Lexington Avenue, late afternoon, October 23, 1929. A small crowd gathers near the construction site at 42nd Street, watching what looks at first like a slow magic trick. A team of riggers inside the unfinished Chrysler Building has spent four months secretly assembling a 185-foot stainless steel spire in the building’s fire shaft, in five sections, hidden from the press and from rival architects. Over the next ninety minutes, the spire is hoisted up the elevator core and bolted into place at the top of the tower, pushing the Chrysler Building to 1,046 feet, the tallest building in the world. The Wall Street crash will begin the following morning. The man who designed both the building and the trick is William Van Alen. His career will end with the building. This is the story of what he built and why it still matters.
The Chrysler Commission
Walter Chrysler was born in Wamego, Kansas, in 1875, raised in railroad towns, and trained as a mechanic in the workshops of the Union Pacific. He came to automobiles through engineering, ran Buick for General Motors in the early 1920s, and founded the Chrysler Corporation in 1925 by absorbing the Maxwell Motor Company. Within three years he had the third-largest car company in America, behind Ford and General Motors.
The Chrysler Building was his personal monument, not a corporate headquarters. He paid for it himself, roughly twenty million dollars out of his own pocket at a time when twenty million was a usable estimate of the gross national income of a small country. The equivalent in current dollars is over three hundred million.
He hired William Van Alen in 1928 on the recommendation of the New York architectural establishment, which understood Van Alen as one of the most promising Beaux-Arts trained designers of his generation. The brief Chrysler gave him was short. Make the building the tallest in the world. Make it look like the future. The two men did not specify what that meant in any further detail.
What Art Deco Was, by 1928
Art Deco had been named in April 1925 at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, three years before Van Alen began drawing. The exposition gave the style its title and a public face. The vocabulary was already established in Europe: stepped pyramidal forms borrowed from Aztec and Egyptian sources, chevrons and sunbursts and zigzags, geometric ornament, new industrial materials including chromium and polished aluminum and stainless steel, speed lines borrowed from automobiles and trains, and a general visual grammar that celebrated the machine age without pretending to be modest about it.
By 1928, Art Deco was already arriving in New York. The Barclay-Vesey Building at 140 West Street, completed 1927 by Ralph Walker, had introduced setback massing with Deco ornament. But no single American skyscraper had yet attempted to synthesize the full vocabulary into one coherent statement. The style was emerging in pieces. The Chrysler Building was about to assemble it into a totality.
The Race to Be Tallest
The drama that made the spire necessary was professional. H. Craig Severance had been Van Alen’s business partner from 1911 until 1924, when the two men ended the partnership in a dispute neither would later discuss in print. Severance went on to design 40 Wall Street downtown for the Bank of Manhattan Company, and through 1929 the two men leaked their respective intended heights to the trade press in a slow-motion bidding war.
By the summer of 1929, Severance had set 40 Wall Street’s final height at 927 feet, a figure he believed would secure the world’s tallest title. Van Alen’s publicly announced height for the Chrysler was lower. Severance had won, on paper.
Van Alen had been preparing his counter for months. His workmen had been quietly fabricating the 185-foot stainless steel spire in five sections inside the Chrysler’s central fire shaft, behind closed doors. On October 23, 1929, the five sections were hoisted up the elevator core and assembled at the top of the tower in roughly ninety minutes, while a small crowd watched from Lexington Avenue without understanding what they were seeing. The Chrysler Building reached 1,046 feet. The Wall Street crash began the following morning. Forty Wall Street, when it opened in April 1930, was already a footnote.
The Crown: Art Deco’s Visual Logo
The terminal element of the building is what made the silhouette famous. Seven stepped semicircular terraces of polished stainless steel, each pierced by triangular windows, rise in a stack of arcs that evoke a sunburst pattern frozen mid-radiation. The geometry is half Mayan temple, half hood ornament, and entirely Van Alen’s invention. Nothing like it had been put on a building before.
The metal was Krupp’s Enduro KA-2, an austenitic stainless steel developed in Germany in the late 1910s and marketed in the United States as Nirosta. The Chrysler Building was the first major architectural project to use stainless steel on an exterior at scale. The metal does not rust. It does not patina. It reflects sunlight in the morning and electric light at night and has continued to do both for ninety-six years.
The crown was visible from almost any street corner in Manhattan from the day it opened. By 1935, the silhouette was being reproduced on postcards, in advertisements, in films, on the covers of magazines, and in the lobbies of imitator buildings. Within a decade it had become the single most recognizable image of Art Deco in the world. It remains the visual logo of the style.
The Body: Eagles, Hubcaps, Speed Lines
The lower exterior is where Walter Chrysler is most visible. At the 31st floor, four corner gargoyles in stainless steel are direct copies of the 1929 Chrysler radiator caps, with the same winged eagle profile and the same proportions. At the 61st floor, eight massive eagles project out from the corners, modeled on the hood ornaments of Chrysler automobiles, scaled to building proportions. Brickwork along the upper terraces is laid in chevron and speed-line patterns evoking auto racing stripes.
The building is, in the most literal possible sense, a Chrysler car translated into architecture. The radiator cap became a gargoyle. The hood ornament became a buttress eagle. The dashboard chrome became polished steel facade detail. The racing stripe became a frieze. The whole exterior is a piece of corporate marketing executed at the scale of the Manhattan skyline, paid for personally by the man whose product it advertises. There is no other major skyscraper in the world whose ornament so directly mirrors the consumer good it celebrates.
The Lobby Is the Masterpiece
The interior is the building’s secret. Most people who know the Chrysler Building have never been inside it. The lobby, restored in 1978, is the room where Art Deco lives at full saturation.
The walls are sheathed in African red marble quarried in Morocco. Amber onyx panels frame the entrances. The floor is blue marble crossed with bands of yellow Siena marble from Tuscany. The ceiling carries a mural by Edward Trumbull called Transport and Human Endeavor, ninety-seven feet by one hundred feet, depicting the modern industrial machine age in scenes of automobiles, airplanes, ocean liners, and the construction of the building itself. The mural was the largest painted ceiling in the world at the time of its completion.
The thirty-two elevators are arranged in four banks. Each elevator cab is paneled in a different combination of Mexican onyx, Brazilian rosewood, Oriental walnut, and inlaid metal. No two cabs are alike. The asymmetric inlay patterns on the elevator doors, with their geometric flowers in brass and steel, are among the most photographed objects in twentieth-century design history. They have been reprinted in nearly every survey of Art Deco published since 1950. The crown is the famous part of the building. The lobby is the masterpiece.
Van Alen’s Ruin
Walter Chrysler refused to pay Van Alen’s full design fee. The amount in dispute was $840,000, equivalent to roughly fifteen million dollars today. Chrysler accused the architect of accepting kickbacks from contractors and refused to settle. Van Alen had no written contract for the commission, an oversight he had never made before in his career and never forgave himself for.
Van Alen sued Walter Chrysler in 1930. The case went to court in 1931 and Van Alen won. But the accusation had already done its work. The New York architectural establishment treated him as a man who had embarrassed a major American industrialist in public. Major commissions stopped arriving. He completed a few smaller projects through the early 1930s, then nothing of significance.
For the next two decades, William Van Alen taught sculpture at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York and wrote occasional essays about ornament. He died in May 1954, at the age of seventy-one, in a small apartment in midtown. He had designed the most photographed building in the world and had never been allowed to design another.
The Long Afterlife
The Empire State Building opened on May 1, 1931, at 1,250 feet, taking the title of tallest building in the world after the Chrysler had held it for eleven months. Walter Chrysler died in 1940. The Chrysler Corporation never used the building as its headquarters and sold it in 1953. The tower has been bought and sold several times since.
The silhouette has not changed. In 1934, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White was photographed atop one of the 61st floor eagle gargoyles for an image commissioned by Vanity Fair, the camera set up on a steel beam projecting over Lexington Avenue eight hundred feet below. The image has been reproduced thousands of times. The crown appears in nearly every film set in New York. The building has become the visual shorthand for an entire decade and the visual shorthand for an entire style.
The Chrysler Building was the tallest in the world for eleven months. The Chrysler Building has been the visible logo of Art Deco for almost a century. The trick worked.