Year: 1876

Real Estate and the Growth OF the
City.


Hard times and the smooth surface of
mortgage valuation have been the upper and
under millstones to the speculative element
in real estate transactions They have
ground as fine as the dust of the balance
that margin in operations on improved prop
erty in which the man who bought to sell
saw his golden future. Operations now are
mostly in liquidation of transactions that
were based on those visions of Golconda; for
the property that was taken on a mortgage
and sold from hand to hand at higher and
higher values is coming steadily back to the
mortgage holders-in some cases at figures
well within the mortgage price. This is
certainly calamitous to some persons, but 1t
is not general calamity. Spectators in
real estate, like spectators in all other
values, are useful to a certain point, beyond
which they are an evil. 1t is as desirable In
this as in other property that buyer and
seller should deal directly, and that third or
fourth parties should not make fortunes be-
tween them, and the event that overwhelms
these third or fourth parties in catastrophes
and sometimes carries down with them one
who bought to hold-as it indicates the
dangerous nature of this activity-en-
courages operations of q more legitimate ma
ture.


But there appears to be encouragement
and healthy movement in operations on un-
improved property. Prices that were painted
on bubbles have gone out of sight, for the
bubbles have burst but prices appear
that are apparently on a more material basis.
With these prices down, with material cheaper
and with the prices of labor tending down.
ward, houses can be built to considerably
! undersell those still held at prices that were
fixed in the light of other days. These
must come down, therefore, and as the de-
mand for houses here in the centennial year
will be very great-for New York will gather
the permanent as Philadelphia will the tenn
porary advantage of that eyent--we may
anticipate, with fair weather, great activity
in the building trades. But there are two
evident movements in real estate, aside from
those due to financial causes, that are note
worthy. One of these relates directly to the
extended development of the district in
which is found the greater portions of our
unimproved property but the other, though
it affects real estate, is less strictly O real
estate movement than q consequence of social
and commercial growth-a distribution un-
der the tendency to the formation of busi-
ness centres that is found in all cities as
they grow beyond certain proportions.


Under the influence of this principle there
is now in progress n sort of aggregation of
all Office business within q radius of half
mile from the new Post Office All the old
neighborhoods so familiar to the last genera
ton have been broken up by the growth
of the city, with the exception of Wall street
for money and the Swamp for leather.
South street" and ''Pearl street" are no
longer used as terms of commercial signif-
canoe, and it is the same with the rest, ex-
cept as to the new exceptions. But we see
the growth now of an Office business centre
in active progress in all the streets that are
in the immediate neighborhood of what
will be the city Post Office for
century to come at least; and in the
erection of all edifces within the given
radius the demand for offices is taken into
consideration as primary fact. The other
movement is due to the uptown tendencies
Harlem River is to be improved, He'll Gate
is to be blown up, there are to be at least
two rapid transit steam roads. One of these
days there will be bridge stretching to
Long Island, with piers on Blackwell's
Island. All these facts seem likely to pro-
duce great shipping centre near the eastern
mouth of the Harlem River for Sound trade,
Atlantic trade, and even North River trade
by the way of the Harlem River. This may
produce a sort of subordinate city in the an
nexed district within a very few years.