The Waterbury Democrat., 1934-07-02
In New York
BY PAUL HARRISON

haitian real estate sometimes loom,
 in importance, as. large as quar-
 ter-section tracts.
 In front of cigar store at Sew
 enth avenue and Christopher
 streets is a 20-inch triangle work
 ed in tile into the sidewalk. The
 lettering says: Property of the
 Hess Estate which has never been
 donated for public purposes" The estate, now administered for the benefit of a great many heirs, reg ularly pays taxes on the piece and could, if it chose, put fence around it There's a similar
 square feet of property down near the Bowery. Chances are one in a million that it ever can be put to commercial use, but it might prove handy in case of argument about
 property lines.
 No Trespassing
 Downtown, in front of the IT,
 triangular plot.
 Downtown
 Set into the sidewalk are two tablets, one on the Wall street, one on the Broadway side of the
 corner. They read, sternly: "Pror-
 erty line of One Wall Street Realty Corporation Crossing by per-
 mission only Permission re- vokable at will" Thousands tread on the tablets every day, and the realty outfit had better be glad they don't all come in to get an OK.
 His Error The smallest flaw in survey, or a deed, is likely to prove costly. Not long ago one of the Mrs. Van derbilts decided to buy some prop | erty on East Fifty-seventh street. On the strip were five brownstone
 houses, built in the seventies by a
 Harvey Dennis.
 Vanderbilt agents began an in | vestigation to be sure the title | would be clear. They discovered that when one of the houses was | sold in 1872 the deed had des- l cribed the lot as being 57 feet, 5 I inches deep instead of 57 feet, | inches. Thus Dennis had kept a l.
 inch strip of the property, without | even knowing it himself. Since the
 lot was IS feet wide. the area of the strip was only 1 1-2 square feet.
 Nevertheless, it was important.
 Expensive lawyers began search | ing for the Dennis heirs. They wrote something like 300 letters, and after several months tracked l the mdown. Then an agent vis- 1 ited the six heirs, telling each of | them that he owned exactly 36 inches of Manhattan real estate for which Mrs. Vanderbilt was
 willing to pay $200. They sold. Question of Size
 The recommissioned LeviQthan steamed home the other day with a few hundred passengers and a | lot of headaches for her owners | who can't figure how to make her
 operating costs, But New Workers
 are sentimental about the Levia-
 than, most of then being proudly of the opinion that she still is the largest ship in the world-pending, | at least, the debuts of the super liners of England and France. Talking to marine expert, though, I find that America hasn't got the biggest vessel after all, l though it's 6 close race between | the Leviathan and England's Ma jestic. The latter is eight feet the | finger. and the Levi is two inches | wider. That extra width Is impor-
 tant because it adds lot of cubic feet to the interior; and interior
 space, converted into tonnage, is
 what determines the size of ship. l We'll, on the basis, the Levi
 athan is the largest. But there
 are some catches in the problem.
 For one thing, gross tonnage" a
 term you often see, has nothing
 to do with weight. This kind of
 a ton is 10 Ocubic feet. Still an-
 other technicality is that not all
 the inside of ship is classed by government and insurance inspec- tors as 'interior." Warehouses,
 bakeries, skylight domes, glassed- ] in promenade decks and certain other points of the ship don't count. "Net tonnage" is gross tonnage minus all the space that
 can't be used for paying cargo or l passengers.
 So in one way and another thu experts have calculated that the
 Majestic is larger than the Levi
 athan, and in Lyold's Registry the
 difference Is nearly 1000 tons. But New Workers, as I said. do their
 measuring with sentimental eye.
 So they'll keep on pointing out
 the Levi as the largest ship in the world.