CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The architect examined his plans. Right in the center of the tower he found a fire tower which, to the untutored mind, is nothing more or less than a large hole in a building. “I will build,” mused Bill, “something in that fire tower.”
—Kenneth Murchison, on the Chrysler Building
Severance was sure he had Van Alen dead to rights. In the third week of October, the Manhattan Company Building surpassed the height of the Woolworth Tower. The high winds slowed the erection of intricate truss work in the pyramid crown, but the schedule had the steelworkers topping out the steel on November 12. Meanwhile, the four sides of the Chrysler Building’s dome were closing in on one another at an angle, preventing it from rising much higher. Van Alen had shown his cards first: His skyscraper would be 840 feet tall, maybe 850 at best—that was without the sixty-foot flagpole Severance had learned about earlier in the week. Announcements from the Chrysler Building Corporation that they had finished their steel work didn’t fool him. The derrick poised above the dome was there to raise this flagpole. Severance knew what to do. “When you get a guy down, don’t let him up.”
The 40 Wall Street team decided to go higher again. Ohrstrom set out to build the tallest and wouldn’t be beat out by less than ten feet. The builders agreed. Paul Starrett had an aphorism about these kind of changes: “Even in building a dog house . . . you find you have to make it larger because the dog’s tail is longer than you thought it was.” No doubt the bondholders who financed this skyscraper thought that every dollar they had invested was used to produce the most efficient income-producing office building, but ultimately some of that money was spent on satisfying pride—for all involved.
Back at the drafting table, Severance and Matsui designed a lantern story and lengthened the top of the structure with a flagpole of their own, one twenty-five feet tall. By mid-November when the workers raised the flag, it would snap in the wind over the Manhattan Company Building at 925 feet. Chrysler and Van Alen would only boast the world’s tallest building for a short month, only long enough to be of minor note in the years ahead.
The 40 Wall Street team tried to keep these revised plans quiet. Not even The Bank of The Manhattan Company’s directors knew the final height. Their vice president, Raymond Jones, had to admit to his employees that he didn’t know the elevation of the last set of plans, saying the skyscraper “will rise to a height of——, well, the builder won’t tell us now, but they admit it will be at least 900 feet high.”
At week’s end, however, he had his answer when a journalist broke the story. “New Skyscraper Race is Won by Bank of Manhattan Building—Plans Altered Twice to Beat Out Chrysler,” read the Evening Telegram headline on Saturday, October 18. Albeit premature, it was great press for Severance and the building’s owners: “[The Manhattan Company Building], unlike the Chrysler Building, was little heralded at first and possibly by virtue of this fact was able to come through in a Garrison finish to win the title of the tallest . . . The Chrysler construction is so far advanced that further changes are impossible.” The article featured photographs of the towers taken on Thursday and an illustration of their future height marks: 905 feet for the Chrysler Building and 925 feet for the Manhattan Company Building.
Severance had much to celebrate at his weekend house in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. One could hardly begrudge him if he toasted his success with a highball or two, Prohibition be damned. Plans for his design of the Nelson Building, a 525-foot-tall skyscraper on Thirty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, were published on the same day as the Evening Telegram article. The real-estate firm, Brown, Wheelock, Harris, Vought & Company, had an army of agents out soliciting tenants for the Manhattan Company Building and were making good progress, particularly with its promise of world’s tallest. And now that a reporter had revealed his and Van Alen’s secret moves, his former partner knew the final score. The race was settled between them and, in only a few weeks, would be punctuated in steel.
Meanwhile, the press had a good story in their teeth with this race, and they had no intention of letting the team behind the Manhattan Company Building relax. A New York Times journalist called Paul Starrett at his Greenwich, Connecticut, home over the weekend, wanting to know if he was willing to confirm or deny the Evening Telegram reports that Severance had altered the Manhattan Company Building’s plans twice to carry the height of his skyscraper to 925 feet. “Because of pyramiding in the upper floors of a skyscraper,” Starrett responded, “it is difficult to define building heights in terms of floors, especially after the sixty-second floor has been passed.” It was the answer of a seasoned politician–the nonanswer—but one only had to know Paul Starrett, knowing how he planned every movement of labor and material on his construction sites, to see through his claiming ignorance of the height of his own skyscraper. After all, he had ordered the steel to exact measurements, even factoring in the slight compression of the columns, particularly on the lower floors, due to the load they had to bear. On his buildings, an eighth of an inch in height discrepancy was considered “the very limit of allowable error.”
Starrett held his ground. The reports were accurate, but he didn’t want to reveal their plans. The journalist then suggested that Ohrstrom and the Starretts were set against Walter Chrysler in a race to erect the world’s tallest building. Starrett balked: he was not involved in any such race. The original plans, as filed with the Bureau of Buildings, were the ones they intended to implement. Furthermore, in his opinion, the Manhattan Company Building stood “too high now.” Despite his protestations, the article concluded that the Starretts’ fast progress would soon bring the height crown back downtown in a few weeks, as the Evening Telegram had reported.
Yet for all the close coverage of the race, not one journalist had connected the fact that the two architects who designed these competing skyscrapers were former partners in a practice that ended badly, nor had journalists uncovered the final height of Chrysler’s plans. In truth, a sixty-foot flagpole told only part of the story.
On October 23, the executive committee of the Empire State—the owners, architects, and builders—came together for their weekly Tuesday meeting. The day before, another article in the New York American had detailed where the skyscraper race stood. Paul Starrett “definitely established” the Manhattan Company Building’s final height at 840 feet. Sitting at the table with Raskob, Smith, Kaufman, and the architects, Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, Starrett knew that was a blatant lie. As for the Chrysler Building, the American’s real-estate editor, J. P. Lohman, made a call to William Van Alen’s office the day before and learned that their skyscraper rose only sixty-eight stories and 805 feet. It looked like the Manhattan Company Building was set to be the new leader at any height greater than 806 feet. At least to the press, the truth was a commodity to be bargained with as freely as a penny stock, and all the race’s participants traded it freely.
Down on Wall Street, the ticker tape revealed that Raskob’s call to his friends to support the market hadn’t worked. Trading was heavy, and despite a few rallies over the previous two weeks, many of the market’s leading stocks were trending downward. A few investors had already lost everything, and rather than face their margin calls, they took their own lives. The unease that hung over Wall Street’s brokers continued, despite statements from Charles Mitchell, a director of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, that recent declines were a healthy correction that had played itself out.
Nonetheless, the Empire State, Inc., board pressed ahead with their business. The wreckers had already hauled away tons of the former Waldorf-Astoria, including much of its marble and gold fixtures, and the board needed to resolve the skyscraper’s plans in order to arrange for the steel and submit a loan application to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. There had been many discussions about the building’s height, and now that the Starretts had run the costs for an eighty-story skyscraper, the committee had to make a final decision on the design and put the machine in motion to build it.
Governor Smith presented Starrett Brothers’ findings: the skyscraper would cost $50 million, including $27 million for construction and $16 million for the land. The young real-estate agent Hamilton Weber provided the numbers for the potential rental income for the skyscraper that Raskob promised him would be “the biggest and the highest building in the entire world.” In an exhaustive report given to Chatham Phenix’s Robert Brown, who sat on the skyscraper’s executive committee, Weber estimated the yearly income from the roughly 2.3 million square feet of rentable space to be an exact $7,961,580. He broke the numbers down by floor and based them on an occupancy rate of 90 to 100 percent. Given yearly expenses (operating, taxes, interest on loans) of roughly $6 million, the building would spin off at least $1.5 million in dividends for its investors. For “practical purposes,” he didn’t take into consideration “the character of ownership and certain other features connected with the building.” One of those considerations included the most important feature of the skyscraper: its future claim as world’s tallest.
For months now the architects and builders had struggled to rein in Raskob’s desire to build higher. When they first told him the most economical height was seventy-five stories, Raskob instructed them to come back with plans for eighty-eight stories. It was progress from earlier discussions of one hundred stories and questions like “How high can you make it so it won’t fall down.” Shreve had explained this number of stories was simply unrealistic: they would require an additional elevator bank and this “utility cone” cut into the number of square feet available for rental.
There were few architectural firms more sober-minded than Shreve, Lamb & Harmon. That was not to say they lacked ambition. In 1921 when Shreve and Lamb joined the letterhead of Carrère & Hastings, the partnership agreement allowed them to profit exclusively on the small jobs they brought in, an arrangement that, Shreve said, “would have been fine if they had stuck to dog houses, garages, and small homes.” They quickly won the commission for Standard Oil’s new Manhattan office building and the new partners argued with Hastings about how the fee should be split. Shreve and Lamb then decided to set off on their own. They won a number of commissions and created a large practice based out of the same Madison Avenue building where Van Alen worked. In May 1929 they offered the puckish Arthur Loomis Harmon, who had distinguished himself as a AIA Gold Medal–winning designer of the Shelton Hotel, a partnership in their firm after Harmon admitted to Shreve on a train ride that “he was afraid that the day would come when he would design great buildings and be unable to clinch the contract with the client because he had no organization to transform good plans into buildings of steel and stone.” Seeing the opportunity, Shreve said, “Loomis, I think you’d better come in with Lamb and me. We can go a long way together.” With the design skill of Lamb and Harmon matched with the management acumen of Shreve, the practice proved to be the modern ideal for an architectural firm—an ideal that Severance & Van Alen had given up years ago in a fit of ego.
In this modern ideal, Shreve didn’t respect the architect with “heavy black pencil, long hair and temperamental disposition” whom he thought fit better in “those high and far off times when all women were beautiful and the brave deserved the fair.” The esprit de corps of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon was cooperation among the members of the boards, and that cooperation had one purpose: to make the building pay. In this spirit Lamb had taken the reins of the Empire State’s design. Harmon provided the out-of-box ideas. Shreve made it all work. “The program was short enough,” Lamb described the origination of his design: “—a fixed budget, no space more than 28 feet from window to corridor, as many stories of such space as possible, an exterior of limestone, and completion by May 1, 1931, which meant a year and six months from the beginning of sketches. The first three of these requirements produced the mass of the building and the latter two the characteristics of design.”
At the beginning, Lamb tried to maintain some of the fifty-story loft building’s massing. He cut indentations into the tower’s face to provide for light and used the same elevator placement, its banks perpendicular to the building’s main axis. Using the thirtieth floor as the master floor plan from which the rest of the skyscraper took shape, he drew several schemes. Shreve then took each and calculated whether it would pay. As the days passed, the skyscraper revealed itself more clearly to Lamb. Raymond Hood, who had vied to be the Empire State’s architect, advised his friend, “Well, there’s one thing you won’t have to struggle with, to make it look tall.” Lamb cut away floors, eliminated setbacks, and simplified its mass. Finally he settled on placing the elevators parallel to the building’s axis and making the tower floor plan more square in design. Then it was a question of how to maximize the rentals of each floor and provide the most light.
Lamb put away his fifteenth scheme and started anew. He drew his final inspiration from a large pencil held aloft. After the fifth floor, Lamb decided to start the tower sixty feet back from the street. Like the unbroken lines of that pencil, the tower then rose to the eightieth floor with only the slightest of setbacks. The design offered the clean expression that matched his tastes, met the zoning regulations, provided ample light and ventilation, and would earn a pretty dollar from renters. Plus, its simplicity met the demands for construction speed. With his partners, he finished the necessary floor plans, elevation drawings, and perspective rendering. The three congregated in the firm’s small library whenever they needed to iron out a certain detail, a scene that reminded Lamb of his charette days at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Thanks to Shreve, however, these plans came with figures detailing the dollars and cents to be earned in rentable square feet. Raskob had adopted these plans, called “Scheme K.”
It had been three weeks since the acceptance of this scheme, yet the question remained: how many stories should the skyscraper rise, particularly in the face of a market on the brink of disaster? Shreve’s arguments and those of the builders prevailed on Raskob. At eighty stories the Empire State would be the tallest, unless one of the parade of skyscrapers announced in October went further than a rendering for the press. Just in case, they would leave some wriggle room in the loan application with the Metropolitan Insurance Company, stating the building would contain eighty stories plus an undetermined number of penthouse stories. Similar to the Manhattan Company Building, these additional stories were not included in the estimates for rental income. Soon the Starretts could claim their involvement in the two tallest buildings in the world. Shreve, Lamb & Harmon had their hands in both as well.
As for Raskob, he meant to keep his promise to Weber and others. If eighty stories was enough to be tallest, fine. The committee adjourned, resolved to move ahead with the eighty-story skyscraper. He even forwarded the motion. But if this turned out not to be enough, Raskob would go higher—whatever it took to beat Chrysler and the others. He may not have liked the spotlight, but he never played for second place.
Unbeknownst to the Empire State board as they broke up their meeting, and unbeknownst to Severance, who had already been crowned winner in the skyscraper race despite being three weeks away from topping out, Van Alen was preparing to distance himself from his rivals in one sweeping architectural gesture. No question that Severance’s lantern story and flagpole were solid additions, but they were typical of an architect who was praised in the same Architectural Record article that said: “It is fortunate that up to this time, no attempt has been made by architectural dilettanti to talk of an ‘American Style’ in city architecture. It is fortunate in as much as there is no such style, never has been and, in all probability, never will be such a style.” Severance borrowed French Gothic traditions for his building’s crown. Van Alen wanted to prove an American style existed, and that it required putting convention aside and using steel to its fullest potential.
On October 23, 1929, however, revolutions in design took a rear seat to the weather. Van Alen needed the day to be clear of hurricane winds or else raising the giant obelisk-shaped spire would be impossible. The previous day a storm had hit the city from the southwest. Its cutting rain and fifty-two-mile-an-hour winds made steel erection in the Chrysler tower too dangerous. The workers scrambled to lash down wooden planks to the beams on the top floors. Several times throughout the construction, high winds had thrown planks down onto Forty-second Street and Lexington Avenue. Charles River, a steelworker on the Chrysler Building, said that to stand up straight during these storms meant risking being blown off the floor. They crawled instead. Down on the street, people ducked for cover as their umbrellas snapped inside out. Power lines, street signs, and construction fences were blown down. One woman was picked up by a gale of wind and thrown like a stone into the window of Schrafft’s candy store on Fifth Avenue. That same day Thomas Hastings, one of the deans of American architecture, passed away at sixty-nine years old, silencing his disdain for those “elongated packing boxes” called skyscrapers that should “be passed ever in haste.” It was as if the storm and Hastings’s death gave pause to reflect on how much New York’s skyline was about to change in the days ahead.
The winds had finally settled. A low drift of clouds crossed the sky like a moving mountain, and the temperature was a cool sixty degrees. Chrysler was about to realize his long-held dream, his “fascinating visions of the fantastically high buildings” that he first saw on coming to New York in 1911. The automobile man had set all the gears in motion to see this happen. He had pushed his lawyer, Nicolas Kelley, to negotiate a deal with Reynolds and Cooper Union. He had bankrolled every extravagance in the design, from the steel-sheathed dome, to the grand marble lobby, to the thirty-two elevator cabs, each individually crafted. He had stepped forward, not back, when the height race demanded changes in the design. He even showed the mechanical engineer how to take the plumb lines for the elevators shafts. “If the elevator cabs travel less than straight,” he instructed, “they will be more noisy than pistons in cylinders that are out of round. I want them perfect.” Now they ran at a thousand feet per minute, two hundred and fifty feet faster than the building code allowed. Most important, he’d signed off on the addition of the steel-latticed vertex.
Although Chrysler had a personal stake in the building and took more than his share of credit for the building’s design, this day was for Van Alen. The vertex was not sixty feet tall, as had been rumored. The five sections of the vertex were instead 185 feet tall. These sections were now riveted together in the fire tower. Its 8-by-8-foot base strained the wooden planks on the sixty-fifth floor, where it stood. The needle’s point reached through the dome’s top to 935 feet in the sky. Only the derrick set to raise the vertex was higher. To hoist the vertex into position, the steelworkers had built an outrigger platform that projected over the four sides of the seventy-fourth floor. First they secured temporary extensions to the floor on each side and then lashed down planks so they had room to step around as they maneuvered the twenty-seven-ton vertex into place. On paper the vertex appeared a simple and clean addition to the skyscraper. Its lines were straight; its angles measured in exact degrees.
The men, however, had to erect the vertex 860 feet in the sky, raising it up through the fire tower and securing it to the dome’s top while moving quickly about the narrow cantilevered platform that offered space for one misstep, but definitely not two. A gust of wind or the snap of a cable threatened to send the vertex pitching headlong into traffic below. This fifty-four-thousand-pound web of steel—some of whose braces were taller than the iron workers—was unlike anything any of these men had faced before, even the bolter-up, old John, who had seen much more than most. Balancing an elephant by his trunk on top of the building would have been an easier proposition. To add to the day’s job, the derrick adjacent to the fire tower had only a twenty-ton capacity, but needed to lift the twenty-seven-ton vertex. Van Alen’s engineers figured that by staging the derrick mast close to the fire tower opening, the boom could be in a vertical position as it raised the vertex. Derrick capacity was determined with the boom horizontal, its weakest position. With the boom and mast held upright against each other, the derrick would be able to handle the twenty-seven-ton pyramid of steel. At least that’s what their calculations indicated.
The men were ready though. Fall lines from the guy derrick were lowered and attached to a connection on the vertex at its center of gravity to prevent the spire from tilting as it was being raised. With the derrick’s boom set, the signal was given to the derrickman. The street car vendors, secretaries, and business executives had no idea of the danger that lurked above them. The papers hadn’t been alerted. Only the construction photographers, Peyser & Patzig, who documented the building’s progress every few weeks, had been informed to have their cameras loaded with film this day.
The vertex rose slowly from the dome, an American flag attached to its tip. Regardless of his faith in the design calculations or the confidence of the workers whose job it was to lift the vertex, Van Alen, “watching it from Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, had four sinking spells, continuous vertigo, and three attacks of mal-de-mer.” The lines secured to the platform from the top of the derrick held. The hoisting connection to the vertex was centered and didn’t slip. The derrick gangs and ironworkers shouted instructions to one another as the cables fed through the derrick’s wheels and the vertex lifted higher and higher—five feet, then ten feet, then twenty, then fifty, then one hundred feet. The final section of the vertex, the first brought up the side of the building and set upon the timbers on the sixty-fifth floor, rose from the confines of the fire tower. At last, the entire length of the spire revealed itself like a “butterfly from its cocoon.”
The foreman waved to the derrick crew’s signalman, who then rung the bell to stop the lifting. The engineer shut off the power. The steelworkers manhandled the lower portion of the vertex to line up its rivet hole with that of one in the steel frame of the dome’s top. The fall lines were dropped one inch, then two, until the holes met. The connectors rushed to place the temporary bolts. The faster they moved, the less chance a stray gale from yesterday’s storm would endanger the operation. Once the connectors finished, an experienced plumber-up scaled the highest piece of stationary steel in the world to check that the vertex stood level. The plumb line fell true. Below him, the web of steel would have done little to stop his fall, but his skill and tight grip on the latticed vertex held him secure.
The riveting gang from Post & McCord moved in to finish the job. The rivets in the coke stove glowed a bright orange at eight hundred degrees. One bolt was removed, and a drift pin inserted in its place. With a pair of tongs, the capped end of a rivet was stuck into the hole. The bucker-up positioned his dolly bar against the rivet’s mushroom end and then braced himself. The gunman swung the rivet hammer to the other end of the hole, squared his feet, and pulled the trigger. Sparks flew into the empty space below him. The shock of the pneumatic hammer shook his whole body. Twenty seconds later the concussion ended, and others hurried to seal the next connection. Ninety minutes from the first signal, the vertex was up and secured at 1,046 feet over the city.
No feat this spectacular had ever been dared, and the men celebrated—but quietly. Until the Manhattan Company Building crews finished their steel work, no announcements would be made. As Van Alen explained, “We’ll lift the thing up and we won’t tell ’em anything about it. And when it’s up we’ll just be higher, that’s all.” Walter Chrysler’s skyscraper was higher than the Manhattan Company Building, and better yet, it was sixty feet taller than the Eiffel Tower, which had been the tallest man-made structure for over forty years. For now, however, Van Alen, Walter Chrysler, and the workers had to enjoy the achievement without recognition. There were no blinding flashes from photographers, no reporters on hand. No grand speeches, not even a press release. They were a team of climbers who could only appreciate the highest peak with those who had ascended with them.
That evening the papers ran photographs of a trolley that jumped its tracks and hurled into a subway excavation on Smith Street in Brooklyn, injuring eight passengers. The only race chronicled was the one run at the Empire City Racetrack where Kildare beat out Turf Writer and Okaybee in a photo finish. In fact, there was no mention in the New York papers about the raising of the vertex. Perhaps everyone—reporters tracking the skyscraper race, people on the street, and the 40 Wall Street team—simply mistook the slender spire for an unusually tall derrick. From a distance, they had a similar steel-latticed design. For weeks, the only significant article featuring skyscrapers was one about how one thousand years ago the Mayans built skyscrapers that rose two hundred feet high among the “cohune palms, giant mahoganies and cedars of Central America.” For a much more interesting story, the New York World reporter should have taken a longer look at his skyline—as should have Severance. It was right there in plain sight, if one knew what to look for.
When Chrysler wanted attention focused on the Chrysler Building, he knew how to get it, yet the time was not right. Meanwhile, they would move ahead with finishing the dome and covering the vertex with Nirosta steel, giving it the force of an exclamation point.
Nobody knew that the next day the Roaring Twenties would be ripped apart, nor that the skyscraper race had yet to be won. Tomorrow would come, but today the Chrysler Building was king.