Posted Sep 26, 2010, 3:49 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/ny...l?ref=nyregion
Tall Towers and Sharp Razors
By MICHAEL POLLAK
September 24, 2010
Quote:
Q. For exactly how long was 40 Wall Street the tallest building in the world? Six days? Six hours? Please tell.
A. It probably never was. What is indisputable is that in the fall of 1929, a battle was being waged about 900 feet above the street between the architect William Van Alen, erecting the Chrysler Building (right) at Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, and Van Alen’s former partner, H. Craig Severance, who, with Yasuo Matsui, was completing a skyscraper at 40 Wall Street for the Bank of Manhattan and others.
Both buildings were projected to top the 1913 Woolworth Building, at 792 feet the world’s tallest. The Chrysler was projected at 808 feet, and in April 1929, a revised projection put 40 Wall Street at 840 feet.
Both estimates were low. Each side made late changes to top the other. Severance got a permit for a huge lantern and a flagpole at the top of 40 Wall Street, raising the height to 925 feet. But Van Alen secretly built a 175-foot spire inside the Chrysler Building, making the tower 1,048 feet high when it was hoisted.
Because of builder secrecy, the day-to-day progress of the towers that fall was not recorded. The Chrysler passed the Woolworth in height first, in October. The 40 Wall Street tower passed the Woolworth the third week of October, according to “Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City,” by Neal Bascomb (2003).
But a photograph of the Chrysler Building on Oct. 23, in “The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon, Day by Day,” by David Stravitz (2002), shows the winning spire already partly in place, as the builders waited for the weather to improve before hoisting it all the way up. In a Nov. 1 photograph, the Chrysler appears to be at its full height. So it appears that 40 Wall Street never quite took the lead.
John Tauranac, author of a history of the Empire State Building (which exceeded them both in 1931), concluded in an e-mail: “I think that if the Bank of Manhattan Building ever had been the tallest building, they would have had bragging rights, and if they did, I certainly never heard them.”
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