Chrysler Building, New York City

Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan (1979) first inspired me to visit New York.  Freddie Laker’s Skytrain made it possible, in the summer of 1981.  My former school-friend, Malcolm, at that time lived on E41St, so when I came out of his apartment each morning, the first building I saw was the Chrysler Building, the epitome of Jazz Age New York.

The Chrysler was built, not by the Chrysler Corporation, but by Walter P Chrysler on his own account.  Its architect, William Van Alen, engaged in a race with his former professional partner, H Craig Severance, to build the tallest building in the world.

The story is repeatedly told of how Van Alen waited until Severance’s 40 Wall Street was topped out at 927 feet before launching the 27-ton, 125-foot steel spire, which had been secretly delivered to the site in pieces, through the roof in ninety minutes flat on the night of Friday September 27th 1929, giving a final height of 1,046 feet 4¾ inches.  Van Alen remarked afterwards that “it was necessary to resort to the unusual”.

This procedure is explained in ‘How engineers crowned world’s tallest building’, Popular Science, August 1930, p 52 at http://kanikasweet-amazing.blogspot.com/2011/10/unreal-structures-built-in-secret.html in the section ‘Chrysler Building’s secret spire’.

Black Thursday, the beginning of the Wall Street Crash, came less than a month later, on October 24th 1929, and the Chrysler has always had a fin-d’époque air.  It was the tallest building in the world for all of eleven months, until the rival Empire State Building was in turn topped out.

The building is known for its embellishments, the genuine Chrysler hubcaps fixed to the brickwork around the 30th floor, the corner features at the 31st floor based on Chrysler radiator caps and the eagle-gargoyles on the 61st floor, modelled on the hood (boot) handles of the 1929 Plymouth.  Its diamond-honed Enduro KA-2 stainless steel cladding by the German manufacturer Krupp has needed neither cleaning nor replacement since it was installed.  Lewis Mumford dismissed it as “advertising architecture”.

The red African marble lobby with its ceiling mural by the English artist, Frank Brangwyn, carefully restored by the current owners, is accessible to the general public, though if you try to take a photograph the security guards become agitated.  I’ve never dared outface them to enter one of the elevators, which are also apparently still in original condition.

When the Chrysler opened, the 66th-68th floors were given over to the Cloud Club, the most blatant speakeasy in Prohibition New York.  Long before the police stepped out of the elevator the members’ liquor could be stowed in individual lockers, personalised by indecipherable hieroglyphics.  Its decoration included a Georgian lobby, a Tudor lounge, a Bavarian bar and a dining room with faceted blue marble columns and white-ice sconces and a vaulted ceiling painted with clouds.  All this survived a couple of decades after the club finally closed in 1979, only to be ripped out and dumped at the end of the 1990s.  Randy Juster’s images of the club area are at http://decopix.com/art_deco_photo_galleries/the-cloud-club;  there are further images of the Chrysler Building at http://adamunderhill.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/the-chrysler-building-new-yorks-art-deco-masterpiece.

Above the Cloud Club, on the 71st floor, was a public observatory giving views into neighbouring states across fifty miles in each direction [http://flappergirlcreations.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/the-chrysler-buildings-long-lost-observatory].  This closed after the Second World War and is now the offices of an architectural practice [see http://chryslerbuilding.circa68.net/cloudclub.html].

Though the Chrysler Building nominally has 77 floors, in fact there are more levels, each tapering within the spire, lit oddly by the shark’s tooth windows.  The 74th floor contains a derelict radio station.  Above the 75th floor the windows have never been glazed, so it’s exceptionally draughty, even on hot days.

Beyond the final floor, 77, a further seven levels accessible by ladder lead eventually to an area about a yard square, which gives access to a trapdoor through which, once a month, an engineer checks the base of the lightning conductor.

There is a detailed description of this by David Michaelis at http://mrbellersneighborhood.com/2002/03/inside-the-needle-the-chrysler-building-gets-lit.

Another enjoyable essay on the building is by Claudia Roth Pierpont, ‘The Silver Spire:  how two men’s dreams changed the skyline of New York’, which appeared in The New Yorker, November 18th 2002, and can be found at http://jayebee.com/discoveries/criticism/silver_spire.htm.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

World Trade Center, New York City (1981)

Anyone who was sentient at the time recalls where they were on September 11th 2001.  I was taking a class of sixteen-year-olds through the text of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and we were discussing – in relation to the three Witches – whether there could be an independent force of evil, or whether it existed only in the hearts and minds of human beings.  We only realised later that during that time the planes were slamming into the World Trade Center.

The so-called “twin towers”, which were not actually identical, were developed in the late 1960s to revitalise the southern tip of Manhattan.  Their genesis was controversial, because they belonged to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey which was independent of city and state planning jurisdiction.

Designed by Minoru Yamasaki & Associates in conjunction with Emery Roth & Sons, they were not universally liked.  These elegant modernist towers, clad in aluminium alloy, were dismissed by one writer, Lewis Mumford, as “filing cabinets”.

Inevitably, they grew to be an immediately recognised part of the cityscape.  Ed Vulliamy, in an Observer article [August 21st 2011] describes how they told the passing of each day:  “…deep gold at the eastern edge in the early morning, becoming paler towards midday and deepening again to a tangerine glow at dusk”.

They also contributed to New York legend.  Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker, walked from one tower to the other in 1974 and was, for his pains, arrested for trespassing.  Three years later George Willig climbed the outside of the south tower using suction-pads.

And they were celebrated by tourists.  Express lifts carried the public in slightly under a minute past ten million square feet of office space to the indoor observation deck on the 107th floor, from which escalators gave access to a surprisingly unvertiginous roof-deck.  Bizarre effects were experienced at this height, including upwardly mobile rain.

The towers attracted the attention of terrorists because of their particular design and their proximity.  A bomb which exploded in the basement on February 23rd 1993, destroying five floors, killing six people and wounding at least a thousand, was apparently intended to tip one tower over to demolish the other.

The final atrocity, which killed over 2,752 people in the buildings, on the planes and in the frantic rescue operation, was no random attempt to create a terrorist “spectacular”.

The people who perpetrated this massacre knew perfectly well that flying a plane into, say, the Hancock or the Sears Towers in Chicago would do great damage but might not engineer a collapse.

The World Trade Center towers were constructed with external load-bearing walls to provide open-plan office space.  Though they had been designed to withstand an accidental collision, the airliners’ wingspan of 156ft ripped through buildings only 209ft wide.

The height of the impacts was far beyond the range of ground or airborne firefighters, and the amount of kerosene on board aircraft at the start of transcontinental flights created enough heat to weaken the steel structure, causing the floors to implode with terrifying speed.

Among the 9/11 terrorists were individuals with civil engineering expertise, trained to build things.  This wasn’t only a violent and a perverse act.  It was calculated evil.