The Chrysler Building: The Spire Built in Secret

On the morning of 23 October 1929, the architect William Van Alen stood at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and watched the top of his building come up out of itself. Workers above the seventy-first floor were hoisting four assembled sections of stainless steel out of the fire shaft inside the still-unfinished tower. The sections went up in sequence, were bolted together at the top, and locked into place. By the most-cited account, the hoist from start to finish took roughly ninety minutes. When it was done, the Chrysler Building was 1,046 feet tall, and it was the tallest building in the world.

This was a planned act of architectural sabotage. The man Van Alen had built the spire to defeat was his former business partner, H. Craig Severance, who was downtown finishing 40 Wall Street, a building designed to be the world's tallest, and who had not known the Chrysler Building's spire existed until it appeared. The hoist of 23 October 1929 is the most famous single morning in twentieth-century New York architecture. The story of how it was kept secret, and what the building was built to do, is older than the morning.

Walter Chrysler and the commission

Walter Chrysler founded the Chrysler Corporation in 1925, after a career running Buick and General Motors. By the late 1920s he was one of the wealthiest men in the United States. He wanted a New York headquarters building that would announce his company to the country in the most visible possible way.

The site was at the corner of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, on a lot that had originally been leased by the New York real-estate operator William H. Reynolds for a smaller speculative tower. Reynolds had hired Van Alen to design that earlier scheme. When the project ran into financing problems, Reynolds sold his lease to Chrysler in October 1928. Chrysler kept Van Alen on as architect. The original design was replaced with a much taller, much more aggressively decorated tower that Chrysler personally financed with roughly $20 million of his own money, beginning with $2.5 million for the site and revised plans on 15 October 1928.

The new design was Art Deco in the fully developed sense. Van Alen specified setbacks at multiple intervals to fill the 1916 Zoning Resolution envelope; sunburst-pattern stainless steel crown with seven progressively smaller arches stepping inward; eagle gargoyle ornaments at the 61st floor corners modelled on Chrysler hood ornaments; and triangular windows in each arch of the crown. The crown itself was clad in Krupp Nirosta, a then-new German chromium-nickel-iron stainless steel alloy that Krupp had patented in 1912 and was supplying to high-prestige American projects through the late 1920s.

The decorated crown was visible in the drawings. The spire on top of the crown was not.

The rivalry

H. Craig Severance had been Van Alen's business partner from 1911 until their partnership dissolved acrimoniously in 1924. The break was public and bitter. Through the late 1920s, Severance set out, partly as a matter of professional revenge, to design a building that would publicly defeat Van Alen.

The opportunity came at 40 Wall Street, where Severance was hired by the Manhattan Company (a precursor of the Bank of Manhattan, later Chase) to design a new headquarters tower in the Financial District. The building was planned at 840 feet. When Severance learned, in early 1929, that the Chrysler Building was being designed at over 800 feet, he revised the 40 Wall Street design upward. By summer 1929 the 40 Wall Street plan called for 925 feet. Van Alen revised the Chrysler plan to match. Severance revised 40 Wall to 927 feet. Van Alen, by Bascomb's account, drew the spire.

The spire was 125 feet of Krupp Nirosta stainless steel in four assembled sections. At eight feet square at the base, narrowing as it rose, it weighed approximately twenty-seven tons. It was designed to be assembled inside the building's fire shaft, beginning in early September 1929. The work was carried out by a crew sworn to secrecy. The four sections were hoisted into the shaft, riveted together, and held in waiting for the moment when 40 Wall Street had topped out.

40 Wall Street topped out on 13 November 1929 at 927 feet. By a strict completed-structures count, the Manhattan Company tower was at that moment the tallest building in the world.

The Chrysler Building's hidden spire had already risen.

On 23 October 1929, three weeks before 40 Wall Street topped out, the Chrysler crew lifted the four assembled sections out of the fire shaft and bolted them into place above the crown. The total operation took roughly ninety minutes, by the journalist Neal Bascomb's account in Higher (Doubleday, 2003), which is the most cited modern source on the height race. Van Alen watched from 42nd and Fifth. The added height was 185 feet over the 922-foot crown line. The new total, with the spire, was 1,046 feet. The building had not officially opened. The structural top had been determined.

When 40 Wall Street opened on 1 May 1930 at 927 feet, it was the world's tallest only on a strict "completed and occupied" reading, and only for roughly four weeks. When the Chrysler Building opened on 27 May 1930, the spire put it 119 feet above its downtown rival. The Chrysler was the tallest building in the world.

It held the title for eleven months.

On 1 May 1931, the Empire State Building opened at 1,250 feet, and the Chrysler dropped to second. The Empire State would hold the title for forty-one years, until the World Trade Center north tower topped out in late 1970.

The morning's mechanics

The ninety-minute figure has become canonical. It is conservatively defensible. Eyewitness accounts from the construction crew, recovered through interviews in the 1930s and reproduced in Bascomb's research, describe a hoist that began in the early morning and was complete by late morning. The exact duration varies across accounts. Some put it at closer to two hours; some at closer to seventy minutes. The ninety-minute figure is the median estimate and the one most consistently cited.

The hoisting mechanism was a system of cables running over pulleys at the top of the fire shaft, powered by steam winches at lower levels. Each of the four sections was lifted in sequence and held in position while the next was attached below it. The riveting was done by ironworkers standing on temporary scaffolds on top of the crown. The cladding panels of Krupp Nirosta were attached after the structural spire was in place, in subsequent days.

The spire was structurally independent of the building's habitable floors. It was an ornamental addition that did not contain rentable space. The highest occupied floor of the Chrysler Building is the seventy-seventh; the spire above it is decorative. This distinction would later become important in the wider question of what counts as a building's "height," a question the CTBUH (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat) has been adjudicating in formal categories since 1969.

For Van Alen's purposes in 1929, the spire counted. The CTBUH had not been founded. The standard was whatever Van Alen could persuade the press to count. The press counted the spire.

What survived

Van Alen never built another major building. The Chrysler Corporation refused to pay his final fee on the building, citing alleged conflicts of interest related to his earlier involvement with the Reynolds lease, and Van Alen had to sue for payment. He won, but the litigation damaged his reputation, and he received few commissions through the 1930s. He died in 1954.

The Chrysler Corporation sold the building in 1953. It has had several owners since. The most recent change of ownership was in 2019, when the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and Tishman Speyer sold the building for $151 million, a fraction of its mid-twentieth-century peak valuation.

The building is a National Historic Landmark, designated in 1976. The exterior is preserved largely as Van Alen designed it. The lobby, with its red Moroccan marble, painted ceiling murals by Edward Trumbull depicting transportation and aviation, and elaborate elevator door inlays in wood marquetry, is largely intact and accessible during business hours. The crown is preserved with the original Krupp Nirosta cladding.

What to look for

Stand on the southwest corner of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, looking up at the Chrysler crown. The seven sunburst arches stepping inward toward the spire are visible from this angle. Each arch is clad in stainless steel that has not been replaced; the surface is the original 1929 Krupp Nirosta, which has not corroded and barely tarnished in ninety-seven years. The triangular windows in each arch were originally meant to be observation windows from the seventy-first floor "Cloud Club," a private restaurant occupying the upper crown floors from 1930 to 1979.

The eagle gargoyles at the 61st floor corners are eight in total, two at each corner, in stainless steel. Each is modelled on the radiator-cap hood ornaments that had been a Chrysler design signature in the late 1920s.

The spire above the crown, the 125-foot section that was hoisted on 23 October 1929, is the slim vertical mast. It is visible from a wide range of vantage points around Midtown. From the corner of 34th and Fifth, near the Empire State Building, the Chrysler crown and spire are visible to the north in one of the most photographed sightlines in New York.

The crown was illuminated for the first time in 1930. The current lighting scheme, designed in 1981 and refurbished in the 2000s, lights the arches at night from inside, so that the seven sunbursts and the spire above them read as a single composition against the dark sky.

The hidden spire is no longer hidden. It is the most identifiable architectural feature of the Manhattan skyline. The fact that it was once a secret, kept in a fire shaft against a former partner who never saw it coming, is the architectural pleasure that the building keeps offering ninety-seven years after the morning it appeared.