The Envelope Fillers

In April last year, 3,000 Philadelphians sentimentally gathered in the Pennsylvania Railroad's 71-year-old Broad Street Station to see the last train pull out. Though outsiders had long considered the sooty old building an eyesore, Philadelphians were fond of its ornate decorations and neo-Gothic gingerbread, liked to recall that it was once the world's biggest station. As the train left, the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra played Auld Lang Syne. Then wreckers went to work to demolish the building and the 40-ft.-high unsightly "Chinese wall" over which the trains had come into the station.

Last week the first steps were taken to rear a Rockefeller Center-like group of buildings on the site, thus improve all the blighted areas around the old station. The Pennsy announced that it has leased the block-square station land to Manhattan's Uris Bros., a pair of redheaded New Yorkers who in the last five years have become the world's biggest builders of office buildings. By year's end they will control seven buildings valued at $70 million, in which their interest is estimated at $20 million.

In the new, 23-acre Penn Center, they will erect two slablike, 20-story buildings, the first to cost $15 million.* The buildings will flank two sides of a pedestrian walk with two levels of shops, one on the street floor and the other underground.

Made-to-Order Team. This is the first commercial building venture outside New York for the Uris brothers, Percy, 53, and Harold, 47, who function like a made-to-order team. Percy is the dynamo and dreamer of the combination. An economics major at Columbia, where he graduated in 1920, he handles the company's financing and mortgaging arrangements. Harold, a civil-engineering graduate of Cornell in 1925, is the detail man and boss of construction. Percy is voluble and high-strung; Harold is stolid and softspoken. Says he: "Percy makes the money and I spend it."

For their big projects, the brothers have only a small staff of 30 employees working in a 14-room office. But the staff works with all the precision of an army's GHQ, directing 30 to 40 different subcontractors so skillfully that they amaze the passing thousands with their logistical skill.

Typical is the 25-story, $25 million office building now being completed on the site of the famed old Ritz-Carlton Hotel (TIME, May 14, 1951). Behind a high fence and a sidewalk canopy, work has proceeded with machinelike smoothness on a painstakingly detailed schedule. Few materials are piled on the sidewalk or in the streets, because most of the materials are brought to the site only when needed. A steady stream of trucks flows in & out of the building, just fast enough to keep the steel girders climbing skyward and a supply of concrete and bricks on hand to encase them.

Fill the Envelope. Construction workers' hours are also staggered so they will waste no time, e.g., some of the men arrive at 7 A.M. to start mixing mortar for the bricklayers, who come at 8. The whole operation resembles an assembly line in reverse; instead of having the product carried along to stations where materials are stored, the materials are carried to the product.

In putting up five buildings in the last eight years, the Uris brothers' policy has been to "fill the envelope," i.e., use every cubic foot of space that zoning laws permit. The Uris brothers use graduated setbacks because it gives them more floor space per building. It has also caused critics to scoff at their buildings as "wedding cakes." Among them: a 22-story building at Park Avenue and 59th Street, entirely rented to the Arabian-American Oil Co., and a 25-story building at Madison Avenue and 57th Street (see cut) whose tenants include Doubleday & Co., Colorado Fuel & Iron Corp. and Street & Smith Publications. But the brothers are not disturbed by critics. Says Percy: "We're not building in a vacuum. We're building in a market."

*A second city block has been leased to Philadelphia Inquirer Publisher Walter H. Annenberg, who plans to put up a community transportation center, probably in 1955.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.