The Chrysler Building. Look at that crown. Seven radiating arches of stainless steel, ribbed and riveted in a sunburst pattern, with triangular windows catching the light. It's been up there since nineteen thirty and it still looks like it arrived from the future.
This building exists because two men hated each other.
William Van Alen and H. Craig Severance were architecture partners for about a decade. Then they split in nineteen twenty-four. Van Alen was introverted and brilliant. Severance was sociable and well-connected. After the breakup, they competed for the same commissions and — because this is New York — they ended up in a race to build the tallest building in the world. At the same time. On the same street.
Severance was building Forty Wall Street — the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building — designed to reach nine hundred and twenty-seven feet. That would make it the tallest in the world. Done deal.
Van Alen was building the Chrysler Building. Its announced height was shorte
r than Severance's. But Van Alen had a secret.
Inside the building's crown — inside that dome you're looking at — Van Alen had secretly assembled a hundred-and-eighty-five-foot steel spire. In five pieces. On the sixty-fifth floor. Nobody outside the project knew it was there.
On October twenty-third, nineteen twenty-nine — one day before the stock market crashed — Van Alen raised the spire thro
