She’s the shimmering queen of Midtown’s night sky — a mirage of brightly lit triangular forms riding sensuous, sculpted layers to a radiant peak. The Chrysler Building after dark seems a feminine foil to the Empire State Building’s muscular lines. A popular postcard by artist Hudson Talbott depicts Chrysler as a sexy lady on the arm of a tuxedo-clad Empire State.
Yet Chrysler’s long-closed, private, top-floor Cloud Club was open only to men. The only woman to use one of the tower’s handful of apartments, Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White, needed office tenant Time Inc. to sign her lease. Landlord Walter P. Chrysler wouldn’t rent to women — not even to Bourke-White, who risked her life to take iconic photos while perched on one of the tower’s 59th-floor gargoyles.
The anti-female attitude was one of many ironies, oddities and calamities in the skyscraper’s roller-coaster, 90-year history. The Chrysler Building’s brief reign as the world’s tallest building inspired others — including the Empire State — to shoot higher in the sky. Yet for all its iconic beauty and influence, the tower was twice in foreclosure and its interior in ruins.
Today it faces a new challenge: It’s up for sale and skyline-lovers and architectural enthusiasts fear for its future.
A legally protected city landmark, Chrysler can’t be torn down. But because it is antiquated compared to modern office skyscrapers, some believe it might not get the $800 million its owners want for it. They worry that it could be partly converted to apartments or a hotel, a long process that could darken the fabulous crown for months or years. The Commercial Observer reported on Friday that the tower — burdened by an expensive ground lease — might fetch only slightly more than $100 million.
But the Chrysler Building has seen worse times. Its saga is one of unbridled ambition, fortunes lost and made — and enduring resilience.
It rose in an age when visionary captains of industry pursued their dreams — not only on Wall Street but in the sky over Manhattan.
Appropriately, it all started with the creator of Coney Island’s Dreamland.
Developer and politician William H. Reynolds launched the fabled seaside amusement park in 1904. He had bigger ambitions: He hired architect William Van Alen to design the world’s tallest building on land he leased at the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan.
But after Van Alen drew up ever-taller schemes, Reynolds didn’t have the dough to build. In 1928, he sold the lease and the architect’s design for an 808-foot-tall tower to Walter Chrysler for $2 million (more than $29 million in today’s dollars).
Chrysler wanted a prestigious New York corporate home for the Chrysler Corp., which he founded and owned. He wanted it to be a dynamic symbol of the machine age — and to be the tallest tower on earth.
But his vision was challenged by a planned building far downtown — 40 Wall St., which is today the Trump Building. That project was the brainchild of banker George L. Ohstrom and a team of architects led by Van Alen’s former partner H. Craig Severance. (The actual chief designer of 40 Wall is believed to be Severance’s associate Yasuo Matsui, a Japanese-American architect who was unconscionably placed under house arrest by the US government during World War II.)
Chrysler and Ohstrom vied for two years to come out on top. Each kept announcing plans for a taller tower. Severance finally said 40 Wall would top off at 925 feet; Van Alen said Chrysler, after several height increases, would reach only 850 feet.
The spectacular crown lighting in 1981 using white neon tubes — following plans by Van Alen that were never previously used — drew “aahs,” but disguised the fact that the building’s guts were falling apart.
Then, in a coup that’s the stuff of legend, Van Alen secretly assembled a 185-foot tall steel spire inside Chrysler’s crown. On Oct. 23, 1929, it was hoisted up in stages.
“The signal was given,” Van Alen wrote the following year in Architectural Forum magazine, “and the spire gradually emerged from the top of the dome like a butterfly from its cocoon, and in about 90 minutes was securely riveted in position, the highest piece of stationary steel in the world.” The Chrysler Building was the skyline king at the then-unprecedented height of 1,046 feet.
The 40 Wall team could only watch helplessly. To this day, 40 Wall suffers a height-inferiority complex. Before he entered politics, Donald Trump once insisted to me that 40 Wall was “taller, much taller,” than nearby 70 Pine St., which in fact tops 40 Wall by 25 feet.
The Empire State Building became the world height champ one year later — spurred on by Chrysler. Empire State’s builders first planned an 80-story tower, but added six more to top Chrysler by four feet.
But they added 200 more feet for insurance, raising the roof height to 1,250 feet after Chrysler’s spire stunt. Empire State’s backer, John J. Raskob, feared that Walter Chrysler might again “pull [another] trick, like hiding a rod in the spire and then sticking it up at the last minute.”
The stock market began its epic crash the day after Chrysler topped off. Even so, the tower opened on May 27, 1930, as home to the Chrysler Corp. Texaco and Time Inc. soon signed on as tenants.
Their new home was and is like no other building. The lobby, drenched in maroon and red-orange African marble and chrome, symbolizes early 20th-century corporate power. The elevators boast a sumptuous blend of woods from Japan, England, China and Cuba.
Auto motifs, such as hubcaps, adorn the tower’s facade of nearly 4 million hand-laid bricks. Giant chromium nickel gargoyles stand sentry on the 59th floor (where a flying dragon took up residence in the totally weird 1982 movie “Q: The Winged Serpent”).
Above the 77th floor, the structure blossoms into what everyone loves most — a Jazz Age fantasy of stainless-steel arches and triangular windows topped by the gleaming spire.
Architect Robert A.M. Stern cherishes its “swagger and originality.” Sarah Jessica Parker has called it “this magnificent piece of art . . . a sand castle . . . You could imagine that the sand was wet and you were shaping it with your fingers.”
The Cloud Club on the 66th-68th floors opened as a Prohibition-era speakeasy on July 1930. Regulars included such moguls as E.F. Hutton, Pan Am founder Juan Trippe, publisher Condé Nast and Walter Chrysler himself. They noshed on Dover sole, black-bean soup, and “No. 18” pink grapefruit, which was “huge, huge, more than twice as big as any grapefruit in a supermarket,” according to a Florida agricultural official.
Developer Jerry Speyer, whose company, Tishman Speyer, would rescue the tower from the brink of oblivion a half-century later, told friends at the Cloud Club in the late 1940s, “I never want to leave here.”
Chrysler was 70 percent leased by 1935 — compared with only 23 percent at its taller rival, dubbed the “Empty State Building.”
Walter Chrysler’s family inherited his skyscraper after he died in 1940, and it changed hands several times after that. It started losing juice when the Chrysler Corp. moved out in the 1950s. Owners rented space to small tenants, such as dentists — because finding corporate tenants was like pulling teeth.
Most famous was Dr. Charles M. Weiss, an innovator in implant technology who had his “Dentist in the Sky” practice there from 1962 until his death in 2012. Skyline views through his office’s 71st-floor triangular windows gave patients a stress-easing high without laughing gas.But the Chrysler Building has seen worse times. Its saga is one of unbridled ambition, fortunes lost and made — and enduring resilience.
The tower entered its dark age when overleveraged real-estate kingpins Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Jr. bought it in the early 1960s. Goldman knew it was trouble, later calling the purchase “a big gamble for us . . . We laid awake many a night over it.”
Rising crime and the city’s near-bankruptcy in the 1970s chased Chrysler’s few remaining large tenants, such as Texaco, to the suburbs. The owners treated it “like a tenement in the South Bronx,” architectural critic Paul Goldberger wrote. CBRE real-estate broker Bruce Surry, who later brought in ad agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample as a tenant, recalled to The Post, “No maintenance was done for years. There were rats and vermin all over.”
The mostly vacant wreck went into default and was sold again to Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke for $90 million in 1978.
Cooke did nothing to arrest the decay. The spectacular crown lighting in 1981 using white neon tubes — following plans by Van Alen that were never previously used — drew “aahs,” but disguised the fact that the building’s guts were falling apart.
The Cloud Club closed in 1979. It was reduced to bare remains when I saw it in 1985. Only a few of its mural fragments gave any hint of past glory.
Tishman Speyer finally pulled the Chrysler Building out of its tailspin in 1997, when it paid $220 million for the tower and two adjacent buildings. Tishman spent $100 million more to restore its original splendor before it sold a 90 percent stake to the Abu Dhabi Investment Council (ADIC) in 2008 for $800 million. Today, it’s 81 percent leased to major users such as Creative Arts Agency and law firm Moses & Singer.
Although Tishman Speyer tried to lure restaurants to the Cloud Club, the impractical layout scared them off. The floors are now home to shipping-industry bank AMA Capital Partners.
Whoever buys Chrysler will need to bring its unoccupied floors to 21st-century office standards. Majority owner ADIC wouldn’t spend on improvements the way Tishman Speyer did. (Technically what’s for sale is a leasehold — the ground beneath it is owned by Cooper Union College, which collects $32.5 million in rent from the tower’s owners).
One office-leasing broker not involved at the property told The Post, “People get off those beautiful elevators, take one look and turn around.” But sale brokers at CBRE optimistically report tremendous demand from around the world.
A happy portent lies in the ceiling lobby mural, “Transport and Human Endeavor,” by Edward Trumbull. It celebrates “resilience, energy and mankind’s ability to overcome challenges,” a plaque states. The Chrysler Building’s dream in the clouds will surely bring joy to New Yorkers for generations to come.
Shine on!