FIRST FLOOR PLAN.
SECOND FLOOR PLAN.
How We Have Grown.
When the history of the past seven years comes to be written, they will stand as years of the most marvelous expansion ever known in our history. Two of them, 1884 and 1885, were held as they passed to be dull years, but even these included great growth, and were a period of industrial readjustment rather than liquidation. The population of this country has not increased more than a fourth since the census of 1880, but house building, as an industry, has more than doubled, the number of common brick made in this country having increased from 3,800,000,000 to 7,000,000,000, worth $49,000,000. As the lumber trade has increased in less but large proportion, and iron production has risen over one‐half from 4,300,000 tons in 1880 to 6,300,000 in 1886, it is certain that the past seven years have seen the most active building ever known in this country. Chicago uses one‐seventeenth of the brick made in the country, and if its building represents the same share of the cost of house erection of all sorts in the United States, fully $2,000,000,000 have been spent on buildings in this country in the last seven years. As about the same sum will be reached by adding the building in the leading cities and estimating for the rest of the country, the truth is probably not far from these figures, which are under rather than over the mark. The railroad building since 1880 has cost, at $50,000 a mile, $2,700,000,000. This makes $4,700,000,000, or about one‐tenth of the national wealth in 1880, turned into railroads and buildings in this country. As the residence and business real estate of the country, including water power, was valued in the census of 1880 at $9,881,000,000, and the railroads at $5,500,000,000, we have added one‐half to the cost of the latter and one‐fifth to the former in seven years, although the railroads represent the accumulated construction of fifty years, and the buildings are spread over an even longer period in their erection. This enormous increase has taken place without adding a bale to the cotton to be carried or a bushel to the grain raised. No more pork is produced now than in 1880, and the number of sheep is no greater now than then. Great increase has been made in cattle raised for food, in fruits, and, on the average, in canned goods. Coal, taking bituminous and anthracite together, has increased one‐half from 70,000,000 to 106,000,000 tons. Copper has advanced in output from 27,009 tons in 1880 to 69,800 in 1886, and about the same this year. A great advance is true of nearly all mineral products, but in agriculture the United States has made little or no progress in product in the last seven years, but a great advance in acreage or the cost of cultivation.—Philadelphia Press.
A Good Suggestion.
Charles Hardy, in the National Builder, says: Underestimating means working for nothing and forcing others to do the same; it means impoverishment and poor work. The contractor has himself and his family to maintain, and the temptation is great to get out by doing poor work. I would suggest that every contractor purchase an account book large enough to enter, line by line, upon a single page, every item of his estimate—giving quantity, price, and labor for each item. Let him leave opposite to this page a blank page, on which he may enter, on the corresponding line opposite, the actual amount of labor expended upon the item, and he will thus be able to see the result of his contract.