Free City of Promise by Beverly Swerling Page B

the bridge, was dead of tetanus after crushing his toes against a piling. His son had taken over, then succumbed to some mysterious on-the-job illness he was chasing round the globe trying to cure. “Just now,” Josh said, “that’s looking less than likely. Queens is no easier to get to and it’s a wasteland beside. As for the Bronx . . .” Josh shrugged, “all those places have one major drawback. They’re not New York City.”
    “Very well. But that fellow Hunt, the architect as put up those flats over on Eighteenth Street, he’s beat you to it, wouldn’t you say?”
    “I would not. Richard Hunt’s used a hundred feet of frontage to make twenty apartments on four floors. Not much advantage there.”
    “I went over and had a look this afternoon,” Clifford said. “It’s five stories.”
    “Top floor’s only accessible after four flight of stairs. Too many for most people. The fifth-floor units have skylights. They’re let to artists for studios. The whole venture’s interesting, but not economically sound. Not here in the city.”
    “The way I hear it, Hunt’s going up eight stories over on Twenty-Seventh Street.”
    Josh nodded. “Better location. And this time his client’s Paran Stevens, who owns a fair parcel of city land to start out with. Hunt’s been assigned the entire block between Fifth and Broadway, and he’s going to install at least four of Otis’s steam elevators. But it’s a far cry from what I have in mind. Stevens’s building is to have eighteen suites, each almost as big as a house, with ballrooms and butler’s pantries and dressing rooms. Communal servants quarters as well. Upstairs in the attic. Under, of course, a properly fashionable mansard roof.”
    “You don’t approve?”
    “I don’t think it answers the problem. If business is to thrive we need to shelter more people of the ordinary sort. As I said, we don’t have much land on Manhattan Island. We have unlimited air. The solution’s to go higher.”
    Clifford’s blond head was wreathed in cigar smoke. Josh couldbarely make out his nod. “Problem becomes that the higher you go, the more of those damned cast-iron pillars you need to hold everything up, and the closer together they have to be. Thicker walls as well. Pretty soon your construction materials are eating up your living space. That’s so, isn’t it, young Mr. Turner?”
    Josh had given away as much of his thought on the subject as he intended. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”
    Another nod. This time Clifford reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a card and pushed it across the table. “Talk to this man. When you and he figure something out, let me know. I’ll back you.”
    A cold day in Hell, Josh thought. But he pocketed the card.

    “I hate it,” Josh said, “that I can only see you on Sundays.”
    Mollie laughed. “I’m a new sort of woman who works for my living, and you have to take me as you find me. You haven’t told me where we’re going.”
    “You’ll see.” He kept a loose hold on the reins and the bay was pulling the phaeton along Third Avenue, but Josh was obviously in no sort of hurry. “Tell me then, do you believe in all this carry-on about ladies’ rights, that they should become doctors and lawyers and such? Even vote. Who’ll look after the children and the households if they do all those things? Presuming they still marry and have families. And what will happen to the human race if they do not?”
    She was of a mind to quote her aunt about the correlation between decent jobs and indecent whores. Mollie thought better of it. “Well and good,” she said, “if all women have a man to look after them. What about those who do not?”
    “My mother,” Josh said with a hoot of laughter, “would approve of you, Mollie as-calls-herself-Popandropolos. She’s a follower of Miss Anthony, along with all her other unconventionalities. Will you come with me to Sunshine Hill someday soon? I’d like my parents to