A rival thought his Wall Street tower had won the world's-tallest crown — until his ex-partner raised a hidden 185-foot spire through the Chrysler Building's roof.
The Chrysler Building went up during what the newspapers called the 'Race into the Sky,' the frantic 1920s competition among New York developers to own the tallest building in the world. The tower was paid for personally by the automobile magnate Walter Chrysler — not by his company — as a legacy for his children, and it was designed by the architect William Van Alen.
The rivalry was personal. Van Alen's downtown competitor was H. Craig Severance, his own former business partner, who was designing 40 Wall Street for the Bank of Manhattan. Their architecture firm had broken up years earlier in an ugly, litigious split, and now the two men were racing each other in steel across Manhattan.
Van Alen raised the Chrysler's planned height to about 925 feet. Severance answered in April 1929 by pushing 40 Wall Street to 927 feet — just enough to win — and believed the contest was settled.
Van Alen had a trick ready. He obtained a permit for a 125-foot spire, then had a 185-foot, 27-ton stainless-steel needle secretly fabricated in four sections and hidden inside the building's crown, so that Severance never knew the Chrysler Building's true final height.
On October 23, 1929 — one day before the Wall Street Crash — the crew hoisted the pieces up through the roof and riveted the spire together in about 90 minutes. Van Alen watched from the street below with Walter Chrysler and the engineers, and said the sight was like 'a butterfly leaving its cocoon.' The press barely reacted; even the newspaper that had covered the tower's construction daily did not mention the spire for days.
The needle brought the Chrysler Building to 1,046 feet, beating 40 Wall Street and passing the Eiffel Tower — the first man-made structure ever to rise above 1,000 feet and the world's first 'supertall' skyscraper. The triumph lasted 11 months: the developers of the Empire State Building added floors and a mooring mast to their own plans, opened higher in May 1931, and took a title they would hold for four decades.
Van Alen was poorly repaid. Walter Chrysler refused to pay the balance of his fee, accusing him of taking kickbacks from suppliers, and Van Alen — who had never signed a contract — had to sue. He won roughly $840,000 in court, but the lawsuit, the Great Depression, and a wave of critical sniping at the design ruined his reputation. He finished his career teaching sculpture and died in 1954, largely forgotten.