The San Francisco call., 1898-12-23
ARCHITECT
 MEETS WITH
 ARCHITECT Relations That Were Often Strained. AN EXPERTING OF THE EXPERT THE NICE POINT OF A PUNC-
 TUATIoN POINT. Efforts of the Senate Committee to Get Down to the Founda-
 tion of the Ferry
AN EXPERTING OF THE EXPERT
THE NICE POINT OF 4 PUNC-
 TUATION POINT.

The Senate investigation of contracts and contractors, specifications original and specifications revises, often develops into a war of the architects. These great builders of the houses of the common wealth occasionally take the field, or rather the floor, to be more parliamentary than military, and plan clashes on plan, while the grave Senators look on and wonder where they-as General Dickinson said yesterday-are at.
 When the ferry structure was piling itself high on it's concrete foundations and the costs were piling themselves high on the original estimates somebody with an eye to the solving of intricate problems and a soul to clouds of facts and figures began to call for light along the ways of its construction. The Senate committee into whose hands the matter finally tumbled employed an architect to expert the whole affair from conception to cu- pola. J. W. Reid, the architectural in vestigator selected to do the work, labored for months along the rugged ways gone over by the State Harbor Commission in the task of rearing the great mass of steel and granite on the water front of this city.
 Expert Reids figures said a number of things not nice on their bare face. He intimated that certain contractors found building ferry structures an exceedingly good thing. Of course the contractors said mo such thing,' and came down to the investigation armed with denials. The expert said in the tumble of the plans and specifications the Commissioners lost sight of the subject of costs until almost sl0O, 900 had been distributed somewhere, certainly not over the building. They in effect came back with the word tumble, and said the report Reid read was tumble of figures
 Architect E. R. Swain, who drew up the revised plans, stands by his work, and between Expert Reid and himself there Is architectural war which starts from a courteous and technical discussion and passing rapidly up story by story untll their relations get into the condition known as strained.
 Yesterday MT. Swain raised his hand against his brother architect, hgurauVely speaking, until Senator Dickinson re- minded the two gentlemen that ne was due in the capital on the frst Monoay III January and to save time now they must be good. 1., Bros contractors of wood work Tn the first and second stories or the Ietts 1,as ing. testified before the committee yes terday. uo, for partitions, etc, ot oak at q ,,uSr,ed coSI o5 pine was substituted which, with a doup, ling of partitions and other addltionai work, was figured at $zl,o43. II was Iu ueIu by the contractor that if the revised plans had been carried out in oak the cost would have been $3016O, ana II was claimed that the State saved the QlHer- ence s0617 Around this arose much dlf- ference of opinion, and it was denied that the original plan did not call TOT oak par titions General Dickinson asked TOT the original plan, which is. locked up Tn the safe deposit vaults, and succeeded in un- covering a resolution adopted py tne Board of Harbor Commissioners which read as follows in the boards minutes:
 To erect all additional partitions in wait waiting nj; nartitions at Iavatories ticket offices. baggage rooms Wells-Fargo and postotnces:; eo no and second stories throughout from quartered oak to kilndried Oregon pine; L9 olr5 s5oas all i
 nishing in mezzanine story. Total. Sz9so.
 The simple English of these lines set fled Senator Dickinson into the positive Knowledge that oak was oak, whether III the original plan or out or the revlseu: Contractor Bateman obJected to ESpert pI. Reid's version of the resolution, statlns that Reid had slightly changed it's sense by changing a word and particuiarly py using a period when there should De vision which changed oak to pine,. botanical transformation to a dot-ot pen or an infection of a voice. General Dickinson again broke into the ulscusSitoi ssto1 on the shades of punctuation as applied to ferry depot construction and remind ed the debaters that the committeeman were not there for the purpose or gong into the niceties of the details, but for the single object of finding how many dol lars. if any, the State Is out of pocket in her ferry building account Architect Swain accused Architect Reid with try ing to mislead the committee with his neTiod and relations were straining again when the calm, rebuking voice of the general spoke peace and eased up on the tension.
 Failing to get the disputants down to a common ground in their figures, from which the committee could start in the oak-pine matter, General Dickinson asked the witness what was the area of the work done in those stories This was a poser. for neither contractor nor archi- | tect nor plan could answer. The chairman insisted on an answer, stating that they must get back to first principles or to some point whence they could make some headway. and finally get somewhere. A number of queries which appeared to be models of simplicity, brevity and con- | ciseness failed to bring out any part of the needed information and the invest- gators, in the vernacular of the water l front, fetched slap up on the rocks. To extricate themselves from the dilem- ma General Dickinson proposed that Con- tractor Bateman employ another expert architect at the expense of the State, to 1 measure those pine-furntshed rooms. The | architects of the committee and commits sion would be present to see that the third expert did not run any revised measure ments in on the Investigating Senator's | This was agreed to and to-day both par ties will learn how many feet of pine were put into those rooms. The committee ad- i journed until 10 o'clock tomorrow for the purpose of giving the expert day to get | his meas aSllrpmentS.