Lofty ambitions built the most glamorous skyscraper in America
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On a mild October day in 1929, architect William Van Allen watched from the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan as a 185-foot steel needle rose from the bowels of his unfinished masterpiece, the Chrysler Building. For months, the New York media covered with bated breath the battle between Van Allen and his former partner, H. Craig Severance, over the completion of the city's tallest building. Van Allen's 27-ton spire, which would be secretly assembled high in the building's frame, was its trump card. After being lifted into place in less than two hours, the spire raised Chrysler's height to 1,046 feet – easily beating out the Severance Building in Manhattan.
But there was no time for celebration. Plans had already been announced for the Empire State Building, which would break Chrysler's record just over a year later. More importantly, the morning after Van Allen's coup, a catastrophic stock market crash plunged the United States into its deepest economic crisis. With its eccentric steel helmet and grand lobby, a temple to the power of American industry, the Chrysler Building encapsulated the dizzying extravagance of its era – an Art Deco landmark to mark the end of an optimistic decade.
Dominating the New York skyline brought prestige and publicity, but skyscrapers also solved a more mundane problem: As land prices rose, contractors had to build upward to turn a profit, pushing their projects as high as engineering, natural light and ultimately zoning would allow. "Skyscrapers were a self-fulfilling prophecy of the heated real estate market," Neal Bascomb wrote in his 2003 book Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City . By the 1920s, with Europe reduced to ashes after the First World War, these buildings became totems of a new world order. Manhattan in particular had become the "port of the world, the messenger of the new land ... of gold diggers and world conquest," wrote German architect Erich Mendelssohn in his 1926 book "Amerika," published the year after New York surpassed the London as the most populous city in the world.
As reported by New York Times by May 1929, skyscrapers had "become for all these United States a symbol, a fashion, and a climbing race to heaven." Money seemed inexhaustible, and as speculation defied the laws of economic logic, buildings increasingly seemed to defy the laws of physics. When the market fell, vacancies in New York skyrocketed. The Empire State Building, for example, has been mostly empty for nearly a decade. Chrysler fared better, opening in 1930 with over 70 percent occupancy from the likes of Western Union and, of course, Chrysler, whose founder, Walter Chrysler, had bought the lease on the Van Alen lot and design. before construction begins. Even so, what a writer of Scientific American , in 1930, had called "a towering sword of fire" soon seemed like an insane act of hubris. In a brutal 1931 deconstruction of the New Republic, the legendary critic Lewis Mumford dismissed the building as "a series of anxious mistakes". Moreover, he wrote, Chrysler demonstrated "the real dangers of a plutocracy: It gives the masters of our culture an unusual opportunity to expose their barbaric egos."
But ego alone was not enough to make projects on this scale work. After the Chrysler family sold the tower in 1953, the building fell into four decades of decline as successive owners cut maintenance costs, punched lights into the painted lobby ceiling and used the spire to store trash. In the early 1970s, with New York City itself headed for bankruptcy, Chrysler's occupancy rate reached a disastrous low of 17 percent, and even after a 1978 inscription by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, the building continued to fall into further disrepair. A $100 million renovation in the late 1990s revitalized the building, but it has continued to change hands, most recently in 2019, as more desirable skyscrapers sprout up around it.
After the trauma of 9/11, experts once again declared that the era of the skyscraper is over, but in the last two decades towers around the world have only gotten taller. As noted by Carol Willis, historian and founder Skyscraper Museum of New York, in her 1995 book Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago , "Tallest buildings generally appear just before the end of a boom." The Woolworth Building, the tallest building in the US before Chrysler, was completed a year before the outbreak of World War I, and the World Trade Center was completed in 1973 as the oil crisis sent the world economy into turmoil. Today, Manhattan is home to five buildings taller than the destroyed Twin Towers. Who can say what this recent boom will bring to an end? Investments like these fit the economic context: The Chrysler Building's pointy-roofed turret didn't puncture the stock market bubble; its mirror-like arches merely reflected it.
Surrounded by giants, the Chrysler Building today seems almost tiny—yet perhaps no other New York building attracts such admiration. "The skyscraper is a romantic idea," says Willis, and Chrysler speaks to the still-young nation's romantic potential. As Madeleine Ruthven wrote in one poem of 1937 which was about Van Alen's capitulation, "These airy mountains of glass / Are the signature of an age – / A way of life that must pass."
*Cover photo: Architect William Van Alen's designs for the building's formidable steel helmet grew taller and more ambitious over time. / NYPL
Source: smithsonianmag