Every Hidden Detail Inside NYC’s Most Iconic Buildings | Obsession To Detail | Daily Mail
Welcome to Obsession to Detail, where we dissect the world’s most interesting things with an obsessive eye. In this episode, architectural historian Tony Robins unpacks the fierce rivalry between the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Woolworth Building—three titans that defined NYC’s race for the sky.
From the Art Deco brilliance of the Chrysler Building to the towering dominance of the Empire State and the gothic grandeur of the Woolworth, we break down their design innovations, engineering marvels, and the competitive spirit that shaped New York’s skyline.
For more deep dives into NYC’s architectural history, check out Tony Robins’ books:
New York Art Deco: A Guide to Gotham’s Jazz Age Architecture
https://www.amazon.com/New-York-Art-Deco-Architecture/dp/1438463960/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Classics of American Architecture: The World Trade Center
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0983227500/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=sl1&tag=artdecometropoli&linkId=d13026c1db5cfe1ae7f21ae724aa2c6c
Welcome to Obsession to Detail, where we dissect the world’s most interesting things with an obsessive eye. In this episode, architectural historian Tony Robins unpacks the fierce rivalry between the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Woolworth Building—three titans that defined NYC’s race for the sky.
From the Art Deco brilliance of the Chrysler Building to the towering dominance of the Empire State and the gothic grandeur of the Woolworth, we break down their design innovations, engineering marvels, and the competitive spirit that shaped New York’s skyline.
For more deep dives into NYC’s architectural history, check out Tony Robins’ books:
New York Art Deco: A Guide to Gotham’s Jazz Age Architecture
https://www.amazon.com/New-York-Art-Deco-Architecture/dp/1438463960/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Classics of American Architecture: The World Trade Center
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0983227500/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=sl1&tag=artdecometropoli&linkId=d13026c1db5cfe1ae7f21ae724aa2c6c
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NewsTranscript
00:00Well, you folks really do care about details.
00:07I'm such a detail pilot.
00:11Hi, I'm Tony Robbins. I'm an architectural historian and I've been looking at the New York City skyline pretty much all of my life.
00:18And today we're going to take a close look at three of the big stars of the New York City skyline.
00:24The Woolworths Building, which is downtown, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building, which are both in Midtown.
00:32Please note, these models are not to scale and they are not life-size.
00:37Although you certainly don't need to be an architectural historian to know this.
00:40These buildings are roughly a century old and each in its day was the tallest building in the world.
00:47Today we are going to take a look at their design, some of the extraordinary and hidden details.
00:52So get ready, we're going to jump in now.
00:55This is Obsession to Detail.
01:00So let's take a look at the interior design and the hidden details in the lobbies of these buildings.
01:05The lobbies are equally distinct as the exteriors.
01:08We can start with the Woolworths Building, which has a lobby unlike any other really in the city.
01:13The details are extraordinary and they have different reasons for being there.
01:17This mosaic that you see in the center with the Bird of Paradise at the bottom, this is up in the second story.
01:23And it's just part of the idea of this is such a tall building, we're up in the heavens, here are the birds.
01:28Over at the right, there's a salamander beneath the postal box.
01:32The mythical salamander could exist inside fire.
01:35Woolworths Building was taller than any building that had ever gone up and there was a worry, well, how can we rent space in it?
01:41What if there's a fire?
01:42You can't worry about that, the building is built with fireproof construction.
01:46And the salamander is there as a symbol of its fireproofness.
01:50The building is fireproof because it's made of steel with terracotta cladding inside.
01:55This is about as fireproof as we can get.
01:58The materials in the lobby, nothing is wooden, it's all metal or mosaics.
02:03The building is as fireproof as it can be.
02:05Over on the left, this is something I haven't seen in any other lobby in any building in New York.
02:09There are a series of caricatures, there are a dozen of them, of people involved in putting the building up.
02:15The one in the upper corner here, this man with the specs who's holding a model of the building, as you might guess, that's the architect, Cass Gilbert.
02:23This was the building that made his career.
02:25And below him, that's Frank W. Woolworth, founder of the Woolworth Corporation, the client for the building.
02:30Woolworth's stores in New York are known as the Five and Dimes because things cost originally a nickel, five cents, or a dime, ten cents.
02:37And here he is shown paying for his building, which he paid for in cash, with nickels and dimes.
02:41It's a lot of nickels and dimes.
02:43The centerpiece of the lobby is a huge crossing vault covered in mosaics.
02:47Mosaics are very expensive material.
02:49You generally find them in churches.
02:51In this case, they're here to illuminate the lobby, but they're modeled on a religious building, a tomb in Ravenna in Italy, a 5th century A.D. tomb, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.
03:03The lobby is actually a bit larger than the actual tomb, but the modeling is clear if you look at the design.
03:09The building actually had two clients.
03:11There was the Woolworth Company, and then he partnered with the Irving National Bank.
03:15The lobby's in two parts.
03:16The front part that we're looking at the details of, that's Woolworth's part.
03:19The rear is the bank's, and they were up on the second floor.
03:23I think in Britain you call the first floor.
03:24So there's a giant staircase leading up to it.
03:26And at the top is a huge skylight, which originally sunlight came through it.
03:30It's been built over since then, with images of all the great financial powers of history, all the different nations with their symbols.
03:37And it's set up as a shopping arcade, really the first time that stores have been brought into an office building lobby in New York, modeled after the arcades of Paris.
03:46Up in the second floor, there are two murals.
03:49They look like Italian triptychs.
03:51One represents commerce, and one represents labor, because this is a secular building.
03:56But the architecture suggests religious models, and the building became known, once it was open, as a cathedral of commerce.
04:04There was an opening dinner, and a local divine, S. Parks Cadman, gave the grand opening dedication.
04:10And that's what he called it, the cathedral of commerce, and the name has stuck ever since.
04:14So next, let's take a look at the Chrysler building.
04:18It's unusual in being a triangular lobby.
04:21That relates to the building's style, which is what we call today art deco.
04:25One of the characteristics of art deco is the use of stylized geometric patterns, triangles, chevrons, all sorts of points.
04:32And this is an unusual case, where the shape of the lobby actually falls into that.
04:36So the image that you see here of the lobby is a little misleading.
04:39It looks as though the ceiling is at an angle. It's not. It's perfectly flat.
04:43That's because the angle is so odd, it's almost impossible to photograph this properly.
04:46You can see in the photo, two images stand out, the lights and the ceiling mural.
04:51The light level in the lobby is actually quite low, and that's because the lighting comes from what's called indirect lighting.
04:57Instead of having lights actually point out into the space, they're hidden behind these metallic ribs.
05:03The light, originally neon, I think today they're fluorescent, bounces off the marble behind it and then into the lobby.
05:09So it's already secondary lighting, and that's a much lower level.
05:12Today, that wouldn't be considered appropriate for a business building, but in this period, it was considered theatrical, dramatic, the kind of lighting we want in our building.
05:20So the walls are covered in marble, and it's a reddish marble from Africa, imported.
05:25Its official name is Rouge Flamme, which I believe means flaming red.
05:29It sounds like something a PR guy would have come up with.
05:31We're not far from Madison Avenue here, and you'll notice that the pattern is vertical.
05:35The lines go up, and that's something we're going to see when we look at the outside of the building.
05:39It's a hallmark of the deco style in these skyscrapers, that the building has a direction, and the direction is vertical.
05:45And the idea is that our eye is caught by vertical lines and let up.
05:48On the outside, we're let up until we see the top of the building, which we will talk about.
05:51But on the inside, we're let up until we see the mural.
05:54The ceiling is covered in murals, and the murals are telling us something about who built the building.
05:58This building was built for Walter Chrysler, the founder and chief executive of the Chrysler Corporation.
06:03That corporation is out in Detroit, Motor City.
06:05The corporation didn't build the building.
06:07Chrysler built it as a personal investment, but his identity was wrapped up in transportation.
06:12So there are images of all kinds of transportation.
06:15The airplane that you see, that's actually the Spirit of St. Louis, the first airplane to cross the Atlantic with Lucky Lindy, Lindbergh.
06:21There actually is no image of a car, because Chrysler thought that would be too egotistical.
06:26It's an interesting choice.
06:27In the center, this is still in the ceiling, what you see is the construction of the building going on.
06:32These images of workmen are not just images.
06:35They're actually portraits.
06:37The muralist, Edward Trumbull, had the workers pose for their portraits, and these are their likenesses.
06:43Though you don't see it in this particular image, they come together and focus on a huge portrait of the Chrysler building itself, occupying most of the ceiling.
06:51To the right, the elevators.
06:53These are the doors, which are covered in various inlaid woods.
06:56And again, this is the Art Deco period, so they're all sort of abstract geometric patterns, like you see here, these zigzags.
07:02Do you notice they get slightly smaller as they go down the elevator?
07:05It's just that attention to detail that makes them work so well.
07:08And then they sort of become more like floral patterns here.
07:11That's the other side of Art Deco ornament.
07:13It looks floral, but you won't find anywhere in nature quite like that.
07:16But inside, there are four different sets of interiors, each a different set of geometric patterning, and they're just exquisite.
07:22Look at the Annunciator Light above the elevator door.
07:25You'll notice it's a pyramid.
07:26Even the Annunciator Light takes a geometric pattern, much as the plan of the entire lobby does.
07:33Now, the Art Deco style was not called Art Deco in these days.
07:36It was called modern, which isn't terribly helpful.
07:39Everything that I do today is by definition a modern.
07:41It was called modernistic.
07:42What do the architects of the day call it?
07:44They called it the vertical style, picking up on this direction that the buildings have.
07:48The name Art Deco was coined only in 1966.
07:50There was a retrospective exhibit in Paris in that year looking back at designs in the 20s,
07:56and they took the name from a very influential design exposition held in 1925 with a very long French name.
08:02It translates as the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts.
08:06And that's a mouthful, and my theory is that it wouldn't fit on the cover of the catalog.
08:11So they shortened it.
08:12They had the phrase Art Decoratif, which is just French for decorative arts, in it.
08:15They shortened that long title to Arts Decoratif, and maybe that was too long, too.
08:19So, voila, Art Deco, the expression was born.
08:21Last, but hardly least, the Empire State Building.
08:25The Empire State Building is an extremely large building.
08:28It runs half a block.
08:29Therefore, it has really two lobbies.
08:31The much larger lobby is simply a long, long space with elevator banks in it.
08:36The smaller lobby is entered off Fifth Avenue, and that's set up almost like a chapel, and it's covered with ornament.
08:41At the far end, the most visible ornament is this image of the Empire State Building with the sun rising behind it.
08:49This was a very popular image in this period.
08:51You'll find this image of the building itself being part of the ornament.
08:55It happens in other periods, but it's particularly common in the Art Deco period.
08:59All the skyscrapers seem to have done it.
09:00The sun rising behind it is sort of a symbol of the dawning of a new age.
09:04In the center, these are a wonderful series of metallic icons of the different building crafts, building trades that went into creating the building.
09:12There are a dozen of them scattered throughout the lobby.
09:14They were designed by Oskar Bach, who was one of the great masters of iron and metal design of the period.
09:20And you see there's masonry, there's electricity, there's heating, and they're all in what we would think of today as the Deco design.
09:26It's all about geometric patterns, symmetry, even the font of the lettering for electricity and masonry have that Deco flair.
09:34On the left here, what you're looking at is the ceiling.
09:37This extends throughout the long corridors that take you past the elevator.
09:40If you'd gone to see the building 10, 15 years ago, you wouldn't have seen them because the ceilings had been dropped years before.
09:46It's covered with acoustical tiles in honor of the 75th anniversary.
09:50They took a look behind the acoustic tile.
09:52They found that the murals still were there, but they were so deteriorated they couldn't even be restored.
09:57So instead, the new owners of the building brought in the architectural firm of Bayer Blinder Bell, one of the best preservation firms in New York, who brought in Evergreen, one of the best makers of ornament for historic buildings.
10:08And they recreated this image that you see here, and it's sort of space-agey almost.
10:12There's the sun and stars, and they're all suggesting the future because that was what the Art Deco style was all about.
10:18We're in the new age.
10:19We've turned our back on Europe.
10:20Even though Art Deco has its origins in France, we really made it our own in New York as a skyscraper style.
10:25And there's that sense of futurism in this extraordinary ceiling.
10:28Now that we've had a chance to look at some of the details in the lobby, let's look at some of the upper floors and see what we can find.
10:34Now, skyscrapers are large buildings, and they have many spaces which people don't often see.
10:38Let's start with the Woolworth Building.
10:41In the basement, there was actually a swimming pool, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, that was open to people.
10:47I guess the executives of the building may have used it.
10:49By the 1980s, it had been leased out to a gym.
10:52I think it was the Jack LaLanne Gym.
10:54A boss of mine once went swimming there every lunch hour.
10:56And then it was abandoned and was kind of falling apart.
10:59The building itself, the upper half of it, has been converted to condominium apartments.
11:03And I've heard talk about revamping the swimming pool for the use of the new condominium owners.
11:08But here's a picture from back when it was still in use in the early days.
11:11On the left, this is a very interesting image.
11:13This is from the grand opening of the building.
11:15It was a special dinner that was held in honor of the architect, Cass Gilbert, hosted by the owner, Frank W. Woolworth.
11:22And it was held on the 27th floor, which made it, at the time, the highest in altitude dinner that had ever been held in the city.
11:30There was a lot of hoo-ha about the opening of the building.
11:33The building's lights were off.
11:347.30, I think it was, p.m.
11:36It was dark outside.
11:37At exactly 7.30, in Washington, D.C., President Wilson pushed a button.
11:42That button rang a bell in the basement of the building, where an engineer, waiting to hear it, heard it, pulled a lever, and all the lights came on.
11:50It was absolutely stunning.
11:51And then came the dinner, which you see here on the left.
11:54So the grand opening was on April 24, 1913.
11:58And this dinner was attended by 900 VIPs.
12:02So now let's have a look at a private club, a former private club, in the Chrysler Building.
12:07Up on one of the highest floors, a duplex club was called the Cloud Club.
12:12It was a luncheon club for executives of companies with offices in the buildings.
12:16And it was a stunning Art Deco space.
12:18You can see the furnishings and some of the wall treatments here on the right.
12:22If you look on the left here, this is typical Art Deco-y detailing.
12:26These squiggles represent clouds.
12:28It's the Cloud Club, after all.
12:29These would appear to be stars.
12:31Up in the upper left-hand corner, this was at the bar.
12:34If you looked out the window at the bar, directly south, you saw the skyline of lower Manhattan.
12:40And if you looked to your left, you saw this mural of the skyline of lower Manhattan.
12:45Now, when the building opened, they would have been very similar.
12:47Visitors to the Cloud Club in the 70s, and I think it closed in 1980, had a different experience.
12:52You looked out the right, and you saw the skyline as of 1980.
12:56It had changed.
12:57But to your left, that was still the skyline of 1930.
13:00So, let's have a look at the Empire State Building now,
13:03and a space that everyone has seen on the outside, but no one gets to see on the inside.
13:08And that's the mast at the very, very top of the building.
13:11This was built, as you see on the left, with the intention of being a mooring mast for dirigibles.
13:17Now, this is before the Hindenburg disaster put an end to dirigibles as a viable means of transportation.
13:22The idea was that the dirigible would float into Manhattan, tie up at the top of the mooring mast
13:29an open-air staircase would descend, and you, the passenger, would pick up your bags
13:34and walk down the staircase in the open air to the 100th floor of the Empire State Building
13:39and be whisked to midtown Manhattan.
13:40This is the best and latest in modern transportation.
13:43Only one problem, it never really worked,
13:45because there were updrafts of 40-mile-an-hour winds coming at you
13:48as you tried to walk down those open-air stairs.
13:50But it really wasn't built so much with that in mind as it was built with the idea
13:55of we have to be the tallest building.
13:57There was a huge competition that was going on in New York all through the 20th century.
14:00Six of the seven buildings, which claimed the title of world's tallest building in the 20th century,
14:04six were in Manhattan, one was in Chicago, the Sears Tower,
14:07and there was a real competition going on in the 20s between the Chrysler Building
14:11and the Empire State Building and the Bank of Manhattan, which did not ever win that title.
14:15When the Empire State Building opened, it took the title of world's tallest building from the Chrysler Building,
14:20but the building itself, which is really just what you see here covered in stone,
14:24the actual office building, was about four feet taller than the Chrysler Building.
14:27And according to an executive who was in the room at the time,
14:30Raskob was worried that Chrysler would pull a trick by adding a flagpole to the Chrysler Building
14:36and taking back the title.
14:37So to foreclose that possibility, he added this mooring mast.
14:41Now, if you go to the Empire State Building today, I think even to this day,
14:44they will tell you that the building is 102 stories tall.
14:47This is a fib, I think it's fair to say.
14:51The building is 86 stories tall to the top of the stone-faced part.
14:55That's where all the offices are.
14:56So that's 86 stories.
14:58As you see here now on the right, we're getting a look at the inside of this mooring mast.
15:02There's nothing inside.
15:03So the image on the left looks like a photograph, and I think it's probably based on the photograph,
15:07but this is a mock-up.
15:08This never happened.
15:09It's to show you the concept of the dirigible tying up.
15:13On the right is a drawing that shows it in more detail.
15:16You can see here, this is the dirigible, and here is the open-air staircase,
15:19and there are the people coming out in the open air, walking down into this area.
15:23You'll see over here it says mooring mechanism.
15:25They were quite serious about it, but it really was about height.
15:29The building is actually 86 stories tall, in fact, that there are stories.
15:33That takes us to the top of the stone-faced section here.
15:37That's where all the actual office space is.
15:39The mooring mast doesn't have stories in it.
15:42It doesn't have anything in it except for an elevator shaft and a spiral staircase.
15:47Again, this is a drawing, not a photograph, but it gives you an idea of what the inside might be.
15:51The folks who were promoting the building said,
15:53well, the building is 86 stories.
15:55This doesn't have any stories in it, but, you know, it's equivalent in height to 14 stories.
16:00Oh, wait, there are two sub-basements in the building,
16:02so we can say that the Empire State Building is 102 stories tall.
16:06This is New York City.
16:07This is what we do.
16:08We're the masters of hype at Madison Avenue, and that was the reason for the choice.
16:14In case Walter Chrysler got antsy about having lost the title of world's tallest building,
16:18it would be a lot harder to match this than just adding a flagpole.
16:21When I was a boy, and even when I was a grown-up, there were two observatories.
16:25There was the 86-floor observatory.
16:27You get to walk outside.
16:28It's really right at the top of the office building as an office building,
16:32right here at the base of the mooring mast.
16:34That's probably the best-known one.
16:36It's certainly the largest one.
16:37It was closed for a while, but you could take an elevator up
16:40to what was called then the 102nd-floor observatory.
16:44That's totally enclosed.
16:45You cannot walk outside.
16:46But that's where the people who were, in theory, coming off the dirigible
16:49would have landed and walked in.
16:51Today, it's just an observatory, 102nd floor.
16:54They might be calling it the 103rd floor today, and that may sound odd,
16:58but in New York, this sort of thing happens all the time.
17:01When the twin towers of the original World Trade Center went up,
17:05they stripped the title of world's tallest building from the Empire State Building.
17:09The Empire State Building didn't even just become the second-tallest building.
17:11It became the third-tallest building because there were two towers
17:14at the World Trade Center.
17:15The architects of the building, which still existed, the firm still existed,
17:19were commissioned to design a 20-story addition to the Empire State Building
17:24that would have covered over the mooring mast and extended the office building up.
17:28It would have just been a great big rectangle,
17:30rather like the twin towers of the old Trade Center.
17:32I asked the architect, were you serious about this?
17:34He said, no, no, of course not.
17:35This was all for public relations.
17:37This is New York.
17:38This is where we are.
17:39This is what we do.
17:40So it's time to have a look at the towers on the outside.
17:44And what you see here are the series of towers.
17:47Each of these was the world's tallest building.
17:49There were six of them in New York.
17:50The Woolworth Building was number three.
17:52The Chrysler was number four.
17:53The Empire State Building was number five.
17:55The World Trade Center towers, the old one, was number six.
17:57The Woolworth Building began as a much smaller proposal.
18:00They didn't have the whole site yet.
18:02They just had the front portion of it,
18:04and they were talking about a 20-story building.
18:06Gradually, Woolworth was able to acquire more and more of the site.
18:09This is called assembling a site in New York,
18:11and it's a complicated thing to do,
18:12because if word gets out that Woolworth is assembling a site
18:16and my property is next in line,
18:18gee, my price just went up.
18:20So it had to be done in great secrecy.
18:22But as each piece of the acreage was acquired,
18:25the architect was asked to, okay, make it a little taller.
18:27And by the time we get to the later section of the design,
18:30the design was already there.
18:31Woolworth was thinking about the value
18:33of being the world's tallest building.
18:35The building that held the title of world's tallest building before Woolworth
18:38first was the Singer Tower, which was all of 612 feet tall,
18:41and then followed by MetLife, 700 feet tall.
18:43The Singer Tower no longer exists.
18:45MetLife is still there.
18:46Woolworth recounted later when he was asked,
18:48why did you build the world's tallest building?
18:49He said, well, I travel in Europe a lot.
18:51Wherever I went, people would ask me about the Singer Building,
18:54the Singer Company, and its extraordinary tower.
18:57And I decided I wanted them to be asking about
18:59the Woolworth Company and its tower.
19:01He actually called the tower a giant signboard.
19:04A giant signboard is an advertisement for the company.
19:07How many stories of this tower does his operation require when it opened?
19:11One and a half.
19:12One story for the offices and his office on another floor.
19:14That's it.
19:15And he did quite well.
19:16He got a lot of railroad companies.
19:17So he didn't need it for the operation of the company,
19:19but he needed the advertising.
19:21And this building was not in the financial district.
19:23It was just a little bit north, right on top of City Hall Park,
19:26where everybody would see it.
19:27There's a story that at one point he said to his architect,
19:29how tall is the MetLife building?
19:31And the answer was 700 feet.
19:32And he said, okay, go 50 feet taller.
19:34In the end, the building went to 792 feet, and it took the title.
19:37And then the building stopped because World War I started,
19:40and it was a good 15 years before the Chrysler Building.
19:42And that's why the Woolworth Building maintained that title
19:45of world's tallest building, became known for it,
19:47whereas the Singer Tower and MetLife only had held the title
19:50for a year or two each.
19:51So they were sort of forgotten.
19:53The shapes of the building are a bit different,
19:55and that's because of zoning regulations in New York City.
19:58Those were passed in 1916.
20:00The Woolworth Building was completed in 1913,
20:02one of the last big buildings that went up without zoning regulations.
20:05And that accounts for differences in the way the buildings are shaped.
20:09You can see through this model, the back, there's an enormous open area.
20:14That's to provide light and air to the windows and offices.
20:17It's a huge light court.
20:19It wasn't required by zoning regulations.
20:21It was just required by economics.
20:23Nobody wanted to rent dark spaces if you're going to be up in the building.
20:26But as you look at the front, it goes straight up.
20:28There are these two little setbacks, very, very shallow, basically.
20:31But there are little walkways.
20:33This one here was the observatory.
20:35But really, it's a straight shot up.
20:37And that's not the case of the other two buildings
20:39because the zoning laws changed that.
20:41The white that you see of the color is not exactly right.
20:44It's glazed terracotta.
20:46The building is covered in terracotta.
20:48This was the first massive use of terracotta tiling covering a skyscraper.
20:52Cass Gilbert had done an earlier building, a smaller building nearby,
20:55and he'd used terracotta there, so he knew it was doable.
20:57But this was a stunning use of it.
20:59And again, it has fireproof qualities.
21:01But it also was chosen, according to the architect,
21:04because of the potential for color.
21:06Now, as you look at this, it doesn't seem to have any.
21:08It looks white.
21:09But the actual terracotta has a sort of a sheen to it.
21:11It's sort of a beige, a tan.
21:13No one quite knows what to call it.
21:15And it seems to be just one color, but that's an illusion
21:17because hidden between the windows,
21:19if you look at them carefully looking for it, you'll find them.
21:22There are tiles that are in blue and yellow and red,
21:25and they're not meant to be seen.
21:27They're meant to give an internal luster to the color overall.
21:30That's something you can do with terracotta that you can't really do in stone.
21:34And that apparently was the main reason that Gilbert wanted the terracotta.
21:37World War I comes and goes.
21:39The Roaring Twenties are here, and people are starting to say,
21:42you know, it's time to start building skyscrapers again.
21:44And there are a lot of proposals that floated during the 20s.
21:47By around 1929, there were four proposals out there for world's tallest building.
21:51And then the stock market crashed, and most of those projects disappeared.
21:54There were just two left.
21:55One was the Chrysler Building in Midtown,
21:57and the other was the Bank of Manhattan downtown,
21:59and they got into a match, who was going to be the tallest building.
22:02Chrysler Building was originally only going to be 808 feet tall,
22:05which made it 16 feet, I think, taller than the Woolworth Building.
22:08But the Bank of Manhattan announced it was going to go to 825 feet.
22:11Chrysler said, hmm, did we say 808 feet? We made 858 feet.
22:15All right, well, we're going to be 875.
22:17Okay, well, we're going to be 900. Okay, we're going to be 925.
22:20I mentioned these were grownups down at the Bank of Manhattan.
22:22They said, well, we're going to put a flagpole, see, on top of our building,
22:25which is going to raise its height to 927 feet, which is two feet taller than you.
22:29We win.
22:30What they didn't know down on Wall Street at the Bank of the Manhattan Company
22:33is that Walter Chrysler was not going to lose this battle.
22:35So secretly, he had the spire that you see at the top,
22:38manufactured in five pieces, brought to the building in the dead of night,
22:43welded together, and then as dawn broke over the metropolis,
22:47lifted by a winch into the sky,
22:49the architect who was watching it from the sidewalk
22:51said it was like watching a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis,
22:54reaching the height of 1,046 feet,
22:57leaving the Bank of Manhattan and all of the rest of them in the dust,
23:00and for the first time, taller even than the Eiffel Tower,
23:03because the Eiffel Tower had been taller than all of these earlier buildings,
23:05and the common response to that was, well, that's not really a building.
23:08It's a structure. It doesn't count.
23:10But here's the Chrysler Building, and it's taller than the Eiffel Tower.
23:13So you see the difference here in the Chrysler Building.
23:15It has these extraordinary setbacks,
23:17and they're not just about the building's architect saying,
23:20I think I'd like to do that. They're required by law.
23:23The idea is a tower like the Woolworth Building,
23:26undifferentiated, no setbacks,
23:28blocks the light and the air from the surrounding streets.
23:31We have to do something about this.
23:33And there were a lot of discussions.
23:35We had talk about a height limit.
23:37We have never had an absolute height limit in New York City.
23:39Apparently we like height.
23:41But instead they came up in 1916 with a set of regulations
23:44that were in effect until 1961
23:46that said if you're going to build a tall building,
23:48you can start at the sidewalk level and go straight up,
23:51but only to a certain point.
23:53That point is determined by a formula
23:55based on the width of the street, the area of the lot,
23:58and a number assigned to this part of town by the zoning resolution.
24:01When you hit that point, the law defines a diagonal line going in.
24:06Now, generally speaking, people don't design buildings on diagonals,
24:09so instead what you get are the setbacks,
24:11but you can almost see the imaginary diagonal line there.
24:15So the idea is you go up as far as you can at this point,
24:18go up, back, up, back, up, back,
24:20until what you're building, the tower,
24:22is occupying no more than 25% of the area of the lot at the ground,
24:26and then you can go up as high as you like
24:28until finance says you're going to start losing money if you go any higher.
24:31And that's what you see in the Chrysler Building,
24:34and that's what you see in the Empire State Building.
24:37That's why those setbacks are there.
24:39You also see in this model, it shows it quite nicely,
24:42is that there is a base that's actually quite sizable.
24:45It's 5 stories tall,
24:47and it extends quite a ways on either side of the building,
24:50and that's actually quite brilliant,
24:52because what it means is that if you're on the city street
24:55next to this world's tallest building,
24:57you don't even see the tallest building
24:59because you'd have to look up and it's hard to do.
25:01What you see is the 5-story base,
25:03which fits into the scale of the streets around it.
25:06So this 100-story building fits quite comfortably on a midtown block.
25:11It's really very cleverly done.
25:13You also see the spires at the top of both these buildings,
25:16and this is what architects mean when they talk about skyline value, right?
25:21You can't see the lower parts of the building unless you get close up.
25:24You have to be fairly near.
25:26But the skyline part, the very top,
25:28that's going to be seen from miles and miles and miles around.
25:31So that's where you're going to put the extra effort in terms of the design,
25:34and you see that in terms of these receding circles
25:37with their triangular windows leading up to that extraordinary spire
25:40that made sure it would be the world's tallest building.
25:43And you see it in the design of the spire here.
25:46By the way, just to be clear, the dirigible mooring mast goes to there.
25:50This is a television antenna mast that was added after World War II.
25:56It really has changed the silhouette of the building.
25:58If you see a picture of the building without that mast,
26:01it's got a clunkier look.
26:03It almost looks a bit more Art Deco than it does now
26:05because that spire really has changed the perspective.
26:08Now, the lobby has wonderful ornamentation
26:11expressing the point of view of who the building was built for.
26:14Again, this is typical of the Deco period.
26:16Not exclusively, it happens in other periods,
26:18but it's very common in this period.
26:20But it also shows up on the outside.
26:22A little harder to find.
26:24You need to look for it because it's up at the 20-something floor.
26:27But I think you can see it here in this image.
26:30There are what look like loving cups with wings.
26:33These are actually very precise copies of the hood ornament
26:36of a 1929 Chrysler automobile,
26:38but blown up to a 20-foot wingspan.
26:40They're practically identical.
26:42And then between them, there are circles and lines.
26:44The circles represent tires.
26:46They have little circles within them that are the hubcaps,
26:48and they're connected by lines which represent
26:50the old running board of a 1929 Chrysler.
26:52So there is the image of Mr. Chrysler's company on the outside.
26:56Up at the top, these are eagle's heads,
26:58and those are more like the gargoyles on, say, Notre Dame Cathedral.
27:01And when you get up to the top, it's all about geometry.
27:04There are triangles and curves
27:06and the extraordinary silver quality of the tower.
27:08The images, all of these pieces of metal,
27:11these are all the same knee rustus,
27:13the non-rusting alloy of nickel, chrome, and steel.
27:15These were all manufactured on site,
27:17just the way the spire was assembled on site.
27:19The contest between the Chrysler building and 40 Wall Street,
27:23the bank of the Manhattan Company, was very intense.
27:25It was followed in the press as the competing heights kept increasing.
27:29The Chrysler building finally won that battle
27:31and opened not just the New York tallest building,
27:33but the world's tallest building, taller even than the Eiffel Tower,
27:35and it held that title of world's tallest building for 11 months
27:39because then the Empire State Building opened, and that was the end of that.
27:42So that's why the spire is there,
27:45and that's not very much different from the Empire State Building
27:48with its dirigible mooring mast.
27:50Now, the design of the buildings, they're similar because they're towers.
27:53I mean, they occupy a similar amount of space.
27:55They have certain similarities and certain differences.
27:58The Woolworth building, the style is based on the Gothic,
28:01and two particular buildings,
28:03one a guild hall in Louvain in Belgium for the lower stories,
28:06but the tower, Woolworth said to Cass Gilbert,
28:09you know, I'm a real admirer of the Houses of Parliament in London.
28:12Make my tower look like the Houses of Parliament.
28:14The Houses of Parliament are low and broad,
28:16and the Woolworth building is tall and narrow,
28:18but the Houses of Parliament have their own towers,
28:20and one in particular is called the Victoria Tower,
28:22and indeed the upper portion of the Woolworth building
28:25is modeled on the Victoria Tower.
28:27Gothic was an unusual choice for a skyscraper.
28:29It seems logical in retrospect,
28:31because it was the style of so many cathedrals,
28:33which were the tallest things in the world at one time,
28:35but not too many skyscrapers picked up on it,
28:37so Woolworth is unusual in that regard.
28:39Now, it's interesting, the Chrysler Building
28:41is considered everybody's idea
28:43of the great art deco skyscraper in New York.
28:46The detail is extraordinary.
28:48The detail is based on, really, two things.
28:51The geometric patterning, which you see especially in the spire
28:54with these receding circles, right? It's all geometry.
28:56The receding circles and these enormous triangular windows,
28:59behind which, originally, the lower area
29:01was where you found the Cloud Club,
29:03and the upper area, there was an observatory,
29:05which is long gone, and this was covered
29:07in a non-rusting alloy of steel called merusta,
29:10which is German for it, never rust.
29:12It's an alloy of nickel, chrome, and steel.
29:14Below it, it's cast in brick.
29:16The central windows have that vertical sense,
29:19and this goes back to Chicago in the 19th century.
29:22Louis Sullivan, who was one of the great innovators
29:24of architectural design, could also write really, really well,
29:27and he wrote, what is a skyscraper?
29:29It is a tall, proud thing, soaring in exaltation.
29:32In other words, these buildings are tall,
29:34and I want people to look at my buildings
29:36and see that they're tall, and how do I make that happen?
29:39Well, if I put the windows in vertical stripes,
29:41it will catch the eye of the observer,
29:43and you'll look up and up and up until you get to the top,
29:46and you'll say, wow, look how tall that is.
29:48You'll see it also in the Empire State Building,
29:50the way the windows are organized.
29:53Remember that the phrase Art Deco didn't exist in 1929.
29:56Architects of the day called their style the vertical style,
29:59and here you see why.
30:01Nobody questions that the Chrysler Building is an Art Deco building.
30:04The Empire State Building, it's a bit more sedate.
30:06There's less ornament.
30:08I was fortunate enough to meet and interview the architect's widow
30:11back in, I think, 1981, when the Empire State Building
30:13became an official city landmark.
30:15Her husband had long since passed on,
30:17but she said, you know, he hated what you all now call Art Deco.
30:20He used to make a face when he saw the Chrysler Building.
30:23He called it the Little Nemo School of Architecture.
30:26His idea of beautiful architecture were the austere Romanesque cathedrals
30:30of the south of France.
30:32So I think you see some of that sensibility here,
30:34not nearly as much ornament until you get to the top with the mooring mast.
30:37I'm sorry, that's Art Deco.
30:39Mr. William Lamb was the designer of the firm.
30:41The rest of it, it's somewhat more austere.
30:43They're about a year apart, and they're often thought of
30:45as almost fraternal twins on the New York skyline.
30:48You know, when these buildings went up, each one of them
30:50was the latest and the greatest and the most modern
30:53and the tallest, of course.
30:55And now they're 100 years old or more.
30:57Each one of these is now an official New York City historic landmark.
31:00They've become historic markers.
31:02Will they even still be standing in 100 years?
31:04You know, I don't know.
31:06I mean, I think if there's archaeology going on in a couple of hundred years
31:08in New York, it may be underwater archaeology,
31:10given the change in the climate.
31:12But I don't think they've lost a bit of their magic
31:14or the way they symbolize the city.
31:16And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
31:18We'll find out.
31:20So, that's it.
31:22Video is done.
31:24We've looked at all the details, and we're done
31:26unless you want to keep going.
31:28And if you want to keep going, I can keep going.
31:30I am a tour guide.
31:32If you wind me up and put me down on the sidewalk anywhere in the city,
31:34you won't be able to shut me up.
31:36There is an old saying said by an architect,
31:38God is in the details.
31:40The more we look, the more we see,
31:42and that's certainly true of skyscrapers like these.
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