Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/371

Rh incidentally illustrates how as interest falls land values rise, and explains the growing appreciation of home-owning in cities and their suburbs.

According to the statistics of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the bonded, share, and floating liabilities of American railroads amounted to $8,129,000,000 on June 30, 1888. It is not likely that science has any such revolutionary gift for mankind in the near future as the railroad; and as American capital at this time demands new outlets whereby to effect new economies or save noteworthy waste, it may be allowable to note some fields for sound investment as yet unoccupied. Is not the improvement of our towns and cities, as such, a field which capital might well enter? Recent investigations by Captain Francis V. Greene, of New York, and other experts, demonstrate that, were the city's pavements as good as they should be, horses could draw threefold greater loads over them, with an immense abatement of both noise and filth. While the improvement of the metropolis due to individual enterprise and taste has been marvelous of late years, its mansions and business structures vying with the finest in the world, the city as a city is little changed. Its gas, water, and sewer pipes are still laid in the earth beneath its streets, subject to unceasing disturbance for repairs. Its electric wires, for many years a grievous eyesore, a menace to pedestrians and an obstruction often fatal to its firemen, at last have so multiplied in number and deadliness that a beginning has been made in laying them underground—a tentative procedure attended with all the uncomfortable results of an underground piping for gas and water service. Repeatedly the suggestion has been made, echoed at last in the City Hall, that subways be constructed for the accessible disposition of gas, water, and sewer pipes, and for electric wires. Never until this suggestion is acted upon will the city's pavements be free from constant breaks, which, were repair of the carefullest, would never permit New York streets to remain smooth and seemly. Subways of the kind proposed could easily accommodate pneumatic tubes for the conveyance of postal letters and parcels. To-day the mails traverse New York, much as furniture and vegetables do, in common vans. So slow is their delivery that letters from Albany, arriving at the Grand Central Station at reach Fourth Avenue and Thirty-second Street partly at  but in larger part between 12.40 and 1.10  The point named is half a mile from the station, on the way between it and the Post-Office. The quickest train from Albany to New York travels the distance, one hundred and forty-eight miles, in three hours and thirty minutes; a letter traversing a distance of six miles within the city occupies