Now I Know (24 page)

In general, the lifting was successful; there are few reports of damage. The city saw the lifting as an opportunity to do something else: It gentrified. Wooden-frame buildings, which were looked at as lesser, poorer structures than the brick-and-iron ones, were lifted—then removed, driven out of the city. As Wikipedia notes, the practice of putting these buildings “on rollers and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.”

Go to the corner of 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, look up, and you’ll see the Citigroup Center, a large white building—one of the ten tallest skyscrapers in the city—with its trademark angled roof, sloping at a 45-degree angle. At fifty-nine floors, the tower is home to well over a million square feet of office space, and its sloping top makes it a distinctive part of the New York City skyline. Construction on the building began in 1974 and was completed in 1977 at the total cost of just under $200 million. The Citigroup Center, like most other buildings, is designed to last for years to come.

Especially once the powers that be surreptitiously fixed the massive engineering mistake that would have otherwise doomed the skyscraper.

The Citigroup Center is, architecturally, different than most buildings. Whereas the typical building has structural support columns at each of the four corners, the Citigroup Center’s columns are in the center of each of the four sides, allowing the building to cantilever over a neighboring church. Doing so required a special type of bracket, which the building’s structural engineer, William LeMessurier, designed for this specific purpose. As designed, the building could sustain a direct, straight-on hit from hurricane-level winds.

Unfortunately, the construction company never tested to see how the building would fare against winds that hit the building at a 45-degree angle, which would cause the winds to hit two of the four outer walls simultaneously. After this concern was brought to LeMessurier’s attention—and well after the building was finished—he tested the theory in a wind tunnel and determined that these “quartering winds” would cause significantly more load than anticipated. But because the building, as drawn up, was padded with a significant level of additional safety measures, this theoretical problem had few if any practical ramifications.

Until, that is, someone mentioned to LeMessurier about a cost savings the builders had found. Instead of welding his special brackets onto the structural columns, the builders bolted them on. Welded brackets are less likely to fall prey to heavy winds. When faced with the same hurricane-level force, bolts have the potential to shear. And no one tested to see if the bolts could handle hurricane-level quartering winds. In theory? They couldn’t.

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.

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.

Copyright © 2013 by Dan Lewis.
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without
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Published by
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ISBN 10: 1-4405-6362-4
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6362-1
eISBN 10: 1-4405-6363-2
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-6363-8

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