The Chrysler Building's Secret Spire

Rising ahead of you, with its stainless steel crown stepping up to a needle point, is the Chrysler Building, and the way that crown got there involved one of the great architectural tricks in New York history.

In the late nineteen twenties, the Chrysler Building was racing another skyscraper a few blocks south, at Forty Wall Street, for the title of tallest building in the world. For months, each side revised its plans upward as rumors of the other's height spread, and by the autumn of nineteen twenty nine, the team behind Forty Wall Street believed they had won, topping out at nine hundred twenty seven feet. They were wrong. The Chrysler Building's architect, William Van Alen, had secretly designed and assembled a stainless steel spire, one hundred eighty five feet tall, piece by piece inside the building's own fire shaft, hidden from view the entire time.

On October twenty third, nineteen twenty nine, one day before the stock market crashed, workers hoisted the spire's sections up through the dome and riveted them into place, finishing the job in about ninety minutes. The completed tower now reached one thousand forty six feet, well past its rival, and Van Alen watched the assembly from the street below, later comparing the sight to watching a butterfly leave its cocoon.

The Chrysler Building held the title of tallest building in the world for less than a year before the Empire State Building, a few blocks south, surpassed it in nineteen thirty one. But that brief victory, and the secrecy behind it, is still why architects consider the Chrysler Building's crown one of the most dramatic reveals in skyscraper history, visible on your right as you pass.