The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-12-07
THE SIZE OF NEW YORK

How big is New York? The question cannot be answered in mere terms of population or municipal area. The size of the city is to be measured more ac- cu1ately by it's dominance in the busi- ness, money and commerce of the na- tion; by the valses of its real estate; by the intensity and magnitude of its &C., tivities; by the variety of its interests ; by the cosmopolite character of it's cit izenship; and by the national and inter- national prestige it enjoys. Having enumerated all its visible and statistical data, one has not yet completed the measure of this most metropolitan of cities.
 Yet some data will serve to help one approximate this city's magnitude. Ac- cording to Mir. B. c. Forbes, eminent statistician, the increase in assessed val uation of real estate in one year was more than one and half billion dollars, sum greater than the total assessed valuation of St. Louis, Cleveland or Bos- ton. It is incredible, yet it means that New York's annual growth is in itself of size excelling that of any American city except only Chicago, which occupies secondary rank in solitary grandeur. The Equitable Building is assessed at thirty millions. This one structure is of greater cash value than the entire municipality of Amsterdam, New York, or of Evans ton, Illinois. Yet taxes are to be levied on 44,333 new buildings this year. Even the property within the city limits of New York that is legally exempt from taxation is valued by the state tax com mission at $833, 3,O0O,OOO, and includes 497,23 buildings, or more than twice as many as there are persons in Blr- mingham.
 The top-notch prices for real estate in clude at least one sale at the rate of $2.11 a square inch, $204 a square foot, or $13,192,240 an acre. At this rate citizen planning home on an average 2O-foot lot of such land would have to pay for it no less than $60S,000 Need : less to say, dwellings are not built on land of this value, even in New York.
 As railroad center of foremost rank New York early assumed leadership in foreign passenger traffic and export and import tonnage. In 1923 eleven raA- roads carried 237, ,867 ,491 passengers into or out of the city. The total waterfront of New York, measured in and out ot pierheads and along the shorelnes, is 92l miles, comprising 400 commercial piers and 5U miles or commercial WHdlldSe, handling approximately one-half the for eign commerce of the United States. As may be expected, the ports capacity is frequently taxed to the utmost, entailing great loss to shippers in consequence, thus laying the predicate and giving the warrant for the present orderly process of equalizing freight and export rates so as to throw more tonnage to other and more convenient seaports. New York is huge, and is served by many trunk line railroads and subsidiaries, which connect with more than 200 steamship lines, but, huge as it is, the funnel has become far too small to accommodate our constantly swelling volume of commerce, to say nothing of the waste and expense of hauling goods to that seaboard, when other ports are so much nearer many centers of production.
 There is a certain majesty in New York's mere size and material impor- tance, but this nation has long passed the one-port, one-metropolis, one-finan- one-dramatic-center stage. Henceforth, New York, while continuing to expand and to be our largest cty, will shrink approximately in comparison with our internal expansion throughout our great and prosperous realm.