BIDS FOR ASPHALT PAVING.

The New York Times
June 16, 1900

Proposals Received for Part of Broadway and for Other Streets.

Bids were opened in the office of the Commissioner of Highways yesterday for the repairing with asphalt of parts of twenty-seven streets in the Borough Manhattan and Brooklyn, the most important of which was the asphalting of Broadway between Fourteenth and Forty-second Streets and of One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, between Third and Eighth Avenues.  On both these streets the present pavement will be relaid and utilized as a foundation.

Competition was unusually active, especially for the smaller contracts, which were, for the most part, single blocks.

For the Broadway contract, which contains 66,679 square yards, the lowest bid received was from the National Asphalt Company, which is outside of the "combine," and which offered to do the work, including the relaying of the present pavement, for $371,118.80.  The other bids were: The Atlantic Alcatraz Asphalt Company, $414,929.30; the Barber Asphalt Paving Company, $427,764.70; the Warren-Scharf Company, $461,060.70, and the Sicilian Asphalt Company, $438,043.80.  All the bidders, except the National, are in the "combine."  The specifications for the Broadway pavement require a fifteen-year guarantee instead of the ten-year guarantee exacted in other cases.  In this was Commissioner Keating hopes to get a better quality of pavement on Broadway than is required in other cases.

For the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street parcel there were five bidders, the lowest being the Asphalt Construction Company, a combine concern, which offered to do the work for $99,437.90.

Neither the Barber Company nor the Standard Asphalt Company, which recently upset all records by bidding for work at $2.05 a square yard, submitted low proposals on any of the twenty-seven contracts, and it was said at the department that both of them were out of the competition.

The bids are being tabulated and the awards will not be announced for several days.  From the tentative computations, however, it is apparent that the two largest contracts will go to the National Company and the Asphalt Construction Company.