The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-01-15
HOUSE CLEANING IN GREAT SKY SCRAPER Janitor of Modern Office 8uiId-
 ing a Busy Man WORK IS DONE RAPIDLY Comparatively Small Force of Men and Women Clean Up Building
 in Remarkably Short Time.
 Expense is Heavy.
WORK IS DONE RAPIDLY
From the Baltimore Herald.

Fl om the Baltimore Herald
 If. as it is said. the average house. wife awaits with fear and trembling the com ing of the weekly sweeping day, what ought to be the state of mind of the man who every day n the year cleans, with the thoroughness O. housekeeping time, the equivalent of 100 to 200 houses ot seven rooms each?
 Beside himself? Ready to jump out of his skin? Half crazy? Nothing of the sort. Taken all in all he is as cool-head- ed an individual as could be found in a days journey. He's got to be cool-head- ed. Otherwise he'd never get his work done for he's the man who is variously known as ianitor and superintendent of the modren skyscraper. and his whole duty is to keep the great pile of steel and bricks and morton as clean and tidy for it's three or four thousand occupants. as t is possible for elbow grease to make it.
 But some doubting housewife may rise to remark, surely cleaning a skyscraper isn't anywhere near equivalent to sweep Ing and dusting and scrubbing d hundred or two houses.
 Isn't it, though? We'll, here is a hand ful of statistics that ought to dispel all doubts on the subject and make the dorbter thank her lucky stars that she's just housewife with only one little seven-room house to scrub and dust, and not the man responsible for the physical condition of a twenty-five story office building.
 Space to Be Cleaned.
 In the first place. take that house which cleans week. ance. perhaps of a maid. If each of the seven rooms average 12x14 feet-a pretty liberal average, by the way-the aggre- gate floor surface of the rooms would be only ten short of 120O feet Allow 300 square feet for the area of halls af5l stairs, and the housewife has about 15OO square feet of floor surface to clean
 Now a skyscraper that has any per tensions at all to "scraping" is every bit of twenty-five stories in height each story being as high as that of the aver age suburban dwelling house of two stories and an attic, while it's floor sur face varies all the way from 5000 to 10000 square feet to each story. Let us be fair and give the representative si<yscraper floor surface of, say 7,500 square feet to each story. Then the combined surfaces Of the twenty-five floors total lS7 300 square feet or 125 times the floor surface contained in the dwelling house of 15O0 square feet.
 There you are. Is there any house. wife who thinks sic mas troubIes of her own who would like to exchange places for day with the skyscraper superin- tendent?
 Lively Boy Wanted.
 If there isn't. perhaps there's boy somewhere who is dissatisfied with life because every morning it's his lot to sweep out the leading grocery store of the auha hnfH ilxa fN f-sa1fa tha sSyscraper janitor of his job for a while But wait! First let 1t be known that that same janitor who Is sharp at figures has calculated that cleaning a fourteen-story 'scraper." with 9375 square feet to each floor is equivalent to tldying up the en- tire business portion of representative western town--hardware store. dry goods store, bank, grocery store. church. lib- rary, public hall, post and telegraph of fees, market, firehouse, drug store, shoe store, hotel Y. M. c. A. building, news store cigar shop schoolhouse, plumber s shop, harness shop, a second grocery store ditto a market and living quarters for a score or more of families over such business places as news and cigar stores. And this building Is the sky scraper of ten years ago. while the one of today is nearly twice as high and with double the floor space.
 Does the youngster still want to lay dslue HIS broom anu DTuST TOT the cap of the superintendent? But he doubt less will not when he learns that sky scrapeH no matter how big it is-whether it's stories number fifteen thirty, It's floor space 1000 to 10000 feet per floor has to be cleaned form top to bottom in five hours, no more. sometimes less.
 How It Must Be Done.
 It's this way From o'clock in the morning till in the afternoon, business of all sorts Is being carried on full blast in the various suites of offices by 1900 2500 5000 occupants and their several thousand callers. These callers usually fai outnumber the buildings occupants; a New York skyscraper of fourteen stories has 1.S00 occupants and the num- Der of persons daily carried up in the elevators average 7,5o0. All these thou sands of workers-suficient to populate q town the size of Bethelem, Pa.-are too much engrossed in their bargaining to brook interference by scrub woman, porter and window cleaner So the clean CTS wait and watch around 3 o'clock for tenant to leave his office, and al- most before he has set foot in the eie- vator, they are swarming all over the of fice--a half dozen of them. One wom- an, on her knees scrubs the concrete floor; porter assists her by mopping it, the dust is flecked off furniture, wood work and walls by a woman with a big duster a second porter gathers up the waste that has been swept into a pile