The Chrysler Building
A car manufacturer paid for it out of his own pocket, its architect hid a 56 m spire inside the roof to win a race, and it was the tallest building on earth for eleven months.
The short answer
The Chrysler Building is 319 m (1,047 ft) and has 77 floors. It stands at 405 Lexington Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, on the corner of 42nd Street. William Van Alen designed it for Walter P. Chrysler. Steelwork began in 1929 and the building opened in 1930.
Chrysler bought the lease and the half-finished plans from a real estate developer who ran out of money, then paid for the tower himself instead of charging it to the Chrysler Corporation. He wanted something his sons could inherit, and the company only rented space in it. That is why the building survived the corporation's own troubles: it was never a company asset to sell.
The race for the sky, 1929
Van Alen had worked with H. Craig Severance until the two fell out. Severance was designing the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building at 40 Wall Street, and both towers went up in the same year aiming at the same title. Each side watched the other's height announcements and revised upward. Severance added a lantern and a flagpole and reached 283 m, then declared victory in the newspapers.
Van Alen had already built his answer. A steel spire of 56 m, which the drawings called the vertex, was riveted together inside the top of the Chrysler Building out of sight of the street. On 23 October 1929, with 40 Wall Street topped out, a derrick pushed the spire up through the roof opening and the crew bolted it in place in about ninety minutes. The building was suddenly 319 m, taller than 40 Wall Street and taller than the Eiffel Tower, which had been the tallest thing standing since 1889.
The win did not last. The Empire State Building opened on 1 May 1931 at 381 m, and the Chrysler Building's eleven months remain the shortest reign of any New York record holder. The record chain by year shows where both sit in the sequence.
The crown, the eagles and the radiator caps
The crown is seven arches stacked one behind the other, each one narrower than the one below, cut with triangular windows that form a sunburst. It is clad in Nirosta, a chromium-nickel stainless steel from the German firm Krupp, chosen because it does not need repainting. The cladding has been cleaned twice in almost a century and never replaced.
Lower down, the ornament is literally automotive. Eight steel eagle heads project from the corners at the 61st floor, their shape taken from the hooded ornament on a 1929 Chrysler. At the 31st floor, where the tower steps back, the corners carry enlarged versions of a Chrysler radiator cap with winged wheels along the brickwork beside them. Walter Chrysler asked for details a passer-by could read as his product, and Van Alen gave him parts of a car at the scale of a building. The Art Deco page sets that approach next to the other crowned towers of the period.
The lobby
The triangular lobby is lined with African red granite and Moroccan marble, with yellow travertine on the floor and chrome trim on every edge. Edward Trumbull painted the ceiling, a mural titledTransport and Human Endeavor that runs about 100 by 60 feet and shows airplanes, machinery and the building itself. The 32 elevators have cabs inlaid with Japanese ash, Oriental walnut and other woods in four patterns, and no two banks match.
Floors 66 to 68 held the Cloud Club, a private lunch club for executives with a Tudor dining room, a marble bar and a locker room where members kept bottles during Prohibition. Texaco took three floors for it; the club closed in 1979 and the space has stood empty since.
Can you go up? No
The Chrysler Building has no observation deck open to the public. The Celestial observatory on the 71st floor sold tickets from 1930 but lost its visitors to the higher deck at the Empire State Building, and it closed in 1945. The space became offices. There are no tickets, no tours and no restaurant at the top.
What anyone can see is the lobby, open during business hours, and the building from outside. For a view of it, the deck at the Empire State Building and the one at 30 Rockefeller Plaza both look straight at the crown. The New York page lists the towers that do let visitors up.
Who owns it
The building became a National Historic Landmark in 1976 and a New York City landmark in 1978, so the crown, the lobby and the facade cannot be altered without review. Ownership has changed repeatedly: Cooper Union holds the land and has done since 1902, while the tower itself passed from the Chrysler family through several investors, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, to a partnership of RFR Holding and Signa that bought it in 2019. It still rents offices.