There were other phases of that tearing-down that were less dramatic and more comic. A restaurant-keeper who had a small eating place on the Broadway side of the site sought obdurately to hold out in his location--seeking an advantageous cash settlement from the store owners. His lease, perfectly good, still had from sixty to ninety days to run. He felt that the store could not wait that length of time upon him--that, in the language of the street, it would be forced to "come across." But it did not "come across." It was not built that way. It was built on either side of the restaurant. Its steel girders were far above its tiny walls and spanning one another across its ceiling before its disappointed proprietor moved out--at the end of his perfectly good lease--and without one cent of bonus money in his pocket; after which it was almost a matter of mere hours to tear the flimsy structure away and remove a small segment of earth that held it up to street level. A barber around the corner in Thirty-fourth street caught his cue from the restaurant. He, too, was going to stand pat. But he was not in the same strategic position as the _restaurateur_. He had no lease. He merely was going to stay and defy the wreckers. They would not dare to touch his neat, immaculate shop. They did dare. On the very night that his lease expired something happened to the business enterprise of the razor-wielder. A cyclone must have struck it. At least that was the way it looked. The barber, coming down to business on the morrow, found his movables upon the sidewalk, neatly piled together and covered by tarpaulins against the weather. But the shop was gone. Where it had stood on the close of the preceding day was a deep hole in the ground; and three Italian workmen were whistling the Anvil Chorus. About the tenth of October, 1901, actual construction began on the new building. On the first day of November of the following year it was complete--or practically so. It was a record for building, even in New York, which is fairly used to records of that sort. A steel-framed nine-story building, approximately four hundred feet on Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets, by one hundred and eighty feet on Broadway (widening to two hundred feet at the west end of the store), with 1,012,500 square feet of floor-space, and 13,500,000 cubic feet in all, had been erected in a trifle over six months. In the meanwhile the wisdom of the Macy choice of location was already being made evident. A Washington concern--Saks and Company--was on its way toward Herald Square. It took the west side of Broadway for the block just south of Thirty-fourth Street, and by dint of great effort and because its building was considerably smaller in area, succeeded in getting into it ahead of Macy's.