A NEW YORK EXPERIMENT IN BUSINESS

CO-OPERATION

The present sketch deals primarily with phases of the fundamental spatial problem in great cities. That problem is one of constant and growing difficulty. Certain steps in the solution of the problem of city space occur to every one. The tenement met the need of housing many people on a small area of land. Rapid transit made still more tenement area accessible without excessive cost of money or time. The additional fire risk was met by high pressure mains, automatic sprinklers, and fire-proof building construction. The difficulties of intercommunication were solved by the telephone. Traffic policemen handle what would otherwise be inextricable confusion in the business streets. Instances might be multiplied.

By "organized city" we mean much more than the city government and the frame it supplies for the play of forces of economic life, under the direction of private initiative. We mean also the organization of those forces themselves. It is their play which creates the problems of the city. A few of them are solved by the city government, and widely heralded. Most of the problems of city organization are solved, as they are created, by business men, silently. To study these solutions and the principles underlying them, is the central task of the new science of business.

One of those who have contributed to the silent solution of New York's tangle is Irving T. Bush, best known as founder of the Bush Terminal in South Brooklyn. He set out to solve the traffic difficulties of Manhattan merchants and manufacturers by applying the principles of coöperation. He has extended those principles deep into the selling field, where wasteful competition seemed most firmly entrenched.

Although New York has grown, its warehousing and light manufacturing center has remained on Manhattan Island south of Fourteenth Street. That section is therefore the source and destination of the bulk of the city's railroad traffic, especially the through "merchandise" cars of high class L. C. L. freight, run daily to and from all principal points of the country. Shippers and receivers of freight in less than carloads, have felt obliged to remain, and new shippers and receivers to settle, in this shipping district for purely traffic considerations, apart from the other economic advantages inherent in industrial concentration. For good

reasons the industrial and commercial congestion of business in lower Manhattan has increased much more rapidly than the provision of the railroad facilities to care for the business; so rents are high, insurance is high, quarters are cramped, and cartage bills to and from the railroad stations are enormous.

Lower Manhattan has direct rail connection with only one of the railroads that serve it. The New York Central has a line that runs through the city's streets south of Sixtieth Street, terminating at St. John's Park. The capacity of this service is low. Most of the freight of lower Manhattan is delivered by carfloats that use piers on the waterfront as railroad stations. Railroad cars on floats are tied up to those piers, unloaded upon them and later loaded from the adjacent shore shed, which serves as outbound freight station. The number of piers put to this use cannot be increased, for steamship lines also are dependent on use of the piers.

With stationary railroad facilities, the city has continued to grow; and still faster has grown the congestion of shippers' trucks at each station-waiting to call for inbound freight in the morning and waiting to deliver outbound freight in the afternoon, the side streets approaching the waterfront full of delayed trucks. Because of this waiting time, a driver could not call at more than one freight station in the morning nor deliver to more than one in the afternoon. A separate truck, no matter how small the shipment to be handled, had to be sent to each station. This made the cost of cartage very high. It still is high, for all those who remain in Manhattan. In eliminating that cost, the plan found its opportunity.

Warehouses and light manufacturers had not moved to outlying sections like Brooklyn or the Bronx for two reasons. First, they wanted to remain accessible to the high class railroad services of lower Manhattan, with its multitude of direct cars. At the outlying freight stations most of the freight is put not into cars loaded for destination but into cars for transfer points, with consequent delay en route. Moreover, a man in the outlying district had cartage charges just as in Manhattan, not so high, to be sure, but still appreciable.

People were asked to come to South Brooklyn to the Bush Terminal, where they would have, no cartage charges at all. Here a manufacturer can rent a part or whole of a floor, or several floors, in any of the sixteen industrial buildings. They

contain altogether 6,000,000 square feet of floor, and enclose 75,000,000 cubic feet of space. Each building is built around three sides of a quadrangle, into which run railroad tracks from a terminal yard (30 miles of trackage in all). Cars can thus be placed alongside the loading platform adjacent to the first floor of each building. The Bush Terminal is terminal agent of all railroads entering New York. Except in a few instances the flat New York rate, the same which applies to all stations in Manhattan, applies to the freight received or delivered there. The shipper of package freight (L. C. L.) delivers his goods to the freight elevator that stops at his floor, and gets from the Terminal a bill of lading to destination. Cartage is gone. The shipper is located directly in a joint freight station of all railroads. His need for a shipping department is reduced to a minimum.

The Bush Terminal receives the small shipment along with others from other manufacturing or warehousing tenants, from steamships docking at its piers, from Brooklynites who use the public freight station it maintains—and consolidates all their traffic into cars either on the individual shipping platform or at a transfer which it maintains for the purpose. To be sure it does not have enough small freight to load as many direct cars as move from the lower Manhattan waterfront, but it loads a direct car to each important center in the country. Other shipments it loads to the transfer stations which each carrier maintains just back from the waterfront. As tenants grow in number, so does the volume of outward traffic and ability to load through cars and give superior railroad service. It now has about 4,000 tenants. They, their employees and those of the Terminal, the longshoremen, ctc., number about 30,000. With their families they represent an industrial community of over 100,000 people.

Little business men have grouped themselves into a shipping unit to eliminate cartage and switching charges just as they are eliminated by the manufacturer who can afford a location on a railroad siding and who has enough outward traffic of his own to load full cars. The Terminal pools its little shipments at the source, before a cartage charge has fallen on them, instead of waiting for the carrier to pool these shipments at the railroad station. As a matter of fact, the volume of L. C. L. which the Bush Terminal can consolidate gives each of its shippers a diversity of railroad service which not even the largest single shipper, located on a siding, can enjoy. Sometimes the little men

grow up so big that they build their own great plants supplied with all the facilities which the Terminal offers them coöperatively. In such cases it has served as an incubator of industry.

But coöperation does not stop with provision of railroad service. Because the Bush Terminal has hundreds of tenants it can supply them with other facilities they could not have as small independent units scattered in decrepit Manhattan loft buildings, but which the big fellow does have in his modern plant. Tenants jointly share in an automatic sprinkler system that costs $1,000,000. It enables them to get rates of 10 cents per $100 in the exclusive New England mutual insurance companies, or 20 cents per $100 in the line companies. Jointly the tenants share in a complete watchman and fire department service. For them all, the Terminal maintains an emergency hospital and a restaurant. Jointly they support a trucking service for local New York distribution, for connection with water carriers, or for delivery to through cars running from the lower Manhattan waterfront to points to which the Terminal does not load direct but which the shipper must reach without the delay of a transfer station. The trucking service is better than an individual could maintain and its charges are lower than the individual costs. Many water carriers dock at the piers connected with the Bush Terminal. There are eight such piers, each 1400 feet long and each an ocean terminal in itself. Twenty-seven steamers can berth there at the same time. The concentration of shipping at the Terminal continues; through it passes one fifth to one fourth of the port's foreign trade today. No tenant has an excuse for a shipment missing these steamers. They dock at his door.

Likewise the Terminal contains one hundred and thirty warehouses, large and small. A good percentage of New York's raw material imports is stored there: Egyptian and Indian cotton, copra, hides, sugar, jute, sisal, coffee, palm oil, etc. They are at hand for tenant manufacturers using such materials. In the old days they used to say that, in New York, goods were landed in Manhattan, stored in Brooklyn, and shipped in New Jersey, and that the devil could not have invented a worse system. In South Brooklyn, steamship, warehouse, and railroad are brought together and waste motion between them is eliminated.

The industrial tenant often but not always gets lower rent in South Brooklyn than in Manhattan. There are many old buildings in Manhattan allowed to stand as "taxpayers" until their

land values have sufficiently enhanced. In such buildings the rents are often low. But the tenant is subject to cramped, ill-ventilated, ill-lighted quarters. Often his saving on insurance and cartage alone, when he moves to the Bush Terminal, is such that he gets his rent "free."

The significance of the Bush development is not exhausted in the advantages it offers to its tenants. Industrials attracted from Manhattan decrease by so much the hideous congestion of cartage on Manhattan streets. Real and permanent relief of that problem lies in the direction of a compulsory pooling of less than cartload trucking through the city streets. It must begin with "store door" delivery-the use of railroad-owned trucks to collect and deliver package freight, as in England. That would promptly double the capacity of our crowded city freight stations. There is not much more sense in allowing a shipper with two boxes to inflict an individual truck upon a crowded railroad station than there would be in allowing him an individual car to carry the two boxes to destination. But that is another story.

It also means something for workers to be taken from crowded Manhattan to the commodious quarters in South Brooklyn, and points the way to a decentralization of light manufacturing, whose product consists mainly of human labor. The heart of the city is no place for men, women, and children to do industrial work. The land is much too valuable. Nobody can afford to give them enough room. The heart of the city is the place for mercantile and financial business. But such business fills up Manhattan space as fast as the Terminal empties it.

Nor should it be thought that the plan attracts manufacturers only from Manhattan. Plants from all over the country move or establish branches there. They come in order to be at the heart of the chief wholesale market in the country, New York, and near the 20,000,000 consumers within 200 miles of City Hall. They come to be at the center of the world's greatest web of transportation lines: rail, river, coastwise, and oversea carriers.

So much for the coöperative service rendered tenant manufacturers. There is many a manufacturer who, though he need not be located in New York, must maintain a small distributing depot there, for two reasons. First, he must carry stock near the dealers who supply the 20,000,000, for merchants do not carry large stocks themselves nowadays, but live from hand to mouth. Second, it is often possible to save money and time by shipping in