Race To The Sky
Manhattan's glittering towers were erected in a frenzy of speculation and self-promotion
One day in April 1929 an agitated Walter Chrysler called elite architect William Van Alen into his Manhattan office. "Van, you've just got to get up and do something," said the auto magnate, according to a contemporary account. "It looks as if we're not going to be the highest after all." Chrysler's bid to put up the tallest building in the world, a monument to himself and American capitalism, was in jeopardy. In the canyons of Lower Manhattan, George Ohrstrom, a 34-year-old banker dubbed "the kid," was vowing to set the record at 40 Wall Street. "Think up something," Chrysler harangued his architect. "Your valves need grinding. There's a knock in you somewhere. Speed up your carburetor. Go to it!" The great skyscraper race was afoot.
The solution Van Alen concocted in secret would help Chrysler trump Ohrstrom in spectacular fashion. But Chrysler's triumph was short-lived. Later in 1929, John Jakob Raskob, financier for General Motors, announced his plans for an Empire State Building that would dwarf Chrysler's skyscraper. Raskob "wanted to put it up as a sign of the possibility of America," says Neal Bascomb, author of the forthcoming Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City. He wanted a symbol of "what a kid who started as a stenographer can do with a little intelligence and hard work."
The race is long forgotten, and later buildings, including Chicago's Sears Tower and the ill-fated World Trade Center, stole the height crown from the Empire State. But the results, especially the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, still shimmer on the New York skyline as emblems of American optimism. The Chrysler Building's facade, with its shiny metal hubcaps, American Eagle gargoyles, and gleaming Nirosta steel, pays homage to the capitalist ideal. The sleek geometric lines and massive form of the Empire State testify to American efficiency and commercial dominance. These art deco skyscrapers represent a break with European conventions of architecture, says Mike Wallace, a City University of New York historian, and mark a moment "when New York was reaching for a new kind of cultural supremacy."
The groundwork for the race was laid in the late 19th century. Until then, walls had to be thick enough to bear the weight of the floors above, which made erecting tall buildings impractical and expensive. But while designing Chicago's Home Insurance Building in 1883, architect William Jenney came up with the novel idea that a steel skeleton structure--a "cage design"--could support the heavy load of a tower.
Cutting cornices. Early skyscrapers were festooned with arches, columns, and cornices, as in Cass Gilbert's 1913 Woolworth Building. Gradually American designers stripped away the heavy accents and accouterments. "No old stuff for me!" Van Alen, the Chrysler Building architect, once said. "No bestial copyings of arches and columns and cornishes! Me, I'm new! Avanti!" A landmark 1916 zoning law in New York City also reshaped the skyscraper. To preserve light and air at street level, the law required buildings to have a "setback" between 9 and 18 stories up and stipulated that towers above that height could occupy no more than a quarter of their site. The result was the familiar "wedding cake" style of 1920s New York skyscrapers.
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