Metal Building Material

1895

It is well within the memory of many persons when metal as a building material was practically unknown. But within a few years building has been almost revolutionized by the use of metal in various forms and for various purposes.

Iron beams, columns, girders, rafters and window sashes have come into use, and now we are to have as a regular addition to our list a great variety of stamped out sections. These have heretofore been made mostly of galvanized iron or some composition of the spelter sort, or, in fine and high priced work, bronze has been employed. Steel is, however, found to answer all demands far better than any other metal used for this purpose.

Door and window casings will be made of metal, and indeed all parts of a house may be constructed of something besides wood. With paper pulp doors and floors, metal frames and finish, slate or tin roofs and portland cement or concrete walls, our houses may in time come to be actually fireproof, as they have for a long time unjustly claimed to be. — New York Ledger.

New York Millinery District

1916

New York, Sept. 10. — With the avowed purpose of shifting the leaders in the millinery trade from Broadway and its vicinity in the section between Bleecker and Fourteenth streets to West Thirty-fourth street, in the Pennsylvania station zone, and to Seventh avenue between Thirty-fourth and Forty-second streets, John A. Larkin yesterday announced the determination of the Larkin and other prominent building interests to proceed immediately with the construction of five sixteen story buildings and one seventeen story structure within the boundaries outlined.

The six new buildings will provide ninety-seven floors of modern show and sales rooms, containing approximately 1,500,000 square feet of rentable floor area, practically all of which huge amount of space, according to Mr. Larkin, already has been underwritten by the leading millinery firms of the city now located south of 14th street.

—The Fryeburg Post, Fryeburg, Maine, Sept. 12, 1916, p. 7.

Italy, the Most Famous Source for Marble

1919

Italy is one of the world's most famous sources of supply for both art and building marbles, and marble, granite and building stones are the common materials used for buildings in that country. Venice is a fireproof city, built of stone of Istria and marble; and the foundations and first courses, at least, of all palaces, public and municipal buildings, government and business edifices are of these materials.

The most important quarries in the Veneto are at and near Verona, the Veronese red and yellow marbles having been favorite building stones since the time when the Coliseum at Verona was constructed. For building, they rank next to the stone of Istria in popularity, and are true marbles, while the stone of Istria is not a true marble, although a very hard limestone, that is much used in Venice, because it resists the action of salt water.

Besides their value for construction, the Veronese marbles are in great demand for decorative work. Among the names of the several varieties of Veronese marbles are white nembro, coral pink, white peach, partridge eye, yellow snail, yellow azure, and paradise.

New Camera Takes Tall Buildings at Close Range

1915

Aid to Photographic Art

With a new camera, invented and patented by an Elgin, Ill., man, a tall building may be photographed from the ground showing the upper portions as plainly as the lower. Such a building will be the exact size at the top as at the base of the picture. Formerly such a thing was considered impossible and photographers have been hunting some invention for the past twenty years to overcome the fault.

The inventor has many pictures of tall buildings taken from a distance of only a few feet which prove his invention worthy. The invention is simple and requires only the turning of the lens to the proper angle, which is determined by the height of the building and the distance which the camera stands from it.

—Saturday Blade, Chicago, Dec. 18, 1915, p. 9.

Building Old As U. P. Road

1915

Its Proprietor Still Lives, a Victim of Generosity and Poverty

LARAMIE, Wyo., Dec. 16. — In the ordinary city which began no further back than 1868 the oldest building would be of little consequence, but in a city in the West, whose existence dates from May 9 of that year, when the Union Pacific Railroad laid its first rails into and thru the townsite, the oldest house seems very old indeed to the residents and to the people generally.

Laramie's oldest building today is a long two-story building which was built by Patrick Doran, who is living here at present, as a hotel, and in which hundreds of transient and regular boarders were accommodated for years.

Doran had his own way of keeping books. He chalked the accounts on the inner side of the front door. If a customer disputed the bill, mine host would go to the door, carefully erase the score and tel1 the dissatisfied customer that they would start all over again.

The old building is of logs, cut in the mountains several miles southwest of the city and floated down the Laramie River. The building is now used for a blacksmith shop.

In the early days of the frontier hotel Mr. Doran would charge a dollar a meal from those who could pay a dollar and lesser sums from those who could not afford to pay. No man ever went away hungry that had any money at all, and Mr. Doran would never take the man's last cent, so that one can imagine the large number of accounts the inward side of that door used to carry. Doran himself was quite wealthy at one time, but accepts charity from the county.