Men at Work

Just off Michigan Avenue in Chicago, workmen fixed an American flag to a steel girder, then signaled to a crane operator atop a 41-story building skeleton. While thousands of sidewalk superintendents looked on, the girder swiftly rose to the top (see cut), where it was fastened into place, "topping out" the $40 million Prudential Building, biggest skyscraper to be built in the U.S. in 15 years.

While topping out its Chicago building, Prudential last week was also finishing up another Midwest headquarters, an $8,000,000 structure in Minneapolis. Both are shining examples of the greatest construction boom the world has ever seen. In Washington, the Commerce and Labor Departments, which had figured 1954 construction at $34 billion, revised estimates upward for the second time, to $37 billion. And the two departments predicted that in 1955 construction will be bigger still--up 7% to $39.5 billion.

The building boom was made of many things, including plenty of mortgage money, the trend to the suburbs, bigger families and a rising population. Credit was so easy that one builder said, "You can buy a house like you used to buy a car." But while much of the talk has been of housing construction, the big eye opener of 1954 has been the boom in industrial building, reflecting the chest-swelling optimism among U.S. businessmen.

Changing Tides. "No sooner is one big job finished," said a St. Louis builder, "when another pops up." Example: work was hardly completed on a $36 million Union Electric plant in St. Louis when plans were announced for a $33 million atomic energy plant to be run by Mallinckrodt Chemical. Outside Pittsburgh, Builder Don M. Castro had barely finished work on a $10 million "Miracle Mile" shopping center (with a special "cruising lane" for window-shopping from the car) when he started on another $10 million center 25 miles away. The Omaha Public Power District put the finishing touches on a $23 million power plant, and then announced a $10 million addition to keep up with the increase in demand while the plant was abuilding.

New construction everywhere gave a measure of changing industrial tides. At Ashtabula, Ohio, Union Carbide broke ground for a $32 million plant to turn out titanium sponge. In New Orleans, a $7,000,000 Shell Oil building was nearly ready; nearby Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical got set for a $25 million expansion. Chicago's face was changing, with scores of new projects ranging from a $50 million medical center to the $46 million Lake Meadows slum-clearance project and a $6,000,000 pretzel plant for Nabisco. Nobody who toured the ribboning express roads around Boston could conclude that New England is dying on the vine. Whole new industrial centers are springing up, with such companies as Raytheon, Polaroid and Sylvania building long, low modern factories to take up the slack in textile employment. And in Dearborn, Mich., Ford was celebrating one of the best sales years in its history by building a new, twelve-story administration building.

"Functional Design." The construction was not confined to offices and factories. All over the U.S., new hotels were rising and old ones expanding. By summer Atlanta's Dinkler Plaza will be ready with a $2,000,000 addition, including 200 rooms and a convention hall. Five resort hotels, worth $20 million, were abuilding in Las Vegas, Nev. In Miami, the $14 million Fontainebleau, the city's most expensive hotel built since the war, was shooting skyward.

From coast to coast, architecture was as varied as the landscape, with porcelain, aluminum and glass brightening up fac,ades. In Denver "functional design" took on a special meaning. Builders of the new, twelve-story Farmers' Union Building claimed it was the first in the U.S. that is A-bomb-proof, by reason of a 16-in. reinforced concrete core that starts 30 ft. below ground and extends to the penthouse. "We frankly admit," admitted Manager C. E. Huff, "that a direct hit by an H-bomb would damage us."

In the Pacific Northwest, building starts on $392 million worth of construction in the first ten months were already $30 million ahead of the entire year 1953. In building, as in other fields, the savings and loan associations and the bankers were out to best one another, with such new structures as Los Angeles' Standard Federal Savings & Loan Building, Dallas' $25 million Republic National Bank Building, Atlanta's 25-story, $10 million Fulton National Bank Building, tallest in town. In San Francisco, Equitable Life Assurance was putting up a $10 million office building. In crowded Manhattan, builders ripped out old buildings* to find space for such new projects as Socony-Vacuum's $45 million building, two junior-grade skyscrapers in the Wall Street area, and a giant $30 million Coliseum for conventions and expositions in the area around Columbus Circle.

Sell, Then Build. The housing boom, which was supposed to taper off as veterans' needs declined, showed no signs of slackening. One big reason: young couples outgrew their new homes. Veterans who bought small houses at war's end now were in the market for three-and four-bedroom houses, and were having little trouble getting the money to finance them. With only about one in five potential G.I. loans used to date, builders were optimistic that the boom would continue as city dwellers kept pushing into the suburbs. In Denver, where the population has nearly doubled since 1940, Hutchinson Realty built 320 $12,950 houses in a development, sold most of them before they even started to build. In San Francisco, housing starts were running 30% ahead of last year. Outside Miami, the giant Carol City development alone will provide 10,000 new houses in the next three years. In Charlotte, N.C., a 1,000-house project for Negroes was being built.

Outside Detroit, Garling Construction Co. started building a 600-unit development of three-and four-bedroom houses priced between $33,000 and $40,000. An added come-on: if the purchaser wants, the purchase price will cover a Ford Thunderbird or station wagon in the garage when he moves in.

*And some not so old, e.g., the 21-year-old Center Theater in Rockefeller Center, which is being displaced by an office building.

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