Chrysler Building

Detroit is still synonymous with the automobile industry, but New York played a starring role, too: Broadway was dotted with showrooms (they have since moved west to Eleventh Avenue) and, as an automotive headquarters city, punctuated by trophy skyscrapers: the General Motors Building (the old one at Broadway and Fifty-Seventh and the newer one on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street), the Fisk Tire Building, the New York General Building (the General Tire name required the editing of only two letters on the old New York Central headquarters on Park Avenue), and of course, the Chrysler Building.

"I like to build things. I like to do things," Walter P. Chrysler would say, reasoning that "every new development, new highway, railroad, steamship line, building operation, whether it be a drainage project in old Greece or a new water system in Peru, means an added use of the automobile." To showcase his company, he took over construction of the art deco Chrysler Building in 1930 from the developer of Coney Island's Dreamland, but he paid for the building personally so his children would inherit it. Designed by William Van Alen, the brick tower features gargoyles on the thirty-first floor, modeled on Chrysler radiator caps, and eagles on the sixty-first. The stainless-steel crown consists of seven radiating terraced sunburst arches. The seventy-first floor contains its highest occupied office space.

Ground was broken on September 19, 1928, during a race to build the world's tallest skyscraper. H. Craig Severance's 40 Wall Street was the apparent winner until Van Alen surreptitiously spirited a 125-foot spire inside the Chrysler Build. ing's steel frame. When it was completed on May 20, 1930, the spire elevated the Chrysler Building to 1,048 feet, making it the world's tallest building and the first man-made structure to surpass a thousand feet. But only eleven months later, it was exceeded by the Empire State Building…..

The Chrysler retains one architectural distinction: it remains the world's tallest brick building (an estimated 3,826,000 bricks form the non-loadbearing walls). .