The Chrysler Building

Of the many beautiful buildings in Manhattan, this is probably the hands-down favorite. Built in a little over a year and a half (for a while they averaged four floors a week) and completed in May of 1930, the Chrysler Building was for a time the tallest building in the world. It is now the third tallest in New York, a distinction it shares with the New York Times building: they are the exact same height.

Designed by architect William Van Alen as the home of the Chrysler Corporation, it utilized automobile designs in an Art Deco style. On the four corners of the 31st floor, for instance, are winged ornaments intended to replicate the 1929 Chrysler radiator caps, just above 'hubcaps' a floor below (see photos). The corners of the 61st floor have eagle-like gargoyles that mimic the 1929 Chrysler hood ornament. You may also notice in the images something quite startling--the exterior of the building is constructed of multi-colored bricks! Indeed, this is the tallest brick building in the world: over 3,826,000 bricks were all laid by hand (no, I didn't count them all--Wikipedia did!). Weight-bearing walls used the typical steel girder construction, held together with over 400,000 rivets (IBID). The chromium-nickel plating on the top of the building was made by Krupp in Germany and not a single sheet has ever had to be replaced. Interesting too is that, while the lease holder has changed several times now from the Chrysler Corporation, the building and land are owned by Cooper Union (another source said only the land was owned by the college). The point here, however, is this--although the building is wholly commercial, the amount that would have been paid in taxes (about $10,000,000 per year) is paid to Cooper Union instead, and the city's loss is the students' gain: they receive their education tuition-free.

Since I'm dealing in arcane facts and figures here, I may as well tell an interesting tale about the top of this structure. At the time, having the tallest building in the world was a goal shared by many. Another building under construction, at 40 Wall Street, was slated to be about the same height at the Chrysler Building. Their architect, a former associate of Van Alen's, added to the height of that building while it was being constructed. Chrysler, however, held firm that his building would stay at the pre-planned height. However, a 'silver spire' was secretly constructed and moved to the building site in five pieces. After the Wall Street structure was completed and could no longer challenge, the building crew at Chrysler assembled the 185-foot, 27 ton spire inside the building and hoisted it in place: within 90 minutes it had become the tallest building in the world--one thousand and forty-six feet, four and three-quarter inches. Recently found photographs suggest the date of this accomplishment as Thursday, October 23rd, 1929, the day before the stock market crashed to the ground. Walter Chrysler later quarreled with Van Alen, claiming that he took kickbacks from sub-contractors, and refused to pay him the rest of his fee. While the architect won the later court case, he never worked again and died in relative obscurity (the New York Times did not print an obituary).

I have also included images of the interior lobby of this gem--one of the few classic buildings in Manhattan that allows photos inside (more on that in a later blog). The Otis Elevator Company designed and built the four banks of eight elevators for the building (photos again) that use Japanese ash, English gray harewood, Oriental walnut, and Cuban plum pudding wood in their door and interior design. The ceiling is actually a painting--this large mural, which shows energy as the solution to man's problems, was painted on canvas by Edward Trumbull and then cemented in place. I did not want to use the camera's flash on this artwork but the lighting is relatively low, making for less-than-crisp focus on these hand-held shots. I've tried to color-correct them as well, as the incandescent lighting resulted in uniformly orangish-yellow images.

Finally, if you're a tourist in New York, this is one of the easiest buildings to go and see--it is just down the street from Grand Central Station, at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, in an architecturally fertile area of Manhattan (more on nearby classic buildings--and the identity of 'Felix'--soon). Be well,

Dan

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