CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Prudent investors are now buying stocks in huge quantities and will profit handsomely when this hysteria is over . . . The pendulum has swung too far.
—John Jakob Raskob
I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Raskob removed his ticker-tape machine from the closet and placed it on his desk. He glared at the contraption, which was sitting quietly, at the moment, between the two crystal lamps that James Riordan had given to him for his birthday. It was 9:45 A.M., fifteen minutes before the stock exchange would open for trading on Thursday, October 24. Raskob knew the time exactly. Usually he needed to find a clock or ask for the time from a colleague. He hadn’t worn a watch in years. This morning, his valet watched him slip one on his wrist and then ask for his chauffer to drive him to his office at 230 Park Avenue. Normally he walked. “I need to know the time—and I haven’t the time to walk,” he explained.
Due to yesterday’s sharp market loss, many investors had suffered long, sleepless nights, worrying about what would surely be another day of heavy trading. In the moments before the opening bell, all of New York was on edge. Financier Michael Levine told his staff, “Nobody goes home until I say so.” Pat Bologna, a shoeshine boy with years of wages in the market, said, “People just stood there, stopped talking, and looked toward the Stock Exchange. It was like the silence before the off of a big race.”
When the market opened, the ticker-tape machine began to punch out market prices, indicating a surge of buying. The first twenty-five minutes of activity offered hope of a rally, but then a block of General Motors shares sold down. U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, and General Electric dropped as well. Switchboards across the city, and country, passed through the urgent message: “Sell at the market!” Within an hour, Raskob read the tale spilling from his ticker. The market was crashing.
At 11:15, sellers found no buyers for their shares, whatever the price. Fifteen minutes later, dread became fear; fear turned to panic; panic to mayhem. The ticker system failed to keep up with the trading and fed out quotations an hour behind the bids offered on the floor. In that space of time, some share prices fell ten or twenty points—others by that same amount in percentage terms. Crowds rushed down to Wall Street; they had to know what was happening, whether they were cleaned out. Police lined the streets to prevent a rush on the exchange. One investor paced back and forth on the street, shredding a sheet of paper into confetti. Some stared in disbelief. Others laughed at a joke they didn’t get. Clerks hurried to manage the orders. Tempers flared at the exchange’s selling posts. One broker mumbled unintelligibly and was led away. Another collapsed. Winston Churchill stood in the visitors’ gallery above the floor watching the carnage unfold. “There they were, walking to and fro like a slow-motion picture of a disturbed ant heap, offering each other enormous blocks of securities at a third of their old prices and half their present value, and for many minutes together finding no one strong enough to pick up the sure fortunes they were compelled to offer.”
Over eleven billion dollars in market value vanished by one o’clock. A collective moan echoed off the canyons of Wall Street. One speculator asked his broker the latest bid for National Casket. A steelworker eating his lunch on a beam hundreds of feet over Wall Street was thought to be a jumper. A producer ran down the aisle of the Shubert Theatre and shouted, “Boys, you can forget about the show. You can forget about everything. The bottom’s just dropped out of the market!” In his office Raskob ate lunch alone, not wanting to be far from his ticker or distracted by another’s misfortune. A market tailspin jeopardized his financing for the Empire State.
Under the din of construction from the Manhattan Company Building, the financial godfathers of New York gathered at 23 Wall Street, the office of J. P. Morgan and Company. They had come through in the Panic of 1907, and they had to come through now. After the meeting, they told the growing number of investors waiting outside to have faith. The break was “technical” and the market sound. At 1:30, the New York Stock Exchange’s vice president, Richard Whitney, strode across the exchange floor to the post trading U.S. Steel. He bid 205 each for a block of ten thousand shares, a ten-point premium over the last bid. The order executed, he moved to the next post and the next. With the bankers’ support, the market rallied in the last hours and by closing bell it had recovered eight billion in its lost value. The “minnows,” as market player Jesse Livermore called small investors, suffered the brunt of the decline, having rushed to sell or had their margin accounts settled. Raskob placed several calls to those investing in his skyscraper. This kind of cataclysm could derail the smallest of projects, let alone one that cost double that of most other skyscrapers. After his last phone call, Raskob calmed. At least for now his investors had weathered the worst.
Unfortunately, the worst hadn’t yet occurred. The next day, John D. Rockefeller announced that “My son and I have for some days been purchasing sound common stocks.” Merrill Lynch suggested that those “with available funds should take advantage of this break to buy good securities.” For their efforts, the market rallied that Friday and in a short session on Saturday. But investors then had almost forty-eight hours in which to test their nerves before the market opened again. Should they sell or hold? Should they swoop in and grab some bargains or was this truly the beginning of the end? On Monday, October 28, the market fell again in a day of heavy trading. It was not cataclysmic, but in contrast to the previous Thursday’s drop, there was no day-end recovery of prices. That evening many investors—big and small alike—decided they were finished. Many had bought their stocks on margin and needed to cut their losses.
In offices across the city Tuesday morning—Raskob’s included—tickers fed out their first quotation: a 45,000 block of Anaconda Copper shares sold at 80, down 16 from the yesterday’s closing. In the first half hour, brokers traded 3,259,800 shares, ten times what would normally be traded in that amount of time. Gigantic losses were posted on the board. Margin accounts were liquidated. Police blocked the entrance to the exchange, and hysteria reigned again on Wall Street. By the closing bell, 16,410,030 shares had been traded during the day, and the Dow Jones index was down forty percent from its position eight weeks before. The bubble had burst.
The knives came out to parse the blame. Some attacked Hoover and Mellon. Others harped at Charlie Mitchell for his optimism in the face of several breaks. Senate Republican leader Jim Robinson charged Raskob for encouraging “every one, even people with small means” to speculate. Raskob bit back that these claims were “false, vicious, wholly unwarranted and manifestly political . . . I do not gamble in the stock market.” In fact, his biggest gamble was elsewhere.
As Wall Street and Washington slung mud slung back and forth, Raskob worked to keep the Empire State on track. They had yet to secure the major financing, and throughout the city buildings slated for construction were now put on hold or cancelled altogether. Charles Noyes quietly backed down from his one-hundred-fifty-story skyscraper, delaying it for at least eight years. W. B. Foshay, who financed the tallest tower in Minneapolis, filed for bankruptcy on November 2 and the thirty-two-story tower that bore his name was included in the receivership action. Spending $50 million on a speculative office building in this environment risked Raskob’s fortune—and the fortunes of those he brought in. And as he would learn a few days later, it was a risk with consequences beyond money lost.
One of his closest friends, James Riordan, had grown despondent since Black Thursday: some said because of the losses so many of his colleagues suffered in the market collapse. Others feared that he may have been driven to desperation because of trouble at County Trust and several bad real-estate investments. On the morning of Friday, November 8, Riordan went missing. The bank’s treasurer discovered that the .38-caliber revolver kept by the cashier for protection had been removed from his desk, and the treasurer notified Raskob, Al Smith, and several others, who feared Riordan might take his own life. They called his house on West Twelfth Street, but the maid didn’t know where he was. A few hours later Riordan arrived at his home and let himself in without the maid hearing him. He went to his second floor bedroom, took off his coat and vest, sat down in a plush red chair, put the revolver to his right temple, and fired. The maid found him slumped in his chair at 3:50 P.M. and called for a priest. Raskob and Smith drove down to West Twelfth Street to meet the priest there. The Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Norris, arrived soon after and they convinced him to withhold the news of the suicide for one day to prevent panic at County Trust. The police were not told.
Raskob assumed the bank’s chairmanship, and over the weekend, he and several of Riordan’s close friends made sure County Trust’s finances were in order. They denied reports that $5 million in gold had been deposited into the bank to make it solvent. Eddie Dowling, “one of the inner circle,” as he put it, admitted years later what most suspected at the time: “If he’d been discovered on Friday and the news had gotten out, it would have wrecked the bank. Anyway, they covered it all up. This was the power of these men. They got into vaults, they opened banks, they did things that nobody but people with their power could do . . . Nobody lost a cent. The bank was ten times stronger when it opened on Monday morning than it was before this thing happened.”
The suicide shook Raskob deeply. He and Riordan had suffered many of the same obstacles and sacrifices on their career paths. Now Riordan, who had been one of the first to know about the Empire State and who was one of the few to understand its significance to Raskob, would never see it tower in the skyline. Much of the same power and influence Raskob wielded in order to prevent a run on County Trust, he used to ensure that the Empire State, and all it represented, wouldn’t become another victim of the Wall Street crash.
As Raskob and Smith served as pallbearers at James Riordan’s funeral on November 12, the steelworkers on the Manhattan Company Building prepared to set the sixty-foot steel cap atop the pyramid crown. Not even the stock market crash stalled the momentum of the skyscraper race now. At 925 feet, New York would have a new winner—at least that was the race’s progress as reported in the papers. Severance and Ohrstrom read nothing about the Chrysler Building’s secret vertex or its height of 1,046 feet. The only photograph of the topped-out skyscraper ran in the World’sgravure section above the caption: “The World’s Tallest Building Raises the Stars and Stripes to the New York Heavens.” But the caption continued that once the Manhattan Company Building completed their steel erection, they would take the height record from the Chrysler’s 808-foot-tall tower. The World was only off by 238 feet. Other papers hardly mentioned the skyscraper at all. As awful as it was, the market crash helped Chrysler keep journalists focused elsewhere.
So those packed into Wall Street a few minutes before noon thought they were watching the final steel erection for the world’s tallest structure. The site always gathered sightseers, who craned their necks to see the workers loop their legs up and around the pipe scaffolding hundreds of feet high to finish the exterior. As they watched a half-ton, ten-foot-wide block of granite ascend the side of the building to the thirty-fifth floor, there came a panicked cry. An engineer shouted to those below to look out. The thousand-pound block hurled downward—a hoist cable had broken. The bricklayers rushed to get out of the way, some diving through windows as the block roared past them. People on the street ran for cover.
The granite fell clear until the ninth-floor setback, where it crashed through several wooden planks (the concrete floors were not yet laid at this level). A thirty-five-year-old steamfitter, James Bellas, tried to scramble away. The block missed him, but it hit the planks at his feet. An upended piece of wood fractured his shoulder, and he was knocked to what was left of the floor. The granite block continued on its path, tearing through six more floors before connecting with a steel beam that split the granite in two. One half plummeted down the inside of the building, hitting other beams and eventually shattering into hundreds of shards on the ground floor. The other half shot out into the street. The stone missed the platform over the sidewalk, sparing the lives of several pedestrians. Instead the granite hit a steel beam in the bed of a truck. The granite crashed with such force that it twisted the beam and hurled it into the street, almost hitting a car driving past. The granite careened off the beam and exploded in the street, sending fragments shooting out like shrapnel. One piece broke through the rear window of a Rolls-Royce idling at 37 Wall Street, hitting Miss Pratt, a young woman waiting in the automobile while her chauffeur ran “the luckiest errand he ever went on in his life.” A splinter of granite sliced through the leg of an eighteen-year-old office clerk heading across Wall Street.
As the cloud of dust settled over the site, Captain Edward Quinn and thirty of his policemen hurried to rope off the block as a crowd pressed forward for a look at the macabre scene. Dr. Salken, a physician for Starrett Brothers, ran to help the injured. Miss Pratt refused his aid and was driven away from the scene. An ambulance took Bellas and the young clerk to the hospital. One patrolman said, “it was miraculous that no others were injured.” A chunk of granite the size of a soccer ball missed one woman by inches. A fragment landed near an evangelist praying on his knees in front of the old Subtreasury Building. Another tore off the brim of a man’s hat on the sidewalk. The foreman ordered the street cleared and ordered his men on the seventieth floor to return to the day’s task: finishing the steelwork.
One hour later, the sixty-foot steel cap was lifted into place above the pyramid crown and secured nine hundred feet above the sidewalk. Workers embraced one another on the seventieth floor. Photographers clicked pictures of the steelworkers waving from their perch. A flag was attached to the topmost steel, replacing the roof-tree in the ritual used for centuries to top out a building. Ohrstrom sent his congratulations, remarking on the unparalleled speed with which the tower had been erected. Reporters from the Herald Tribune, World, New York Times, and the Sun left the scene to file their copy about the half-ton block of granite crashing into the street, but also to herald the completion of the steelwork on the “tallest structure in the city” and the “world’s tallest tower.” The newspapers proclaimed it a great day for the city. Praise was showered upon the architects and builders.
Four days later the truth was revealed, from the most unlikely of sources: the Dow Service’s Daily Building Report. The trade report usually devoted its pages to such titillation as the price differentials for a ton of cast-iron soil pipe between suppliers in Newark, New Jersey, and White Plains, New York. On November 16, Allen Beals surprised his readers and the world when he wrote:
This is the story of how two architects, formerly partners, vied with each other to erect two of the world’s tallest man-made habitable structures, and how one of them, by an ingenious engineering device, finally succeeded in passing the hitherto thousand-foot pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower in Paris . . . While the structural steel men were fabricating in the shops the final-framework for the lantern story on the Bank of Manhattan Building . . . there was being secretly fabricated 845 feet above 42nd Street at Lexington Avenue a spindle-like lattice ornament that only a few knew what it was to be used for . . .
It grew in size two, three, four, until finally it reached a dozen stories tall before it dawned upon the workmen on the job that it was some kind of a pinnacle, but how was it going to be set, on so narrow and so precarious a footing as the structural steel beams and columns and girders more than 845 feet above the street, until the day came when a huge American flag, attached to its point, floated out 100 feet beyond the derrick boom that raised it, and the 185 foot vertex was fitted into place as the Stars and Stripes straighten out at the highest level the Flag ever flew from a fixed point in New York City—the top of the world’s highest man-made structure.
Over the next week, newspapers splashed the story onto their front pages. Van Alen’s defeat of Severance made great copy, even though this defeat had really played itself out weeks ago. Chrysler had fooled the same journalists who now headlined: “Architects’ Race Jostles the Moon” and “Chrysler Tower Wins Sky Race: Architect, Spurred by Rival’s Bank of Manhattan, Tops It and Eiffel, Too.” The story prompted magazine articles and was the target of editorials, one reading “America is vindicated, and our national passion for the biggest, the tallest, the most stupendous, may gratify itself in the thought that at last we are supreme.” Photographs of the late October emergence of the vertex finally found their way into editors’ hands. Even cartoonists took a turn at the extraordinary set of events, one depicting the Chrysler Building as so tall that its elevators serviced such floors as Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Heaven—in that order.
The surprise finish between the architects captured the popular imagination. It was a welcome return of the decade’s spirit of extravagance in a time when there wasn’t much to be excited about, except the billions of dollars lost on Wall Street every week. In the American tradition of making nouns into verbs, “skyscraping” was introduced “to indicate what is undoubtedly the big major sport of our architects, engineers and their backers of today. It is, in many respects like a game of poker. The chips in this game cost about a million apiece which makes a certain amount of bluffing possible.”
Severance had laid down his cards only to find Van Alen with an ace up his sleeve. Van Alen had outplayed him, and everyone knew it. Severance suffered the publicity in silence, not granting any interviews. However, he was not idle, nor did he sit for the widely accepted idea that he had lost out to the architect-artist. Now that the steelwork on the Manhattan Company Building was finished, height alterations would be more difficult and expensive, and more obviously an act of pride rather than good business. Yet even with the steel cap riveted into place, complicating matters greatly, Severance and the builders investigated ways to carry the skyscraper higher.
They now had two choices to pursue in the race: devise some structural addition of their own or spin their skyscraper as the tallest because it claimed “the tallest usable floor,” as Severance, the architect-businessman, argued in private. They pursued both.
One afternoon, while journalists at newspapers and magazines across the country churned out ever more copy about the skyscraper race, earning the Chrysler Building a bonanza of free publicity, Van Alen and Chrysler entered a mine-cage elevator at the construction site. The gate shut, a bell rang, and the elevator lifted upwards with a jolt. The journey up was like an old wooden roller coaster—the ride was not for the faint of heart. As the elevator climbed upwards, the floor beneath their feet shook and they had to hold the sides tightly so as not be thrown against each other. They rattled past workmen finishing floors and installing electric wires. As the elevator gathered momentum, wind whistled through the floorboards and each floor became nothing more than a blur. When they reached the top floors, the ride slowed and was bookended with another jolt. They stepped out of the elevator into a different world than the one they had left behind.
A spiderweb of tubular scaffolding covered the arched dome and vertex. Workmen in overalls and caps moved about, no doubt stealing a glance at the visiting suits before continuing with the pinging and banging of Nirosta steel sheets. The noise they made sounded as if they were pounding together aluminum trashcan lids. Only the sharp rat-tat-tat of the pneumatic hammer could be heard above their ruckus. Chrysler and Van Alen climbed upwards through the aerie construction site, careful with each step. At the seventy-fourth floor, they reached the vertex’s base. It was surrounded by a tangle of steel; the dome rose four more levels around the vertex until approximately 950 feet above the street, where the finial leapt clear. Chrysler and Van Alen climbed a set of ladders to the seventy-seventh floor. The wind howled through the three open triangular windows on each side of the dome. At this height above sea level, the temperature down on Forty-second Street was meaningless. Up here, workers weathered temperatures that dipped as low as ten to twenty degrees below zero. The constant wind drowned out the men’s voices and numbed their hands.
According to the papers, the Chrysler Building ended at the seventy-seventh floor, but in the middle of this “last” floor another ladder led to the seventy-eighth floor, 906 feet above the street. This shrunken space wouldn’t be available for rent, nor would the seven floors above it—each smaller than the one before. By the eighty-fourth and final floor, two men could barely stand together at one time. Above this, one could ascend a series of increasingly more narrow ladders through several trapdoors inside the vertex until it tapered to its point. There the darkness was complete.
The other way to get to the long, slender pyramid spire was to climb the scaffolding on the outside of the building. Chrysler and Van Alen took this route, one less claustrophobic but a lot scarier. They scaled the slim series of ladders and platforms, the wind blowing against them and even rocking the building slightly. Glancing down would reveal a thousand feet of empty space.
Several minutes later, they reached the top platform, a few planks of wood surrounding the vertex in a square. It wouldn’t take much to pitch headlong over the side; to stand up straight was an act of valor, simple foolishness, or both. Van Alen and Chrysler stood up straight, placed their hands on the vertex—the tallest point man had raised above the Earth—and posed for the camera. (A photographer had clambered after them to record this moment.) The steel, which weighed as much as twenty thousand automobiles, rocked slightly underneath their feet. All they could hear was the muffled hum from the streets far below and the faint creaking of the building.
Few characterized better the feeling of reaching this height on the Chrysler Building than writer David Michaelis. “Deep-sea divers in deep-sea depth are said to experience something called the rapture of the deep. A diver’s euphoria proves so overwhelming that he fails to return to the surface even when his air runs outs. From the 84th floor of the Chrysler Building, the city below appears as dreamy, distant, and unnecessary as the mercury-colored surface of the sea must look to an enraptured diver.”
Van Alen must have experienced a well of emotion standing atop his skyscraper, especially after such a long struggle to see it built. The vertex had outstretched the Eiffel Tower and beat Severance, but in his heart he cared more for its purpose as a “natural and logical development of the tower,” than its role in the height competition. As he instructed, the workers below him were fastening the forty-eight tons of Nirosta steel—shaped in a metalworking shop on the sixty-seventh floor—to the dome and vertex frame using screws, bolts, rivets, and nails made of the same alloy. The silver luster dominated the building’s crown from the sixty-first floor to the vertex tip. “With all the surfaces of this spire turned toward the sky, it will reflect nothing but the sky, and because it will have no outline—all being in perfect reflection—it is expected to be almost invisible. Thus the tower will appear to join the sky and melt into any cloud that floats by.” This “artistic effect,” Van Alen knew, provided the perfect terminating point for the Chrysler Building. The eight eagles’ heads for the sixty-first floor—now being shaped in the same metal as the vertex—spoke further to the truth he sought in designing for the modern world. No more “rusticated stone work, belt courses and heavy stone cornices,” he said. The gargoyles that would stare out at the city were “very bold in outline, form and scale, and of proportions suitable for their great altitude.”
Hand pressed to the pinnacle of his skyscraper, Van Alen had set aside convention in favor of eagle gargoyles and steel pyramid spires. Some called his designs capricious, the result of too much emotion and too few spare economic lines, yet in his own fearless way, Van Alen had answered the question posed years ago by Louis Sullivan, the first genius of modern skyscrapers: “How shall we proclaim from the dizzy height of this strange, weird, modern housetop the peaceful evangel of sentiment, of beauty, the cult of a higher life?” There was still much to do—design the vaulted ceiling of the observation floor, the passageways to the subway, the revolving doors, recessed lighting, shop fronts—each detail, even down to the pattern brickwork on the sidewalk, refined his answer: an architect should proclaim nothing less than the spirit of the age in which he lived.
Standing next to Van Alen, Chrysler shared the same view of the city stretching below them, but one colored by his own thoughts. The long lines of flat brownstone roofs of a nineteenth-century Manhattan had lost out to the towers of office, hotel, and apartment buildings, his now the tallest of them all. Cars, many of them built by his company, passed on the streets instead of horse-drawn wagons. Bridges (and unseen tunnels) conquered the Hudson and East Rivers that once were crossed only by ferries. Somewhere an airplane tracked through the sky, its passengers the rare few who could see, from an even higher altitude, the green spread of Central Park, the proud stance of the Statue of Liberty in the harbor, and the slope of the Palisades. Those who came to his building after its completion would pay a meager fifty cents to enjoy this same majestic sight, or at least the one from the seventy-first story. It was on this observation floor that Chrysler decided to display the tools he had fashioned at seventeen in the same wooden box he had carried around the railroad yards, evidence of what man could achieve with the strength of his own two hands. The mural planned for the Y-shaped lobby ceiling—the largest painting in the world, per his instructions—would first impress this on visitors, showing among its other images the “single figure, the naked torso of a man,” which symbolized the individual’s ability to harness the elements in the mechanical age.
For Chrysler, his skyscraper best represented this ability. He celebrated the building’s engineering triumphs: the self-leveling, high-speed elevators; the latest fire protection; an underfloor electrical system; moveable steel office partitions; pressurized steam connections; a centralized vacuum system; mechanical lungs that breathed fresh air to every floor; and individual thermostats for each office. The skyscraper would be a self-enclosed city for over fifteen thousand people—stores, barbershop, hospital, gymnasium, restaurant, and transportation included. He planned to have an apartment and office in its penthouse floors as well as a three-story “Cloud Club” where the city’s powerful could congregate in one of the private dining rooms or at the oyster bar. It would also serve as the world’s highest speakeasy.
Few could understand the glory he experienced in standing atop this monument to his life, but the brochure published for the skyscraper offered a hint:
Heavenward spring the spires of man’s aspiration. Through the ages, from the eternal pyramids brooding over Egypt’s timeless sands, the soul has sought expression in a restless, ceaseless striving to reach the heights . . . And now, one more bold has attained a new eminence . . . into the glorious sky of eternal blue and billowy cloud springs the shining finial, fashioned of gleaming metal and flaunting its triumph like the upraised lance of a knight of old.
The photographer finished the shot, and Chrysler and Van Alen began the climb back down to the street. Chrysler and Van Alen didn’t know it, but they would only have a few months to enjoy being the world’s tallest. The men behind the Empire State were putting together plans to put up a lance of their own.