Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 65, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 March 1916 — Lales of GOTHAM and other CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Lales of GOTHAM and other CITIES

Why Owners of Gotham Apartment Houses Rave NEW YORK. —“The average tenant In an apartment house,” said a real estate man when a prospective tenant kicked on the high rentals, “thinks that the owner has nothing to do but to wait and grow fat in purse from his

revenues from the rent checks each month, and he hasn't a care on his mind. But let me tell you the landlord who makes his expenses on property nowadays is lucky. In many . cases it all goes out, and more, too. I know of a million-dollar apartment house that suffered from a plague of red ants so persistently that it could not keep its tenants, and its value as an investment was seriously impaired until a good deal of money had been Bpent in finding a remedy for the

pests. There is a number of big brick apartment houses whose walls above the eighth floor let in the beating rainstorms as if they were sieves. “The ‘red-ant house,’ as it used to be known locally, is one of the finest city. The cheapest apartment is $2,000 a year, and the most expetf--Bjve is— W ell, only the well-to-do can affordto live there and enjoy the every modern luxury that it furnishes. A short time after it was opened the red ants appeared—little bits of things, not much larger than pinheads, but there were millions of them. They got into the tenants’ sugar, and those who tasted their morning coffee inadvertently learned that they had an acid flavor. They crawled over the damask sheets at night, and the tenants learned that they could bite. “Things came to such a pass that not only the occupants, but the agents and owners of the property were frantic. Leases began to be canceled, and the line of moving vans in front of the place was the sight of the neighborhood. Every known remedy for their extermination was tried. Finally a German came along with a chemical preparation, and in a short time the public was freed of the red ants. But it was many years before the landlords of the property caught up with the losses.”