Omaha daily bee., 1906-12-30
NEW YEAR'SEVElN NEW YORK
Roman Festival Planned TO Divert Gotham
Monday Night.
SEATS IN CAFES AND HOTELS ALL TAKEN
Great Rush to Eat, Drink and
Make Merry as the Clock
Tolls the Passing of
1905 to 1907.

NEW YORK. Dec. 29.-New Years In
New York will be a Roman festival
such as the ancient city by the Tiber
never saw in all its centuries Of
magnihcence. This year the Great White
Way is making preparations for celebra-
ton that will be a wonder even to itself
For two weeks every table in every popular
resort In the lobster belt has been reserved
for the Inevitable supper at prices rang
ing from 81 to s. a seat, and that takes no
account Of the many dollars that will be
spent in other ways after the game is on.
1t is estimated that $1,000 people will par
take OF the feast in that gilded mile of
Broadway, beside which all the rest Of the
world seems tame and uninteresting on New
Years eve. Enough food will be eaten or
wasted to feed an army for a week
end the champagne consumed will float
battleship. The section in which the cele-
bration will be most strenuous extends from
Twenty-third street to Forty-eighth street
and reaches its climax at Longacre Square,
Into which, after the theaters are out,
broadway, Seventh avenue. Forty second
street and Forty-fourth street pour an army
of jewellers and sightseers. Around the
square are ranged the famous restaurants
and hotels where the fun will be most up
roarious. BY virtue of its size, the Hotel
Astor will accommodate the largest num-
ber-between 1900 and 1000 So great has
been the demand for places that the ca
pacity of the regular dining rooms and
cafes was exceeded long ago. and all sorts
of maISeshift preparations have been made
to accommodate the overflow in ball rooms
and parlors.
When the savants Of a future age un-
earth from the debris of some gigantic
cataclysm of nature what is now going on
at the bottom of New York, and survey the
tremendous engineering feats to which the
inhabitants were driven to secure refuge
from the ferocious trolley -dactyl, the hippo
tornobile, the autohornosaurus and other
savage mechanical beats which infested the
island of Manhattan in the early part of
the twentieth century'. the speculations
occasioned thereby will make interesting
eavesdropping for such ghosts as have
found their way back to earth An under
river passage to Brooklyn, as well as one to
New Jersey, is now an accomplished fact.
Under Ninth avenue there is in process of
construction for the Pennsylvania tunnel,
twenty-five feet beneath the curb line a
massive steel bridge designed to support
not only the street above It, but the ele-
waited railroad structure as well. While the
work of building this bridge is going on,
the rush Of traffic at and above the surface
goes on undisturbed. 1t has been found
necessary to support the street for dis
lance of 400 feet between Twenty-first and
Thirty-third streets, and for this purpose
hfty-four enormous steel Orders, each
: axty-one feet long and weighing ten tons
were bought for temporary use on this
part OF the work The latest remarkable
scheme is a double-decked subway under
Lexington avenue, the express tracks be-
meath and the local tracks above, where
the street is too narrow to accommodate
four tracks on the same level. There Is a
project afoot to install I'm this tunnel the
new Behr monorail, which affords possible
speed CT more than 100 miles an hour. In
some places the lower tracks will be nearly
Altogether the bottom Of New York is
getting to be a good ways from the top.
A record breaking long distance clock
setting device has recently been discovered
in the daily noontime blasts Of traT
rock quarry on Hook mountain, some thirty
miles up the Hudson river from this city
A dentist living at Darien Conn, twenty
two miles from Hook mountain, will testify
in a suit before the supreme court a.
White Plains next month that he sets hli
clock daily by the II O'Clock blast at Hool
mountain, the defamation being not alone
audible at his house, but is plainly per
ceptihle in the shaking OF the house when
ever blast is set Off. The Interstate
Palisades Park commission and a numbe