"Harlem and The Bronx" is a sizable room for itself. The further end of
the second conveyor to receive milady's precious package rests upon a
table in its very center. Roundabout the table are small compartments or
bins, each about the size of a small packing case; each numbered and
corresponding to a definite wagon route or run. Run No. 87 (the number
is purely fictitious) takes in West One Hundred and Fourth Street. Into
compartment No. 87 goes milady's packages. But not, of course, until the
clerical young man technically known as the sheet-writer has made a
record of it. Into his records, also, go all the other packages destined
that day for that particular room. If there should be, as sometimes
happens, an overplus of packages for the single run, then it is the
business of one of the assistant superintendents of delivery to meet the
emergency either by stretching momentarily the runs of the adjoining
routes or by sending a special wagon up from the main store. Experience
and judgment must cut the cloth to fit the case.
Under any ordinary procedure milady's package will go out early in the
morning of the day following her purchase. That, at least, is the
store's ordinary guarantee of delivery. As a matter of fact, it does far
better than this. On ordinary days, when weather and street conditions
in Manhattan have not gone in conditions of near-impassability, there
are at least two regular deliveries to every part of the island south of
One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street, with a single one at least to every
other part of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, to say nothing of the
downtown portions of Jersey City and Hoboken. Easily said, this thing.
But when one comes to realize how tremendously widespread the
metropolitan district of Greater New York is these days, the performance
of it becomes a transportation marvel, a masterpiece of organization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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