CHAPTER SIXTEEN
If the race itself is a competition in advertising, so . . . have been all the competitions in tall buildings from the time when Pharaoh vied with Pharaoh, matching tomb against tomb, to the pious rivalry of the cathedral builders, each seeking to raise a pointed arch or spire nearer to god.
—H. I. Brock
[After hearing of another record-breaking skyscraper], the redoubtable Shreve, the gentle Lamb, and the retired Harmon, met in their own private office and swore to a suicide pact. They fished out the old office revolver . . . and started to draw lots for the first shot.
—The Architect, 1929
Van Alen and Severance had maneuvered and countermaneuvered for nearly a year now, and although Severance still had some fight left in him, the spotlight had turned to a much more spectacular battle. It was now John Raskob pitched against not only Walter Chrysler, but also a world fast disintegrating upon itself with the stock market’s collapse.
On Monday, November 18, two days after the story broke about the Chrysler Building surpassing the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State, Inc., announced the purchase of the land adjacent to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, adding seven thousand five hundred square feet to the skyscraper’s site. Reporters wanted to know why they needed the additional land, suspecting the larger site anticipated a taller tower. No definitive height had been announced yet; a skyscraper of eighty stories and “at least 1,000 feet” were the firmest figures mentioned.
“We bought that property simply because we thought that it was cheap,” Al Smith explained to reporters eager for the race to go on. They tracked down Shreve as well, who added: “The determination of the height of the building will be based on the sound development of useable space. As we proceed with the plans the owners will be in a better position to determine what the height of the building is to be. Any announcements as to dimensions and set-up must come from Governor Smith.”
This announcement had to wait a day. The politician in Smith knew how to play the press for the greatest effect. The furor over the Chrysler Building’s secret vertex had drawn attention away from the Empire State. The two skyscrapers were rivals, not only in vertical feet but also in their attraction to tenants. Millions had read about the race between the Chrysler and Manhattan Company towers, and Raskob meant to steal the story back—the decision as much economic as an act of pride.
Demanding that the Empire State stretch higher, Raskob wanted to add several stories to the tower, whether more elevator banks were needed or not. Utility cones be damned. The architects had told him those renting these offices, if tenants could be found, would have to switch cars to reach their offices. The board fielded these concerns in the days after learning of Chrysler’s vertex. No doubt Raskob insisted that the significance of this monument far outweighed the architectural complications or cost of going higher. While Shreve specified what these complications and costs were, Lamb may have sketched out some design ideas on a scrap of paper, crumpling it before Raskob made him stick a needle or some other structure atop the Empire State. Du Pont and Kaufman likely thought about how their investment had made a great deal more sense when the economy was not in ruins. As for the Starrett brothers, they had already been beaten once in the height race and the addition of several stories would only affect their schedules by a week. Smith had much experience in mediation and must have brought his persuasive powers to bear, but ultimately it was a decision for Raskob to make. Despite the additional cost and unsuitability of these floors for commercial office space, he led the board to increase the Empire State’s height to eighty-five stories. For as much as they heralded the skyscraper as the finest of collaborations among owner, architect, builder, real-estate agent, and engineer, when push came to shove, Raskob had the money, and the money talked.
On November 19, Smith sat at the head table for a luncheon of the Fifth Avenue Association. Members and journalists crowded the Hotel McAlpin to listen to his speech, which was also being broadcast by radio station WEAF. Few luncheons hosted by Lewis Flaunlacher, the association’s chairman, warranted this kind of attention. He introduced Smith, saying he welcomed the Governor’s switch “from the brown derby of Oliver Street and the gray fedora of the West Side to the silk hat of Fifth Avenue.”
Smith began with his opinions on such topics as whether New Jersey should obtain a railroad price differential over other sections covered by the Port of New York (no) and if Fifty-ninth Street should serve as the northern limit for general business and office developments (yes). This was fine and well, but most wanted to hear what he had in mind for the Empire State. Smith didn’t disappoint. “This building will be a monument to the dignity, power, growth and wealth of the imperial city of the Empire State,” he predicted. As if unaware his comment would lead tomorrow’s headlines, he casually mentioned that they now planned for the skyscraper to rise eighty-five stories, five more than originally announced. At first, he didn’t even detail the height. He let the audience draw the conclusion that this would bring his skyscraper higher than any other in the city. Only later did he offer the specific figure—1,100 feet—though final plans had yet to be completed by the architects.
Several hours later, Richmond Shreve spoke at the Building Managers and Owners Association dinner at the Hotel Commodore, just across the street from the Chrysler Building. Entitled “The Economic Design of the Modern Office Building,” his talk covered the factors that went into planning a skyscraper of the Empire State’s proportions: “Since the building must pay, the designer must do his best to make this possible . . . After all the elements to make up the cost of the skyscraper are gathered together, we must locate the point at which the balance begins to swing back, where the additional floor space becomes too expensive and the rate of return on capital investment begins to diminish as the building goes higher. We must then set up a financial analysis, because it is the final test, of our capital investment, our financing, our income, and our fixed charges and our operating cost, which will finally determine if the building we have designed is to be built.” He excluded from the speech anything about how the advertising value of greater height affected the equation, though it was a factor he later admitted.
The tandem speeches by Smith and Shreve shaped the message that the five stories added to the Empire State met the demands of maximizing profits. They argued it was an indisputable calculation of economic height, a decision as sound as the bedrock underneath their skyscraper. Beating out the Chrysler Building had nothing to do with it. Frank Rogers, who listened to Shreve’s speech and knew the architect well, probably had a different read on the day. The timing of the change was too conspicuous to overlook. The title of the world’s tallest remained in play.
The next day, people read only of the Empire State in their morning newspapers. “Smith to Break Height Record in 1,100-foot Tower” ran one headline. The eighty-five-story tower “settled, at least for the present, all question of height supremacy,” said the Evening Post. All the newspapers mentioned that once built, the Empire State would out-top every skyscraper in the city.
“Make believe that you are 8 feet up and relax, take it easy,” the steelworkers instructed photographer Margaret Bourke-White. “The problems are exactly the same.” Seventy-one stories high in the Chrysler Building, she leaned over the elevator shaft’s edge to take a picture. The workers, responsible for making sure she didn’t hurt herself while on the site, wanted to lash a rope around her waist. She refused. She had to be free to compose her shots, so they held her waist and legs. Laying on her stomach, she had the better half of her upper body over the edge. Still she didn’t quite get the right shot. She told the workers to release her. They feared this young woman with the thin face and short bob of black hair had a lesson in gravity awaiting her. It looked like the camera weighed more than she did. Finally they let her alone. There was no denying the demands of her photography. As for the danger, she always felt safe with her 5 x7 Corona View camera in hand. She got the shot.
In the second week of December 1929, she came “to steeple jack for Mr. Chrysler,” as she wrote her editor Parker Lloyd Smith at the new magazine Fortune. Only twenty-three years old, she had already made headlines with her photographs. She once braved the steel mills of Cleveland, nearly drowning in a pile of iron dust, to practice her craft. Months before the skyscraper race began in earnest, she met Chrysler on a job to photograph his mile-long automobile plant in Detroit. The two shared an appreciation of the mechanical age. “Industry is huge and vital,” she once wrote. “It is important because it is close to the heart of the people. Art must be sincere and active to have value. Art that springs from industry should have real flesh and blood, because industry itself is the vital force of this great age.” The words might have come from Chrysler himself.
He commissioned Bourke-White to dramatize his skyscraper in photographs for newspapers and magazines. Some in New York questioned the vertex as a stunt and unworthy of the height crown. “In this battle of the skyscrapers . . . I was brought in as a sort of war correspondent on the Chrysler side,” she wrote. “The scene of battle was that relatively narrow band of atmosphere ranging from 800 to 1,200 feet above the sidewalks of New York. . . . The principal target was prestige. A skyscraper was a tall and strong feather in the cap of that ultra-rare individual who could afford to build one. . . . Chrysler was aware of the stupendous advertising value generated when the world’s highest building bears the name of your product. And this was where I came in.”
It was bad enough for Chrysler that people questioned whether his skyscraper deserved the title of tallest (on account of the vertex offering no rentable space). Now the “Napoleon,” John Raskob, looked like he was moving ahead with the Empire State despite the Wall Street crash. An incredible, but not altogether surprising show of resilience on his part. Given the uncertainty in the business community, rentals could prove difficult to find, particularly if tenants would rather wait to sign leases with Raskob’s world’s-tallest skyscraper. Chrysler couldn’t support an empty skyscraper forever. Going on the offensive, he hired Bourke-White and the renowned publicity flak Ivy Lee to promote his building.
Ivy Lee had cut his teeth in political campaigns, and now represented the Rockefellers, Bethlehem Steel, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. He was one of the first public relations spinmasters and had recently helped Chrysler shape his message for investors after a decline in his company’s stock.
In early December, Chrysler began the campaign. First he announced that his renting agents had signed the Texas Company to lease seventeen floors. Furthermore, to handle the leasing of the nine hundred thousand square feet of office space, the agents had hired a “special staff of brokers, canvassers, layout men, stenographers and resident agents, equivalent in number to a full-fledged real-estate office.” They had spread across the city in an orchestrated assault. Each time they leased a block of space, Lee would dash off an additional release to build the impression of success on success.
While Lee fed journalists copy and intensified the height war on the public front, Bourke-White scaled stairs and ladders into the tower dome, hauling her camera and wooden tripod with her. At a thousand feet above the sidewalk, amidst gales of wind and temperatures reaching subzero, she followed her orders to show the vertex as integral to Van Alen’s overall design. One day the wind buffeted with such force that the tower seemed to sway eight feet. “With three men holding the tripod so the camera wouldn’t fly into the street and endanger pedestrians . . . my camera cloth whipping and stinging my eyes as I focused . . . I tried to get the feel of the tower’s sway in my body so I could make exposures during that fleeting instant when the tower was at the quietest part of its sway.”
The vertex scraped the sky as Van Alen had planned, and Bourke-White photographed it for all the world to see.
Raskob had been quick to add five stories to the Empire State, but the architects told him these floors put the skyscraper at 1,050 feet, not the 1,100 feet that Smith announced to the press. This provided a slim margin over the Chrysler Building; too slim. Chrysler had shown himself willing to take extraordinary measures to win the height race. Raskob knew of his drive to win, had witnessed it first hand in the years they spent together at General Motors. His architect, Van Alen, was obviously full of clever ideas. He might have another secret plan to breach the four-foot difference between the two skyscrapers. Hamilton Weber said that his boss “was worried that Walter Chrysler would pull a trick, like hiding a rod in the spire and then sticking it up at the last minute.” A cartoon published that year poked fun at this possibility, showing a lank architect (not unlike Van Alen) explaining to his client with a drawing (not unlike the Chrysler Building) that “You see, this spike runs down the entire length of the building and if anyone builds a taller building we can jack up the spike and still be tallest.”
Raskob wanted to prevent this joke from becoming a reality. His architects could add even more floors to the tower, but this plan lacked boldness and begged the question: how many were enough? Shreve, Lamb, & Harmon had made clear their prejudice against a hundred-story building. The five floors above the eightieth story already presented a challenge to rent. Raskob didn’t require another lecture in service utility cones and the valuable space that elevator banks took from rentable areas. If he wanted the building to be taller, it had to generate that much more money.
While studying the latest plaster model made for him by the architects, Raskob hit upon the solution: “What this building needs is a hat!” What in fact he had in mind was a mooring mast for airships. Passengers could embark and disembark from zeppelins anchored to this mast affixed to the Empire State’s crown. Unlike Chrysler’s vertex, the “hat” would have a practical use. It would rise two hundred feet over the eighty-fifth floor, put to rest any chance of Van Alen outmaneuvering them again, and capitalize on the country’s aviation obsession. He would bring to life the future that Moses King had predicted thirty years before in Views of New York: airships launching from tall buildings and threading their way through the city’s canyons.
If there was one thing that challenged the public’s interest in skyscrapers and Wall Street, it was the romance with flight—or “airmindedness.” Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight to Paris made him a hero worthy of ticker-tape parades and keys to cities. Americans spoke of aviation as a “winged gospel” and those who mastered these flying machines as “apostles” and “prophets.” Hollywood produced numerous films featuring daredevils and fighter pilots braving the skies. Henry Ford came out with a single-seat flying flivver, the supposed Model T of airplanes, causing one writer to script: “I dreamed I was an angel . . . And with the angels soared . . . But I was simply touring . . . The heavens in a Ford.” Young boys and girls pestered their parents to help them build model airplanes. And zeppelins, traveling at seventy-five miles per hour, promised a bright future of available transportation for the masses. In Akron, Ohio, the Goodyear Zeppelin Company was building a 785-foot dirigible, the largest in the world, to be ready by August 1931. The Empire State could serve as its New York terminal.
As a way to win the skyscraper race and cause a publicity stir, the plan had legs. Finding a workable design, absorbing the seven hundred fifty thousand dollars of additional costs to build the mast, and radically changing the skyscraper’s flat-topped crown, was an altogether different story. Raskob ordered his reluctant architects to make it happen. The board approved the proposal, authorizing sixty thousand dollars in alterations to the structural steel specifications to carry the mast. The effect of cost considerations on profitability was not calculated. The architects had little say on whether the plan made sense or not, despite the fact that Lamb didn’t typically suffer the demands of clients, regardless how trivial. When designing the Reynolds Tobacco Building, he refused to smoke Camels instead of his usual Lucky Strikes, even after the company’s executives complained to Shreve. He considered Van Alen’s vertex worthy of “the Little Nemo school of architecture.” Now Raskob asked him to perform a stunt design for the top of what was his most important commission. Shreve kept his disdain to himself, but his staff of draftsmen conveyed the firm’s sentiment in an illustration drawn for him that showed a gargoyle sitting atop a column, hands covering its eyes, with the bubble quote: “Hear No Dirigible—See No Dirigible—Who Said Anything About a Dirigible!” Reservations aside, they had a job to do. The plan made sense to Raskob, so they began their sketches.
Two days after Chrysler’s boast of “supremacy,” Raskob had Smith announce the broad strokes of the plan in New York:
The directors of Empire State, Inc., have come to the conclusion that in a comparatively short time Zeppelin airships will establish trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, transcontinental and, possibly, South American routes from New York. One of the chief problems is mooring facilities and landing spaces. At present our own Zeppelins and those of foreign countries that visit the Port of New York on a friendly trip are compelled to anchor at Lakehurst, New Jersey, about seventy-five miles from the center of the city.
Building with an eye to the future, we have determined to build a mooring tower 200 feet high on top of the new Empire State Building. The roof of the building itself will be 1,100 feet from the sidewalk. That will mean that the Zeppelin would be anchored more than 1,300 feet in the air, with elevator facilities through the tower to land passengers downstairs seven minutes after the ship is anchored.
The next day Smith traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with the Secretary of the Navy to discuss the plans. The day appeared more like a victory tour: an entourage of guards, cheering crowds, and a phalanx of reporters. “Hello, Al!” His fans yelled, pushing forward to shake his hand. He was scheduled to return to New York late that evening, but many wanted him to stay, urging him to rejoin the fight in the political arena.
“I am interested in constructing buildings and landing airships now and not politics,” he said before meeting with the Secretary and a pair of admirals. They promised to provide any technical assistance Smith needed in designing the mooring mast, ignoring the fact that the Empire State’s architects and engineers had already discussed their plans in secret with the Navy experts and had even sketched them out. Smith’s trip served its main purpose: capturing headlines. It gave him the opportunity to declare to reporters that the mooring mast, though an expensive addition to the skyscraper’s costs, would be “of inestimable advantage in national defense and as a means of developing commercial use of lighter-than-air craft.”
The idea was so fantastic that “if it was bein’ put up by just a regular politician and not Al Smith,” noted a comic, “wouldn’t any of us believe it. We would demand a recount.” Given the swirling winds over New York, experts questioned the feasibility of mooring a zeppelin at this height. They also wondered what was to happen when the airship needed to stay at even keel and jettisoned several hundred gallons of water ballast down onto the streets. But Raskob had a height crown to claim. Whether the experts found a way to make the mooring mast work or not, its steel would top the Empire State over two hundred feet higher than Chrysler’s vertex. Now they just had to build it.
Lest anyone forget the Chrysler Building after the long weekend and incredulous discussion of mooring masts and dirigibles, Lee sent a press release to newspapers Monday morning, recounting for editors that Chrysler’s tower ranked “definitely as the tallest which has ever been erected,” and that “the Eiffel Tower must bow before this latest addition to the skyline of New York.” Furthermore, “If the building were located in Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi or Rhode Island, it would be theoretically possible to extend the lines of vision from the top of the Chrysler Building to all parts of the state without interruption.” Unfortunately, his words were only a whisper in the hurricane roar of attention now swirling around the Empire State.
There was scarce word from those behind the Manhattan Company Building. Severance was spending many hours with his first grandchild, awed that “she’s the most beautiful girl in the world—she’s even got fingernails.” He was also busy shoring up his business in the wake of the market collapse. Ohrstrom needed to travel to England to reassure several of his major investors and inform them as to how he intended to recover their losses. And the Starretts had the Empire State’s construction to focus on. For them, as their partner Andrew Eken later said, “the battle for the possession of the world’s highest structure goes on apace . . . Billions of dollars have been spent, millions of tons of steel and stone have been reared from Manhattan’s rocky base in the struggle to come nearest to a literal interpretation of ‘skyscraper.’ ”
However, the 40 Wall Street team’s absence from the headlines didn’t signal their surrender. The flagpole, scheduled to have been riveted into place a week after securing the pyramid cap, had missed its deadline and remained unraised. The builders promised it would be set before May; that was all they said. In secret they continued to discuss plans to go higher. They claimed the “mysterious scaffolding” was simply left above the pyramid to finish the lead and copper roof. It was foolish to ask any of them what they thought of the Chrysler Building beating their tower in the height race: blueprints were retrieved and laid out for the misinformed to discover the truth.
“Chrysler’s only sixty-eight stories,” explained one of Starretts’ men after being confronted with the suggestion. “We’re seventy. They put that flagpole, or whatever they call it, on the top, and it goes up higher, but you can’t put offices in a flagpole, can you? We’ve got more construction. Clear up to the top penthouse, right under the pole, we’ve got space for things you have to put in a building like this.” Then they invariably spoke of the speed of construction: the demolition crews razed the old building and cleared the site in three weeks—setting one record; the foundations were set into place during this work—an unheard of achievement; and, in a mere ninety-three days, the steelworkers erected the seventy stories of steel—the greatest record of them all. Speed measured as important as design or height. “This skyscraper was built in less than a quarter of the usual schedule,” said Matsui. Some confronted with this argument might have remembered that the Singer Building people had talked about speed as well, explaining how the Cologne Cathedral required 641 years to build and “the great pyramid of Cheops, on which 100,000 men were employed for 30 years, which would be equivalent to 3,000,000 men working every day for one year—as against 1,200 men employed for one year and eight months on the Singer Building.” Of course, the Metropolitan Life Tower stole the Singer’s short-lived height record, speed or not. After that, the Singer Building’s architect, Ernest Flagg, proposed a thousand-foot-tall skyscraper. Even he wasn’t convinced that “fastest” was as important as “tallest.”