Yet even these changes could not solve the final problem. Macy's still refused to stay put. Its growth was relentless, unending. Each fresh provision made for its expansion was quickly swallowed up, with the result that the proprietors of the store finally faced the inevitable: the need of making a real addition to their plant, not a series of picayune little extensions, but one fine, sweeping move which should be as distinct a step forward in Macy progress as the mighty hegira that occurred when the store moved north from Fourteenth Street to Thirty-fourth--a little more than eighteen years ago. And, facing the inevitable, Macy's quickly made up its mind. It never has been noted for any particular hesitancy. It decided to step ahead. Forecasting tomorrow in New York is not, after all, so vast a task as it might seem to be at a careless first glance. That is, if you do not put your tomorrow too far ahead--say more than ten or a dozen years at the most. I am perfectly willing to sit in these beginning days of 1922 and to assert that to attempt to forecast 1952 or even 1942 is not a particularly alluring pastime--if one has any real desire for accuracy. But 1932 is not so difficult. It is the business of skilled experts to interpret 1932 in 1922; a business which incidentally is rendered vastly easier in New York today than it was ten years ago by two hard and settled facts--the one, the wonderfully efficient new zoning plan of the city, and the other, the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station on Seventh and Eighth Avenues, from Thirty-first to Thirty-third Streets. The first of these factors should hold the strictly commercial development of the city--save for local outlying hubs or centers--south of Fifty-ninth Street. The block-a-year uptown movement of Manhattan for whole decades past has finally been halted; and halted effectually. Central Park has of course proved no little barrier in fixing Fifty-ninth Street as the arbitrary point of stoppage. But the zoning law, protecting the fine residence streets north of that point, and the Pennsylvania Station are also factors not to be overlooked. True it is that at the very moment that these paragraphs are being written whole groups of new business buildings are being opened, in Fifty-seventh, Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth Streets, in the center of Manhattan. But other and bigger buildings are going up in the cross-streets far to the south of these. Count that much for the Pennsylvania Station. For it, and it alone, has proved the salvation of Thirty-fourth Street. Macy's, Altman's, McCreery's, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Hotel McAlpin--none of these alone nor all of them together--might have been able to save Thirty-fourth Street from becoming another Fourteenth, or another Twenty-third--a dull, wide thoroughfare given almost entirely in its later days to wholesale trade of one sort or another.