New Britain herald., 1926-10-30
SPANISH FLATS
 WILL BE RAZED
Noted New York Buildings Not
 First Apartment Houses


 looking Central Park in New York City, reputed to be the first high class apartment houses in the New World, are to be demolished.
 It would be more accurate to de- scribe these buildings as the first apartments erected since Columbus discovered America. For early American Indians lived in apart nents which were pretentious com- munal abodes.
 Pueblo Bonito, in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico explored by National Geographic Society expedition led by pr. Nell M. Judd, was one of the most noteworthy of these aboriginal homes, situated in the pre-Colum- bian metropolis of America.
 Ten Times Size of White House
 This hube communal dwelling, In it's heyday, sheltered some 1900 in- dividuals. The explorers find today broken pile of once-terraoed homes that rose four stories in height and covered ten times more ground than does the White House, in Washington. It is the dead echo of an aboriginal venture in democ- racy that reverberated throughout our desert regions at least 500 years before Columbus set forth on his memorable journey to the New World.
 The National Geographic Society began intensive exploration of Pueblo Bonito In 1921. Each suc- ceeding summer has found the so- ciety representatives at work there, delving into the secrets of an an- cient people who left no written rec ord of their thoughts and experi- ences. A hundred thousand tons of earth and stone and blown sand have been carted away. revealing a veritable maze of empty rooms in which the former occupants unwit- tingly left the ineradicable thumb prints of their distinctive culture.
 Life Strenuous and Complex
 Life in prehistoric Bonito' was surprisingly modern. It was both strenuous and complex; yet it re- mained simple, withal. It witnessed the coming together of at least two distinct groups of people. and their subsequent development of perhaps the most extraordinary pre-Colum- bian settlement north of Mexico.
 Theancient Bonitans were back yard farmers. They dwelt in this compact village-an aboriginal apartment house, if you will-cov- ering over three acres of ground, standing four stories in height, and containing fully eight hundred rooms. No other apartment house of comparable size was known in America or in the Old World until the Spanish Flats were erected ip 1882 at 59th Street and Seventh Avenue, New York City.
 Desert plants furnished edible seeds and skilled hunters brought occasional game from distant mesas. Nevertheless. the principal source of the Bonitian's food-supply lay in their neighboring garden plots, where corn. beans, and squash staple food of our prehistoric, Sc dentary Americans-were intensive ly cultivated. And. if we may judge by modern Pueblo practices, the colorful clan ceremonies periodically performed by these farmers of the long ago had for their fundamental purposes the propitiation of tribal gods to the end that more bounti- ful harvests might be brought about.
 Indians Developed Irrigation
 Historians of the Old World offer convincing argument that irrigation originated on the sandy borders of the Nile and the Euphrates. Wheth' CT this be true or not, 1t is well known that similar methods of crop production were developed in our own arid Southwest by Indians who had never heard of the Egyptian Pharaohs or the splendors of for gotten Babylon.
 In prehistoric Bonito there ex- isted a curious division of domestic responsibility. Woman's rights were already recognized and in vogue. The head of the Bonitian household was the wife and mother not the husband. Times have changed since then, bit history tends always to repeat itself. Bonftian fathers had the responsibility of providing for their families, yet the women owned their homes and brooked no inter ference in purely domestic affairs.
 Mother Supreme in Home
 Among primitive sedentary peo- ples this had always been true. Man reigned supreme out-of-doors, in the chase, for example. or in the fields. The corn was his so. long as 1t re- main unharvested, but once dried and safely stored in the dark, inner rooms of the place he called home, possession passed: automatically to his better half. At her direction only 1t was doled out and crushed in the family fnealing mortars.
 In Pueblo Bonito a daily task for the daughters of every household was the preparation of the allotted ration of maize. Metates were brushed with bunch of grass; the corn was shelled and crushed to degree of fineness dictated by the particular use for which it was in tended. And while precious yellow kernels were being crunched between the milling stones, black-eyed maidens shyly gossiped of promising village swains or sang such pleasing grind | ing sopgs as have often been heard 1 through open doorways at Zuni.
 Excepting the present generation, which has been somewhat schooled | in the ways of the white man, Pueblo peoples have changed but 1