The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-01-08
HOUSE CLEANING
 A SKfoLRAPEk
THE GREATEST OF ALI HOUSE.
 EAEArlNG JOBS.
A Small Handful of Mea and Women keeps a .scrapers m Apple
 Pie Order.

New York Letter by Anthony Hem
 son.
 If, as 1t is said. the average house wife awaits with fear and trembling the coming of the weekly sweeping day. what ought to be the state Of mind of the man who every working day in the year cleans. with the thor oughness of housecieaning time, the equivalent of 100 to 200 houses of seven rooms each?
 Beside himself7 Ready to jump out of his skin7 Half crazy? Nothing ot the sort. Taken by and large he IS as cool headed an individual as could be found in a days journey. He's got to be cool-headed. Otherwise he'd never get his work done; for he's the man who is variously known as Janitor and superintendent of the modern skycrap- CT. and his whole duty is to keep the great pile of steel ard bricks and mor- tar as clean and tidy for it's 5000 or 1000 occupants. as 1t is possible for elbow grease to make 1t.
 But, some doubting housewife may say rise to remark, surely cleaning skyscraper isn't anywhere near equiv- alent to sweeping and dusting and scrubbing a hundred or two houses
 Isn't 1t, though? We'll. here Is handful of statistics that ought to dis pei all doubts on the subject and make the doubter thank her lucky stars that she's just a housewife with only one little seven-room house to scrub and dust, and not the man responsible fol the physical condition of a twenty-five story office building.
 In the first place, take that house which she cleans once a week. with the assistance, parhars. of maid. If each of the seven rooms averages I2x 14 feet--a pretty liberal average, by the way--the aggregate floor surface of the rooms would be only ten short of 1900 feet. Allow 800 square feet for the area of halls and stairs, and the housewife has about i.50o square feet of floor surface to clean.
 Now. a skyscraper that has any pretentions at all to "scraping'' Is ev- cry bit of twenty-five stories in night, each story being as high as that of the average suburban dwelling house Of two stories and an atticl while its floor surface varies all the way from 5000 to 10000 square feet to each story. Let us be fair and give the representative skyscraper floor sur face of. say 7.500 square feet to each story. Then the combined surfaces of the twenty-five floors total 1S7,5OO Sf1otC tOSh, VT ASo tAihCS luc HUT sur face contained in the dwelling house of 1,500 square feet.
 Compared With the AIousewife's Job.
 There you are. Is there any house. wife who thinks she has troubles of her own who would like to exchange places for a day with the skyscraper superintendent?
 If there isn't. perhaps there is a boy somewhere who Is dissatisfied with life because every morning It's his lot to sweep out the leading grocery store of the town. Maybe he would like to relieve the skyscraper janilor of his job for a while. But walt: First let II he known that some janitor who Is sharp at figures has calculated that cleaning a fourteen-story scraper," with 9.375 square feet to each floor. is equivalent to tidying up the entire business portion of a representative Western town--hardware store, dry goods store, bank. grocery store. church. library, public hall post and telegraph offices, market. fire house. drug store, shoe store,t hotel. Y. M S. A. building. new store, cIgar shop school house. plumbers snop, harness shop, a second grocery store. ditto g market, and living quarters for a score or more of families over such busi- ness places as news and cigar stores And this building is the skyscraper of ten years ago. while the one of to-day is nearly twice as high and with doub- le the floor area.
 Does the youngster still want to lay aside his broom and brush for tho cal of the superintendent? But ne doub: less will not when he learns that q skyscraper, no matter how big it Is- whether It's stories number fifteen UI thirty. its floor space 1000 ar 10000 feet per floor-has to be cleaned from top to bottom Tn five hours, no mOI {. sometimes less time.
 How It Is Done.
 It's this way. From o'clock fin the morning till in the afternoon, busi- ness of all sorts Is being carried Oh full blast in the various suites of of- fices by 1900, 2,500, 5000 occupan n .s and their several thousand callers These callers usually far outnumber the buildings occupants; a New York skyscraper of fourteen stories has L. 500 occupants and the number of per. sons daily carried up in the elevator average 7.500. All these thousands oi workers are too much engrossed in their bargaining to brook interference by scrub woman. porter and window cleaner So the cleaners wait and watch around five o'clock for "a ten- ant to leave his office. and almost be- fore he has set foot in the elevator they are swarming all over the office "a half dozen of them. One woman, on her knees, scrubs the concrete floor porter assists her by mopping 1t; the dust Is flecked off furniture. wood work and walls by woman with a