CHAPTER SEVEN

The Poet in Overalls

Mr. Chrysler is a big man and would not be content in any city other than the biggest. Everything Mr. Chrysler does is done in a big way.

—Parker W. Chase

To me this building is a human thing.

—Walter Chrysler

Most executives who decided to build an office building with their company’s name running over the front entrance left the details of its construction to the architects and contractors. They approved the broad strokes and signed off on a watercolor of the exterior, with painted pedestrians providing a sense of scale. Their interest may have been piqued by discussion of office location and design, but otherwise they left matters alone. Walter Chrysler was different.

In his office on Madison Avenue, Chrysler often crawled around the floor on his hands and knees, studying the latest changes that Van Alen had sent over. Despite the demands of his expanding automobile empire, he involved himself in every facet of the building’s construction, with the same joy he’d had putting together his first engines, or the twenty-eight-inch model of his father’s locomotive which he said lived within his “mind so real, so complete that it seemed to have three dimensions there.” He had a poet’s imagination and the mind of a mechanic. Building a skyscraper required both.

Every week he sat down with the construction team to discuss the progress. He ran the skyscraper with the hands-on approach he applied to his assembly lines, requiring the best materials and the most efficient schedule. By the first week of April, the ordered pandemonium at the corner of Lexington and Forty-second Street was adhering to his schedule because he demanded it that way. The foundation work was finished. Hundreds of men labored in double shifts under the direction of Fred Ley and his subcontractors, and more would soon follow. Steel was already stacked around the site, and the derrick operators were prepared to lift the first column into place. Once this forest of columns was set, the builders would connect horizontal beams to them, beginning the steel frame that would rise floor by floor into the sky. Every stage of the skyscraper’s life was mapped out on paper, and the site was already beginning to look more structured with its evenly spaced-out sections—resembling a gridiron—where the steel work would proceed. On the walls surrounding the site, Fred Ley’s men had even hung signs for the renting office.

In addition to the construction, Chrysler had the final say in every major move Van Alen made, and he fielded hundreds of questions. Chrysler approved the tower design; he approved the parabolic curves of the dome; he approved the Rouge Flamme marble for the lobby, the heating units, and the steel office partitions. He approved the use of his company’s car motifs in the exterior façade; for instance, a copy of the Mercury wings on his radiator caps served as a flagstaff holder above the Lexington Avenue entrance. As with the styling of his automobiles, he trusted his instincts. He knew what was needed to distinguish his cars from his competitors’—from the curves of the fenders to the purr of the engine. It was Chrysler who approved his skyscraper’s height of 809 feet, thinking this would win him the title of world’s tallest.

On April 8, one month and a day after Chrysler announced his skyscraper plans, a small article tucked into the back of the New York Times—page 47, column 2—said that The Bank of The Manhattan Company was planning a sixty-four story skyscraper on Wall Street that would challenge the proposed height of the Chrysler Building. Perhaps Chrysler missed the inch-and-a-half piece buried in the real-estate section; it was a busy news day with a record-breaking heat wave and a bomb discovered on its way to Governor Roosevelt. Two days later though, Chrysler would have been hard-pressed to miss the headlines: “Banker at 34 to Build Highest Structure Here—Work Is Being Rushed” and “64-Story Bank Building to Rise in Wall Street” and “Wall Street Building to Top All in World—Edifice to have more than 63 stories capped by sparkling finial—Ready May 1, 1930.”

The site for the Manhattan Company Building covered nearly an acre of land in one of the city’s choicest locations. According to one newspaper, it stopped “in its tracks the rumor that . . . the skyscraper district would move uptown and leave Wall Street and the remainder of the downtown section in silence and desertion.” Apparently Ohrstrom had already secured a number of tenants, enough to fill most of the 835,000 square feet of rental space. Granite and marble would dignify the first seven floors. The building’s cut-glass pinnacle would be illuminated at night, visible throughout the city and beyond—“a beacon for airplanes and ships at sea.” During the day, it would reflect the sun’s rays in a prism of colors. The story spread across the country, appearing in papers like the Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, Detroit News, and St. Louis Times, as well as the Billings (Montana) Gazette, Toledo (Ohio) Times, and the Oil City Blizzard. In the Shamokin (Pennsylvania) Herald, the column “Hot Off the Griddle” read: “The newest skyscraper will cost more than $20 million and will have 63 stories. There will be 40 elevators. When fully tenanted, its population will be equal to that of an average sized town. Taking some of these statistics into consideration, you will begin to understand why the Seven Wonders of the World inspire only a yawn in these progressive days.”

No hamlet was too small, or too distant from New York, to run a piece on the “kid” George Ohrstrom, who meant to build the tallest building in the world. This was the stuff of legends: Danish immigrant’s son, wartime aviator, and bank president at thirty-one years old. “This young man calls himself ‘lucky’ in seeing opportunity,” wrote B. C. Forbes in his widely syndicated column. “But is seeing and seizing opportunity wholly a matter of luck?” An Associated Press article recounted how Ohrstrom labored in railroad yards to pay for his education, then heroically abandoned it to serve his country. Now, “Twentieth century pyramid builders, who are trying to pierce clouds over Manhattan with massive monuments to themselves and their achievements, have a new competitor.”

Not only was Ohrstrom’s skyscraper taller at 840 feet, but it would also cost five million dollars more than Chrysler’s building, and amazingly be ready at the same time as his own, which was already well under construction. The Starrett brothers planned on setting the foundations for the new building before beginning the demolition. One had to question if that was even possible, let alone getting the steelwork up at such a pace. Nobody had ever built a skyscraper of such height, so quickly.

Chrysler had to have a talk with his architect. Something needed to be done, and soon. After all, he was building a “monument” to himself, his company, and American ingenuity—and wanted it to be the tallest in the sky no matter the cost to change the plans or the work required. This time they would keep secret their intentions and final height.

Walter Chrysler needed the world’s tallest skyscraper to house his ambition—and pride. He was Time’s Man of the Year. He was taking on Ford and General Motors, having acquired Dodge, debuted the Plymouth and Desoto models, and constructed the Lynch Road plant. He was, according to Time, “prodigious,” “fabulous,” and “a torpedo-headed dynamo from Detroit with the smile like Walter Hagen’s and the sensitive sophistication in oriental rugs.” The symbolism of his skyscraper towering over the twenty-six-story General Motors Building and every other building in New York was not lost on him. Chrysler simply explained, “I like to build things. I like to do things.”

Such was the story of his life. On April 2, 1875, he was born in a Kansas railroad town. His father, Hank, ran trains across Western Kansas as a locomotive engineer for Union Pacific. He relocated his family from Wamego to Brookfield and finally to Ellis, Kansas, when Walter was five years old. Like many towns across the Midwest plains, Ellis began as a patch of dirt scuffed up by the railroad men, then welcomed homesteaders, cowboys, buffalo hunters, merchants, saloonkeepers, and a “lady” or two. A blacksmith’s shop was the first building to stand. Then came a roundhouse to work on the locomotives. A man had to know how to use a gun in towns such as Ellis. Whisky-induced brawls were common. People living above the local saloon put steel plates under their beds to keep from being shot in the middle of the night by the cowboys below.

“You had to be a tough kid. Out there . . . if you were soft, all the other kids would beat the daylights out of you,” said Chrysler. His family lived in a small house with no plumbing. During winter nights, snow sometimes accumulated an inch high on the plank floors. The windows never fit too well. Before sunrise his mother clanked the lids on her iron pots to wake Chrysler and his two siblings. On banner days, he walked to the trains beside his father, who always carried a six-shooter hidden underneath his coat. He let Walter ride in the cab and yank on the whistle cord as the engine chugged across the dark prairie.

When he graduated from high school, he abandoned his father’s plan—that he would go to college—and went straight to the Union Pacific roundhouse to sweep floors and clean boiler flues for ten cents an hour. He wanted to study machines, not books. After six months, he convinced the master mechanic to let him apprentice, even if it meant losing half his current wage. With grease-stained hands and a face blackened with soot, he spent his time tinkering underneath the locomotives, seeing how the parts worked together to generate motion. If there was a new piece of equipment on a locomotive, whether steam heat, air brakes, or electric signals, he was the first to know how it operated.

When away from the roundhouse, he played baseball, practiced the tuba, and courted the Ellis belle, Della Forker, who lived in the town’s finest house. Mostly, he worked. He made his own set of tools, starting with a pair of calipers, and etched his initials on them with acid. What he couldn’t learn from other mechanics, he read about in Scientific American. If the articles failed to satisfy his curiosity, he wrote the editor to discover more information.

After four years as an apprentice, he graduated to journeyman mechanic, a title people looked up to in those days. Chrysler set valves and laid out shoes and wedges for locomotives across the West: Wellington, Denver, Cheyenne, Ogden, Pocatello, Salt Lake City, and a long list of other towns—too many to name. “I wasn’t willing to stick around a shop to prove that I was good. If they didn’t appreciate me, if any foreman dressed me down, I’d get my time, pack up my bag, forward my tuba and head for the next shop.” Looking for work, he traveled by freight train with machinists, boilermakers, and vagrants. When he chose a direction to travel, he carved his name on the nearest water-tank post with an arrow underneath so those looking for him knew which way he had gone.

Finally in 1901, after years of jumping on the next train to nowhere, a lonesome Chrysler married Della and took a job in Salt Lake City. That autumn he got his break when a blown-out cylinder head hobbled a train bound for Denver. The railroad called their best mechanic, and Chrysler ran out to fix the train, doing so in less than three hours and allowing the train to leave on time. “You can take her away, she’s ready,” Chrysler said. Three months later he was foreman of the roundhouse in Trinidad, Colorado, with the nickname that stayed with him the rest of his life: Old Man. He was twenty-six and the boss of over ninety men. From there other railroads called and by thirty-two he was Superintendent of Motive Power for the Chicago & Great Western railroad, the youngest in the railroad’s history.

Still he was restless. One afternoon in Oelwien, Iowa, he followed his men as they filed out of their shops. The men lived in small brick houses and grew old repairing the same locomotives over and over. Chrysler stopped in the center of the yard. There had to be more in this world than being the best mechanic on the line. He wanted to do more than center valves and ensure the trains ran on time. He should be the one building and selling these engines. It was time to wash the grease from his hands and move to the other side of the desk.

In 1908 he found his ticket, on a Chicago automobile show floor, when he saw the Locomobile touring car. Three decades later he recalled the scene as if it were his first romance. “It was painted ivory white and the cushions and trim were red. The top was khaki, supported on wood bows. On the running board there was a handsome tool box that my fingers itched to open. Beside it was a tank of gas to feed the front head lamps; just behind the hood on either side of the cowling was an oil lamp, shaped quite like those on horse drawn carriages.” He visited the car four days straight and then harangued two friends until they loaned him five thousand dollars. “Just ask yourself what this country will be like when every individual has his private car and is able to travel anywhere.” He emptied out his barn, rolled the car inside, disassembled it, spread the parts on newspapers, drew sketches, studied schematics, and put it all back together again. His wife was short with him, sometimes closing the door behind her with a slam. They were in hock for a car that never left the garage.

Three months later he drove the Locomobile for the first time, and sent it headlong into a ditch. A team of horses pulled him clear. He had seen his future.

After a blow-out with the head of the Chicago & Great Western, he took a job manufacturing trains with the American Locomotive Company (ALCO). He turned the plant around and then made his second leap by joining the automobile business. The president of Buick, Charles Nash, had been told to hire Chrysler by GM board member James Storrow. Storrow, who also sat on ALCO’s board, was impressed with Chrysler’s ability to manage efficient production lines. When the thirty-six-year-old Chrysler took a tour of the Buick plant, he saw the men making the bodies of the cars out of wood and said to himself, “What a job I could do here, if I were boss.” Not wanting one of Storrow’s boys in his company, Nash offered Chrysler half his current salary in hopes he would pass on the job. Chrysler turned to him and said, “I accept it, Mr. Nash.”

In his eight years at Buick, Chrysler economized and streamlined almost every stage of production. He upped output from 40 cars per day to 550, improved quality, and raised profits at this linchpin division of General Motors to $50 million per year. Although he had no part in the invention of the automobile, he spent every effort in modernizing and perfecting its motion—a relationship not unlike his with Van Alen on the Chrysler Building’s design.

The men on the line loved him, for if there was one thing bigger than his pride, it was his fear of that pride showing. After skipping out of the office one day to watch a baseball game, he saw several of his workers in the bleachers. They twisted uneasily in their seats. He ordered popcorn for himself and another executive, and then spun around to ask, “Fred, what would you fellows like?” He insisted on never forgetting what it was like to be out in the cold, forced to knock on strangers’ doors for a bite to eat before continuing his search for work. Of course, by July 1916 when he became president of Buick and a member of the General Motors board, making five hundred thousand dollars a year in salary and stock, he never had to worry about that again.

Developments at General Motors, however, had him running on a collision course. Before accepting the top job at Buick he demanded the freedom to run the division without interference and to report directly to GM’s president, William Durant, whom he admired. He didn’t have to wait long before both conditions were violated. First, Durant meddled in his operations. Then, the company’s power structure began to shift, loosening Durant’s control over GM—and Buick. Pierre du Pont, urged by his erstwhile stenographer, John J. Raskob, had been acquiring blocks of GM stock. Because of du Pont’s windfall in selling munitions during the war, he had money to spare. In 1917 he purchased twenty-four percent of the outstanding shares. During a visit to Durant in November of that year, Chrysler looked through the open door to see his boss, “staring at the wall as if in a daze. He seemed completely unaware of me and just stood staring blankly, as rigid as if he had been turned to ice.” Chrysler entered and shut the door behind him. In the office were Pierre du Pont and Raskob. “I seemed to be in a room full of Napoleons at various stages of Napoleonic careers. I decided to vanish from the scene . . . There was nothing I could do.” By 1919, du Pont and Raskob essentially ran the show. Soon thereafter, Chrysler quit, was talked into coming back, and then quit again for good, irked at his bosses and their expansion into everything from refrigerators to tractors and airplanes. He left the Napoleons to their own devices.

Chrysler departed before GM’s stock collapsed, his millions secure. He traveled to Europe, entertained, played golf, once again grew restless, and came back to take two jobs, one at Willys-Overland for a million dollars a year and another at the Maxwell Corporation, one of the first automobile manufacturers. At Willys he met a trio of engineers—Zeder, Shelton, and Breer—who would design his first car over the next four years. The job at Willys ended when the board insisted he was being paid too much, though he had saved the company his salary several times over by cutting costs. With his usual subtlety, Chrysler said, “If that’s the way you feel about it, you can stick that job up your ass.”

He then focused on modernizing Maxwell’s plants and eliminating their crippling debts. In only three years he put the company into the black. He stole his weekends away at a stripped-down factory in Newark where his engineering trio put their careers on the line to design his first car. Chrysler financed much of their work out of his own pocket, determined to produce his own line of cars. On his visits he inspected their latest modifications and then test drove the high-compression engine hidden under the hood of an old beat-up Maxwell.

When the first prototype was finally ready in July 1923, he arranged for Maxwell to take over the ownership of the plans and he premiered the car, dubbed the Chrysler Six, at a New York automobile show in January 1924. He paced the lobby of the Hotel Commodore where the car was showing, anxious to see what the industry executives and dealers thought. If the car failed to impress, the bankers wouldn’t extend the money he needed to produce it. They had already backed out once on the financing. All his effort in corralling people over to his cars, slapping backs, and shaking hands was not needed: the Chrysler Six stopped the show on its merits alone. The engine was powerful, the look was sleek and modern, and the price hit the mark. The bankers opened up their checkbooks, the dealers clamored to sell the car, and the plant fired up its line. Although it took some maneuvering before the Maxwell Motor Company took his name, the cornerstone of his empire was put in place in 1924—the same year he decided he needed to build a skyscraper in New York.

Right across the street from the Hotel Commodore, where Chrysler proudly displayed his new car, lay the site on which he would build that skyscraper.

Van Alen was buried in revisions when Chrysler asked to meet. In the first two weeks of April, the architect delivered a ream of design changes to every floor, from the cellar to the sixty-seventh floor, altering column dimensions, floor levels, elevators, windows, stairs, vaults, elevations, and entrance details, among many other things. Van Alen first discussed changes with Chrysler and his builder-architect-carpenter, Frank Rogers, then he returned to his office. He and his draftsmen placed tracing paper over the previous blueprints and drew out the new lines, one after another. The specification writers followed. If new materials were needed, representatives from the manufacturers brought in samples to inspect. When the changes were complete, blueprint copies were sent to Fred Ley, his subcontractors, and Rogers.

The Chrysler job was not, however, a building by committee. There was one boss: Chrysler. He had his opinions, and when he wanted a new idea to be explored, he didn’t worry about time or expense. After the announcement of the Manhattan Company Building, Van Alen must have known the meeting with Chrysler wasn’t going to be about elevator designs.

More details had been published about Severance’s plans, or more likely those drawn by his associate architect Matsui. Rather than the sixty-three or sixty-four stories first announced, the 40 Wall Street skyscraper was set to rise sixty-seven stories, the same number as the Chrysler Building. Severance himself had cleared up the misunderstanding to the press. The tower would rise to sixty stories, then three penthouse floors for executive offices and perhaps a club. The remaining four housed fire tanks, mechanical equipment, and an observation floor. A steel pinnacle of sixteen feet promised a maximum elevation of 857 feet, fifty feet taller than the Chrysler Building.

Van Alen shouldn’t have been surprised that his former partner had talked his way into building the world’s tallest skyscraper. This was a character who went to the Plaza Hotel with his Pekinese in tow; if and when the waiter strode over to his table and instructed him that under no circumstances were dogs allowed, Severance leaned back and debated the merits, and lack thereof, of the policy, all the while chewing on his sandwich and finishing off his plate. When finished, he put his napkin on the table, and said, “I’m done with lunch anyway.” Ten years of partnership had acquainted Van Alen with the fact that there was little Severance couldn’t talk himself into getting. Their friendship had long since passed into the kind of bitterness one reserved for an enemy whose betrayal had yet to be revenged.

Now the chance presented itself. The meeting with Chrysler was quick and certain. There was nothing unclear about what he wanted from the architect: not only did he want the world’s tallest building, but he wanted that building to be the world’s tallest structure. “Make this building higher than the Eiffel Tower,” he instructed Van Alen. No real-estate developers downtown were going to best him. Kenneth Murchison characterized the meeting with a bit more drama, but the point was the same:

“Van,” said Walter Chrysler. “Van, you’ve just got to get up and do something. It looks as if we’re not going to be the highest after all. Think up something. Your valves need grinding. There’s a knock in you somewhere. Speed up your carburetor. Go to it!”

Van Alen was given a signed blank check to make his skyscraper rise above his former partner’s. For an architect who had spent his life participating in design competitions ridden with restrictions and parameters, this was an unprecedented offer. He had a free hand. The only caveat was that the entire plan had to be carried out in secret. The few who had to know were sworn to silence. As far as Van Alen was concerned, the surprise would provide an even sweeter victory. This was one competition he needed to win.

Returning to his drafting table with his marching orders, Van Alen understood that the paper plans to stretch higher came at the risk of the men hired to follow them. On April 20, as the first columns cast their shadows on the building’s foundation floor, some of their brethren on another site were about to pay the ultimate price.

In addition to working on the Chrysler Building, Post & McCord was in charge of the downtown construction site of the Western Union Building, heralded as the “largest telegraph building in the world.” The foreman, Frank Richards, had worked steel on buildings for the last thirty-two years, two decades’ worth with Post & McCord. He began carrying water buckets, then passing rivets with a pair of tongs to the men who drove them into the beams. Now he could be found on the site leading his men with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. His face was weatherbeaten and wise. Once he had to dance on a beam hundreds of feet in the air to prove to the men on a job in Central America that the steel was safe from collapse. In French Guinea, he ran a crew of convicts from Devil’s Island. His men were tough, as they had to be to do their jobs well.

“Running up a building’s like playing baseball,” said Richards.

“You’ve got to have a team. There isn’t any more place in a steel gang for the individual star than there is on a baseball team. I pick my own men, and I pick ’em to work together. Sure, to the fellow who never put up a thirty-story building it looks like a simple matter of putting one steel beam against another and riveting ’em together. That’s all it is. But you can’t rivet a cross-beam unless your two end supports are up to the same height at the same time. That’s where the organization and the teamwork comes in. My men know their business.”

Many knew each other better than they did their own families, often traveling together to find work.

At the corner of Thomas and Hudson Streets, a patrolman was trying to settle a fight between a truck driver and the pedestrian he almost hit. The rivet guns echoed in the canyons of the tall buildings. The bricklayers were already up to the ninth floor, and Richards was busy with the coordination of the steel being placed on the twenty-second floor. On the Thomas Street side of the construction site, a derrick was lifting a three-and-a-half-ton bundle of steel to the top floor. The derrick engine had a fifteen-ton capacity, plenty of strength to raise the girders dangled above the workers like guillotine blades. When the bundle reached level with the twenty-first floor, the signalman, Emil Simonson, shielding his eyes from the sun, relayed “Boom up” to the stationary engineer, Edgar Harper. The beams swayed in toward the building as the boom rose several feet. Then something went wrong.

The main power on the building site blew a fuse. A derrick lifting girders on the Worth Street side of the site stopped and the steel hung mid-air, the hoisting machine’s brake locking. On the Thomas Street derrick, however, the automatic brakes failed and the cable lifting the girders paid out too fast. Harper pressed on the manual footbrake, but that failed as well. He closed his eyes, knowing there was nothing to do. The boom swung downward and struck the steel on the twentieth floor. The lead cable continued to pay out. The eight steel girders jackknifed down, slicing through the ninth-floor scaffolding where several bricklayers were sealing up the black-and-red steel skeleton. Then the girders shot through a canopy on the second floor. Four men—Salvatore Cardoni, Antonio Corio, Samuel Jones, and Sam Rowning—never had a chance to leap away and were swallowed up in the crash, buried under tons of girders, cables, bricks, wooden planks, and blocks of stone. The patrolman sprinted to a call box to get help as some of the workers wailed out in Italian and Polish. Others stood absolutely motionless, their faces covered in dust.

Overhead some hoisting equipment dangled over the twenty-second floor and several men were dispatched to remove it. Crowds circled around, and the police and fire departments hurried to save those buried underneath the rubble. The girders lay twisted on the street. Eleven men suffered contusions, severe cuts, and shock from the accident. Richards and several others were arrested by the police commissioner, charged with manslaughter. Corio left a young boy fatherless; Jones a family of five; Rowning three children. Although Richards was the easiest to blame, the accident was not his fault.

Steel work was dangerous business: some reports suggested that one death should be expected for every floor erected above the fifteenth floor on a skyscraper. Chrysler wanted to better those fatality odds, hoping to avoid a similar incident by the Post & McCord workers on his own site. He pushed Rogers and the builder Fred Ley to employ every effort to guarantee the safety of the men. Still any solution Van Alen proposed to win the skyscraper race would test the skills of foremen like Richards, who for all their experience and attention to safety, remained vulnerable to the potential errors of machine and man on a construction site that employed so many of both, higher above the ground than any other crew had ever gone.

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