Now I Know
Page 19
That June, LeMessurier determined that the type of winds capable of causing structural damage to the building hit Manhattan every fifteen to twenty years. Having a fifty-nine-story building in the middle of Manhattan that was at risk for such damage was, to say the least, a very big problem. Hurricane season was only a few months away. With a 5–10 percent chance of a building-threatening storm coming that fall, fixing the problem became a priority. But admitting to it was an embarrassment. In addition, telling the public would likely cause a panic among neighbors and office workers alike. So LeMessurier and Citicorp (as it was then known) agreed to do the repairs after-hours, and not tell anyone.
It took three months, but the secret workmen successfully welded steel plates over the bolted-on brackets. No one found out about the fix-up job for nearly two decades; The New Yorker broke the story in 1995. And no one was hurt by the faulty building.
BONUS FACT
The angled roof of the Citigroup Center was not, originally, intended for simple aesthetics, but rather to provide a home for solar panels. No solar panels are there, though, because the roof is positioned in such a way that it never receives adequate sunlight for solar panels to provide a worthwhile amount of power.
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND
THE RACE TO BUILD THE TALLEST BUILDING IN THE WORLD
On New Year’s Day, 1930, the world’s tallest building was Manhattan’s Woolworth Building, at a height of 792 feet. As advancements in architecture emerged, so did the desire to top the heights reached by the Woolworth Building. In late 1928, two competing teams broke ground with plans for buildings that, if completed as designed, would easily surpass Woolworth’s mark. The race was on.
And trickery was on the agenda.
Originally, the Chrysler Building wasn’t supposed to be the Chrysler Building. The architect, a man named William Van Alen, had designed some plans for a contractor named William H. Reynolds, who was looking to build an office building. At 807 feet tall, Van Alen’s proposed building would be taller than the Woolworth Building. But Reynolds thought the plan would cost too much and might not be possible. He sold the plans to Walter Chrysler, the founder of the Chrysler Corporation. Chrysler envisioned the creation of a future headquarters for his car company—a jewel among skyscrapers known throughout the world. An 800-something-foot building sounded like a great start, but both Chrysler and Van Alen wanted to push to the limits. Van Alen went back to the drawing board (literally). His revised plan put the building at 925 feet.
Around the same time, H. Craig Severance, also an architect, began a rival project at 40 Wall Street (which the building is often called today), known then as the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building. This building was, originally, designed to be 840 feet. But upon learning that the Chrysler Building would soar eight-five feet higher than their construction, Severance and his team revised their plans, adding three extra stories. The completed Bank of Manhattan Trust Building, upon its opening in April of 1930, was 927 feet, then the tallest building in the world. The Chrysler Building, which wouldn’t open for another month, was not going to pass it, given everything that the Bank of Manhattan Trust team knew.
But they didn’t know everything. Chrysler and Van Alen had secretly constructed a 125-foot-tall spire, made for the top of the building, within the building itself. Almost no one outside the project knew about it, and the secrecy involved kept Severance and company from adjusting their plans. When the Chrysler Building installed the spire in October of 1929, construction on the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building was too far along to revise the plans again.
The Chrysler Building opened on May 27, 1930 at a height of 1,048 feet—not only taking the title of “tallest building in the world” from its downtown rival, but also surpassing the Eiffel Tower as the tallest man-made structure on the planet at the time. Severance took exception to their claim, however, arguing that the spire was nothing more than decorative; his building’s highest accessible floor was 100 feet higher than Chrysler’s.
That nuance, while still in debate when determining what constitutes the tallest building in the world today, was quickly rendered moot. On April 30, 1931, the Empire State Building—1,224 feet to the top floor, 1,250 feet to the roof, and 1,454 feet to the tip of the antenna spire—topped both buildings, by any measure.
BONUS FACT
The Empire State Building set a new height record, but its architects weren’t above some chicanery themselves. The top of the building was originally designed, at least superficially, to be a landing moor for dirigibles (that is, Zeppelins), giving passengers a way to enter midtown Manhattan in style. According to The New York Times, the dirigible moor was nothing more than an excuse to make the building an extra 200 feet taller in order to surpass the height record set by the Chrysler Building. No airships ever docked at the Empire State Building, as conditions were quickly deemed unsafe for such activities.
Copyright © 2013 by Dan Lewis.
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