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As space is always limited in the basements of sky-scrapers direct connected engines and dynamos are generally installed instead of belt connected and the boilers operated under a high steam pressure. Besides delivering steam to the engines the boilers also supply it to a variety of auxiliary pumps, as boiler-feed, fire-pump, blow-off, tank-pump and pump for forcing water through the building.
The America of Civil War days was a country without transcontinental railroads, without telephones, without European cables, or wireless stations, or automobiles, or electric lights, or sky-scrapers, or million-dollar hotels, or trolley cars, or a thousand other contrivances that today supply the conveniences and comforts of what we call our American civilization.
The next morning we met on the corner, as usual, and Bessie led us to our new job led us through a world that was strange and new to both Eunice and me, though poor Eunice had little heart for the newness and the strangeness of it all. In and out, and criss-cross, we threaded our way through little narrow streets bordered with stately "sky-scrapers," and at last turned into Maiden Lane.
Perhaps this was what made me think of scrap-iron heaps, heights, pinnacles of it. No, there was no sublimity there. Some astronomers have latterly assigned bounds to immensity, but the sky-scrapers go beyond these bounds; they are primordial, abnormal." "You strain for a phrase," we said, "as if you felt the essential unreality of your censure.
It needed but a glance to tell what they were sky-scrapers. "New York!" cried Dick. "We're over New York all right!" "Then I've got to get a message to my paper!" exclaimed Larry. "Is the wireless working?" "We'll have to make a landing to send it up," replied Mr. Vardon. "Well, if we're going down anyhow, a telephone will do as well," went on the reporter.
Instead of being carried on thick walls spread over a considerable area of ground, the sky-scrapers are carried wholly on steel columns. This concentrates many hundred tons of load and develops pressure which would crush the masonry and cause the structures to penetrate soft earth almost as a stone sinks in water.
We should like you to explain again why, if 'The Heart of New York, with its sky-scrapers, made you think of scrap-iron, the Flatiron soothed your lacerated sensibilities?" "The Flatiron is an incident, an accent merely, in the mighty music of the Avenue, a happy discord that makes for harmony.
Now, in 1898, David Cable's hands were white and strong; the grime was gone; the engineer's cap had given way to the silk tile of the magnate; and the shovel was a memory. But his case was not unique in that day and age of pluck and luck. Many another man had gone from the bottom to the top with the speed and security of the elevator car in the lofty "sky-scrapers."
And the fact that a very prominent item in the perspective is a fiery representation of a frothing glass of beer inconceivably large well, this fact too has its importance. But in the sky-scrapers there is a deeper romanticism than that which disengages itself from them externally. You must enter them in order to appreciate them, in order to respond fully to their complex appeal.
The rich and the poor alike suffer from the prevailing lack of taste. The proud "residences" on the Lake Shore are no pleasanter to gaze upon than the sulky sky-scrapers. Some of them are prison-houses; others make a sad attempt at gaiety; all are amazingly unlike the dwelling-houses of men and women. Yet their owners are very wealthy.
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