguishing apparatus on every floor, light, heat and power plants, postoffice and telegraph office, uniformed police force, restaurant, shops and a population running into the thousands. The tenant may supply his manifold wants without going from tinder the roof. He has at command telegraph, telephone and messenger service, and mails his letters in the mail chute, which ex-tends through all the floors, carrying the letters to the mail box at the bottom, where the mail is collected by the postmen. He may lunch in the restaurant on one floor, take out a life insurance policy on another, cash his checks at his bank on a third, and put his valuables in safe-deposit in the basement. He may consult his physician, his broker or his lawyer; visit his tailor, shoeblack, barber and manicurist; and buy his cigars, papers, theater tickets, and flowers and a box of candy for his best girl. In some buildings each individual office has a fireproof safe; in the Vincent lawyer tenants have access to a law library maintained by the building. Many of the New York sky scrapers are open day and night every day in the year.
The Manhattan Life has an artesian well, and the Metropolitan Life draws water from a stream which was once an open brook from Madison Square to the East River, and, being covered up, still flows.
Some of the halls are arcades, with telegraph and messenger offices, news stands, flower stands, and confectionery counters about which the typewriters flock at noon time like so many butterflies. The hall of the Empire Building constitutes the approach from Broadway to the Rector street station of the elevated railroad, and hundreds of thousands of people pass through it every day; it is lined with shops and is a veritable city street.
The elevators in the New York sky scrapers are divided into local, which stop at every floor, and express, which stop only above certain stories. A fine illustration of the spirit of hurry which possesses the average down-town New Yorker is the impatience with which he resents a delay of a five-second elevator stop before he gets to his own floor. In some buildings, as the American Tract Society, there are two sets of elevators, one above the other, so that one must change cars to go to the top. There are automatic brakes to stop the descent of the car in case of accident, and air wells at the bottom of the shaft to serve as cushions if the car should fall. The high-speed elevators have a possible speed of 500 to 700 feet per minute, and in practice are run at 500 to 600 feet. The elevator has been likened to a vertical railroad; and when we come to think of it, it is quite as much an achievement of mechanical skill to take us straight up smoothly and safely forty stories in forty seconds as it is to carry us over the rails at express train speed. The highest development of the elevator is the electric, which is worked by electric motive power and is controlled from the car entirely by electricity.
In the New York sky scrapers cellars and subcellars are the electric light, water and steam-heating plants and the machinery which runs the elevators—an astonishing and bewildering maze of furnaces, boilers, steam engines, dynamos, pumps, pipes and tanks. Under direction of the superintendent of the building is a host of employees—uniformed police, elevator conductors, engineers, sweepers, scrub women and window cleaners. The men who clean windows hundreds of feet in the air wear belts with straps which are fastened to hooks on the outside of the window, so that if one should lose his footing on the window sill he could not fall. An interesting illustration of the specialization of industries in a great city is offered by the towel supply concerns, which make a business of supplying offices with clean towels, soap and other accessories.
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