How tall is the Chrysler Building?

How tall is the Chrysler Building?

The Chrysler Building in Manhattan rises 319 m (1,046 ft) to the tip of its stainless-steel spire, the height used on this site. The building has 77 floors; the roof of the main structure is about 282 m (925 ft) high and the top floor about 274 m (899 ft). Everything above that, the terraced crown of sunburst arches and the needle that rises from it, is ornamental architecture rather than office space.

Under the criteria of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), a spire is part of a building's architecture and counts toward its official height, while antennas and flagpoles do not. The Chrysler spire is a designed, permanent element, which is why the building's official height is measured to its tip rather than to the roof.

The secret spire that won the race

The Chrysler Building's height was the result of one of the most famous contests in architectural history. In the late 1920s, three Manhattan projects competed to become the tallest building in the world: the Chrysler Building at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building at 40 Wall Street, and later the Empire State Building. The rivalry was personal. The Chrysler's architect, William Van Alen, had recently ended a bitter partnership with H. Craig Severance, who was designing 40 Wall Street.

The heights escalated through 1929. Van Alen raised his design to 925 ft. Believing that was final, Severance added a 50 ft flagpole to 40 Wall Street, bringing it to 927 ft. Meanwhile Van Alen had obtained permission for a spire he called the vertex and had it secretly assembled inside the building's crown in four sections. On 23 October 1929, a week after the Chrysler had passed the Woolworth Building and a day before the Wall Street Crash, the bottom section was hoisted to the top of the dome and the remaining pieces were raised and riveted in place in about 90 minutes. The building suddenly stood at 1,046 ft, far above 40 Wall Street. Van Alen later compared watching it emerge to seeing a butterfly leave its cocoon.

In the October 1930 Architectural Forum, Van Alen described the vertex as 185 ft high, 8 ft square at its base and weighing 27 tons, and the city's 1978 landmark designation report repeats the 185 ft figure. Other histories describe a spire of about 125 ft; the gap reflects how much of the frame hidden inside the crown is counted. The press barely noticed at the time. Even the New York Herald Tribune, which had covered the construction closely, did not report the spire until days later.

Tallest in the world for eleven months

The Chrysler Building passed the Woolworth Building's height on 16 October 1929, and with the spire in place it became the tallest structure in the world, also topping the Eiffel Tower as it stood then. It opened on 27 May 1930. Its reign was short. The developers of the Empire State Building, already planning a taller tower, added floors and a mast to their design, and when that building was completed in 1931 with an architectural height of 1,250 ft (381 m), according to CTBUH, the Chrysler Building became the world's second tallest. It remains the tallest steel-framed brick building in the world and was the first building anywhere to exceed 300 m.

The original plans were far more modest. When developer William H. Reynolds first commissioned Van Alen, the building was to have 67 stories and rise 808 ft. Walter P. Chrysler, head of the Chrysler Corporation, took over the project and financed it personally as an investment for his children rather than as company headquarters. He pushed Van Alen to win the height race.

Building at four floors a week

Construction was fast even by today's standards. Excavation for the 69 ft deep foundation began in November 1928 and reached bedrock in January 1929. Steel erection started on 21 January 1929 and proceeded at about four floors a week; the frame was complete by September. In total, 391,881 rivets and about 3,826,000 bricks went into the building. No workers died during the construction of the steelwork, a record Walter Chrysler made a point of celebrating. The first tenants moved in during April 1930, even before the building was finished.

An Art Deco crown in Nirosta steel

What makes the Chrysler Building's height so memorable is how it is dressed. The crown is made of seven radiating terraced arches clad in Nirosta, an 18–8 stainless steel developed by Krupp in Germany and used here for the first time on a major American project. The arches are pierced by triangular windows arranged like the spokes of a wheel, and the needle above narrows to a point, emphasizing height. Stainless-steel producers studied the panels every five years until 1960, when inspections stopped because the metal had barely deteriorated.

Lower down, the building advertises its patron. At the 31st floor, winged ornaments modeled on 1929 Chrysler radiator caps project from the corners above a frieze of hubcaps and fenders. At the 61st floor, steel eagle heads lean out over Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street. About fifty metal ornaments in all project from the corners like the gargoyles of a Gothic cathedral. The crown has been lit with V-shaped fluorescent tubes framing its triangular windows since 1981, a feature that had been part of the original design.

How the Chrysler Building compares

The Chrysler Building has been overtaken many times since 1930, but it is still taller than several famous towers. All heights below come from this site's landmark data.

The Eiffel Tower is taller today only because antennas added over the decades raised its tip to 330 m; in 1930 the Chrysler spire overtopped it. London's Shard, completed in 2012, is still slightly shorter than this 1930 tower. For a side-by-side view at true scale, try the 3D height comparison tool, where you can line up the Chrysler, the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center along a single skyline.

The Chrysler Building by the numbers

A few calculations from the official figures help show how the building's height is put together:

• Spire share. If the vertex is taken as 185 ft, as Van Alen described it, the needle and its supporting frame account for about 18 percent of the building's 1,046 ft height. Even on the shorter 125 ft figure, the spire supplies about 12 percent, roughly the margin by which the Chrysler beat 40 Wall Street.
• Floor height. Dividing the 925 ft roof by 77 floors gives an average of about 12 ft (3.7 m) per story, typical of an office tower of the period once mechanical floors and the tall lobby are included.
• Margin of victory. The final 1,046 ft beat 40 Wall Street's 927 ft by 119 ft, a decisive lead created in a single afternoon.
• Human scale. The 319 m tip is about 182 times the height of a 175 cm (5′9″) adult.
• Windows and ornaments. The building has 3,862 exterior windows and around fifty projecting metal ornaments at its corners.

Measured then and measured now

Height rules have changed since 1930, but the Chrysler's figure has not. In the 1920s there was no independent arbiter, and builders announced heights as they saw fit; Severance's flagpole on 40 Wall Street shows how loosely the contest was judged. Under the modern CTBUH criteria, flagpoles like Severance's would not count, while Van Alen's spire would, because it is a permanent architectural element. By today's rules, the Chrysler's victory over 40 Wall Street would be even clearer. Its loss to the Empire State Building, though, would stand: CTBUH lists the Empire State's architectural height at 381 m, with a tip of 443.2 m including its later broadcast antenna.

Celestial: the lost observation deck

When it opened, the Chrysler Building had a public observation deck on the 71st floor, about 783 ft above the street. Called Celestial, it was a 3,900 sq ft gallery with a vaulted ceiling painted with stars and small glass planets hanging overhead. Admission was fifty cents, and Walter Chrysler's toolbox from his days as a machinist was displayed in the center. A brochure promised views of up to 100 miles, but the small triangular windows made viewing awkward. When the Empire State Building opened in 1931 with two higher decks, Celestial lost its visitors, and it closed in 1945.

The floors above the 71st are narrow, sloping-roofed spaces used as stair landings and to house equipment such as elevator motors and a water tank. A few floors below Celestial, the private Cloud Club occupied floors 66 to 68 from 1930, a dining club for business leaders whose membership was dominated by executives of the oil company Texaco.

Visiting the Chrysler Building today

The Chrysler Building is a New York City designated landmark, inside and out, since 12 September 1978, and a National Historic Landmark since 1976. Its triangular lobby, lined with African red granite and Siena travertine and capped by Edward Trumbull's 110 by 67 ft ceiling mural Transport and Human Endeavor, has been the only part regularly open to the public. Access has varied with ownership and renovation work, so it is worth checking before you go. The building's 32 elevators, with inlaid wooden doors, are considered among the finest Art Deco interiors in the city.

The best views of the spire are from the street: Lexington Avenue looking north from below 42nd Street, or from higher observation decks such as those of the Empire State Building, which look across Midtown to the Chrysler's crown. If you want to convert the heights in this article, the height converter turns meters into feet and inches, and the landmarks hub ranks the Chrysler Building among every structure on the site.

Why 1,046 feet still matters

At 319 m, the Chrysler Building is no longer among the tallest buildings in New York, let alone the world. Its height still matters because of how it was won. A 185 ft steel needle, assembled in secret and raised in an afternoon, turned a building that would have finished second into the tallest structure on Earth, if only for a season. That gesture, framed by a crown of gleaming Nirosta arches, is why the Chrysler is so often named New York's most beautiful skyscraper, nearly a century after the Empire State Building took its title away.