A clear look at the egos behind three Manhattan skyscrapers
The typical office building in mid-19th-century New York City left much to be desired. Workers passed their days climbing up and down long flights of stairs and laboring in gloomy, congested quarters. Executives recognized that to gain more space in a city where real estate was scarce, the only way to go was up.
The inventions of the elevator and the steel skeleton frame precipitated an architectural revolution. By the early 20th century, Manhattan's landscape boasted buildings more than 300 feet tall. In 1913, the Woolworth Building rose proudly at 792 feet, a symbol of technological progress and business success.
"Higher," Neal Bascomb's first-rate account of the race to construct the world's tallest building in New York during the late 1920s, makes clear, however, that the skyscraper represented much more than a solution to a business problem. Though the creators of the rival Bank of Manhattan Company, Chrysler, and Empire State buildings spoke soberly about adding floors to increase rental space and boost the bottom line, the builders of these three were consumed by the chance to achieve glory. In spirit, says Bascomb, they were the descendants of those who conceived the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Parthenon in Athens, and the Roman Colosseum.
Bascomb, while stressing the timelessness of the quest for height, also takes a cue from urban critic Lewis Mumford, who wrote, "Each generation writes its biography in the buildings it creates." Skyscraper fever, in Bascomb's view, like stock-market mania and trans-Atlantic flight, reflected the exuberance of 1920s America, a society freeing itself from the cultural domination of Europe, surging ahead in business, and embarking on "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history," as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously put it. Bascomb's portraits of the men who planned and constructed the three skyscrapers, each a striver from a humble background, demonstrate that they saw themselves as smart, modern, and capable of accomplishing anything they wanted.
The race originated in a rupture between architects and former partners William Van Alen, a passionate, innovative designer, and Craig Severance, a savvy businessman more conventional in his tastes. In 1928, automaker Walter Chrysler hired Van Alen to do whatever it took to create a building that would enthrall midtown passersby and proclaim his company's success. In early 1929, investor George Ohrstrom, the "Boy Wonder of Wall Street," hired Severance to design a building there for the Manhattan Company to surpass all predecessors. Almost immediately in response, Chrysler ordered Van Alen to add height, cost be damned, and the race was on. Later that year, former New York governor Al Smith and General Motors executive John Raskob announced a third project, located at 34th and 5th. Calling it the Empire State Building, they promised it would be the grandest of them all.
Bascomb's history makes the construction process tangible, capturing both the detail and the vast challenges involved in erecting skyscrapers under enormous time and financial pressures. While providing a wealth of information about financing, construction materials and methods, and skyscraper aesthetics, Bascomb keeps the narrative lively and suspenseful. Especially entertaining are the accounts of the extremes the builders would pursue to attain victory: in secrecy, Van Alen created a 185-foot steel spire that would ultimately crown the Chrysler building's sparkling dome; Raskob unsuccessfully tested a mooring mast atop the Empire State Building for airships to land on. For his part, Severance never conceded that Van Alen beat him, maintaining that the Manhattan Company building had higher floor space.
Even the Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression did not stop the race. By the time the skyscrapers opened for business in 1930-31, they stood as eerie reminders of a giddy, freewheeling era, suddenly vanished. Some dour critics of the day decried the ego and extravagance expressed in these buildings. Bascomb takes a hard look at the economic and human costs, but finally celebrates these buildings, whose beauty far outshines the strictly functional structures of a later era.
Persuasively, Bascomb views the skyscrapers as their makers would have wanted, as emblems of a great city coming into its own, as testaments to pride, nerve, and determination.
