In short, the possible saving in first cost for each family adopting the “flat” system of building lies between $14,265 and $28,758, making an aggregate saving for the 80 families occupying the apartment of between one and two millions of dollars.
The annual running expenses are also greatly in favor of the “flat” system when the advantages of coöperation are used to its greatest extent.
Eighty independent Irish cooks give way to a professional chef and half-a-dozen attachés. The wages and maintenance of the 80 cooks would amount to an annual sum of not less than $40,000; those of the chef and his assistants to hardly $10,000, making in this one item a possible annual saving of $30,000.
The management of the 80 independent Irish cooks, if possible at all, could only be accomplished by the constant struggle of 80 worried and largely inexperienced owners or their wives. The management of the chef and his attachés could more easily be managed by a single person, either selected from among the 80 families and suitably recompensed, or employed as a professional manager at a regular salary. Or the entire control of the café, and kitchen could be let out by contract to some suitable caterer, if preferred.
Corresponding savings are evidently possible in every other department of housekeeping, including steam-heating, ventilating, laundry-work, lighting and elevator-work. In all of these particulars, coöperation, judiciously conducted, has been shown to yield surprising economies.
But there are other advantages even more important than its economy in favor of the “flat.” Freedom from housekeeping cares has already been touched upon. In the “tower,” life is spent in training and treating with servants, mechanics and market-men. The private cook is a volcano in a house, slumbering at times, but always ready to burst forth into destructive eruption. True repose is out of the question, and we are told that “the motive for foreign travel of perhaps one-half of Americans is rest from household cares and the enjoyment of good attendance, freed from any responsibility in its organization and management.”
Security against burglary and fire is another. In a good apartment-house, trained watchmen stand on guard night and day to protect the occupants, and stand-pipes, hose and fire-buckets are provided in all the halls, and kept in repair for emergency.
The family may leave their apartments for travel summer or winter, knowing that their property is as secure as modern appliances, system and ingenuity can make it. Not so with our isolated dwelling. The cost of providing all these means of protection is too great to make them practicable. The result is that the fear of burglary and fire at all times causes uneasiness, particularly on the part of the wife during the absence of her husband.
Beauty in the architectural arrangement of the rooms is a third advantage of the “flat.” In this it has all the advantage of the double house or residence of the immensely rich. The rooms may be grouped in a manner which renders possible the highest architectural effect, whereas in the “tower” the perpendicular arrangement evidently precludes such opportunity by limiting the design to a wearisome and monotonous repetition from basement to attic.
No argument can be sustained against the “flat” on the ground of transmission of sound or want of privacy and isolation, for sound may be as fully deadened as in the “tower” by means of the 12-inch brick separating walls shown in our plan, and the most improved deafening treatment of the floor-joists.