STATE OF BUSINESS: Men at Work

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Just off Michigan Avenue in Chicago, workmen fixed an American flag to a steel girder, then signaled to a crane operator atop a 41-story building skeleton. While thousands of sidewalk superintendents looked on, the girder swiftly rose to the top (see cut), where it was fastened into place, "topping out" the $40 million Prudential Building, biggest skyscraper to be built in the U.S. in 15 years.

While topping out its Chicago building, Prudential last week was also finishing up another Midwest headquarters, an $8,000,000 structure in Minneapolis. Both are shining examples of the greatest construction boom the world has ever seen. In Washington, the Commerce and Labor Departments, which had figured 1954 construction at $34 billion, revised estimates upward for the second time, to $37 billion. And the two departments predicted that in 1955 construction will be bigger still—up 7% to $39.5 billion.

The building boom was made of many things, including plenty of mortgage money, the trend to the suburbs, bigger families and a rising population. Credit was so easy that one builder said, "You can buy a house like you used to buy a car." But while much of the talk has been of housing construction, the big eye opener of 1954 has been the boom in industrial building, reflecting the chest-swelling optimism among U.S. businessmen.

Changing Tides. "No sooner is one big job finished," said a St. Louis builder, "when another pops up." Example: work was hardly completed on a $36 million Union Electric plant in St. Louis when plans were announced for a $33 million atomic energy plant to be run by Mallinckrodt Chemical. Outside Pittsburgh, Builder Don M. Castro had barely finished work on a $10 million "Miracle Mile" shopping center (with a special "cruising lane" for window-shopping from the car) when he started on another $10 million center 25 miles away. The Omaha Public Power District put the finishing touches on a $23 million power plant, and then announced a $10 million addition to keep up with the increase in demand while the plant was abuilding.

New construction everywhere gave a measure of changing industrial tides. At Ashtabula, Ohio, Union Carbide broke ground for a $32 million plant to turn out titanium sponge. In New Orleans, a $7,000,000 Shell Oil building was nearly ready; nearby Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical got set for a $25 million expansion. Chicago's face was changing, with scores of new projects ranging from a $50 million medical center to the $46 million Lake Meadows slum-clearance project and a $6,000,000 pretzel plant for Nabisco. Nobody who toured the ribboning express roads around Boston could conclude that New England is dying on the vine. Whole new industrial centers are springing up, with such companies as Raytheon, Polaroid and Sylvania building long, low modern factories to take up the slack in textile employment. And in Dearborn, Mich., Ford was celebrating one of the best sales years in its history by building a new, twelve-story administration building.