But the City Hall long since was outgrown. The municipal government of New York is a vast and somewhat unwieldy machine that can hardly be housed within a dozen giant structures. To provide offices for the greater part of the city's official machinery, this towering Municipal Building has just been erected. And because it is so typical of the best form of the so-called skyscraper architecture, let us stop and take a look at it, listen to the story of its construction. In appearance the new Municipal Building is a gray-stone tower twenty-five stories in height and surmounted by a tower cupola an additional fifteen stories in height. In plan the structure is a sort of semi-octagon--a very shallow letter "U," if you please. But its most unusual feature comes from the fact that it squarely spans one of the busiest crosstown highways in the lower part of the city--Chambers street. The absorption of that busy thoroughfare is recognized by a great depressed bay upon the west front--the main _façade_ of the building. And incidentally that depressed bay makes interior courts within the structure absolutely unnecessary. So much for the architectural features, severe in its detail, save for some ornate and not entirely pleasing sculptures. You are interested in knowing how one of these giants--so typical of the new New York--are fabricated. This young man--hardly a dozen years out of a big technical school--can tell you. He has supervised the job. Sometimes he has slept on it--in a narrow cot in the temporary draughting-house. He knows its every detail, as he knows the fingers of his hands. "Just remember that we began by planning a railroad station in the basement with eight platform tracks for loading and unloading passengers." "A railroad station?" you interrupt. "Certainly," is his decisive reply. "Downstairs we will soon have the most important terminal of a brand new subway system crossing the Manhattan and the Williamsburgh bridges and reaching over Brooklyn like a giant gridiron." He goes on to the next matter--this one settled. "There was something more than that. We had to plant on that cellar a building towering forty stories in the air; its steel frame alone weighing twenty-six thousand tons--more than half the weight of the heaviest steel cantilever bridge in America--had to be firmly set."