CHAPTER 5
A Building Shaped Like a Pencil
The new owners asked for a new building design from the same architects who made the first design. The company was called Shreve, Lamb and Harmon. William Lamb was the main designer.
Raskob and Smith told Lamb they wanted something more unusual and elegant. It should soar upward. Raskob took his pencil, point up, and stood it on end. He wanted the building to look like that. “How high can you make it so that it won’t fall down?” he asked.
Lamb came up with a beautiful new design. He decided to make only the first five floors the size of the full lot. Then there was a very large setback. To people walking on the street, the building would seem friendly and human-size.
After the sixth floor setback, the tower started. To beat the Chrysler Building, the tower would go up to the eighty-sixth floor. Because the site was so big and the first setback so dramatic, the huge tower would look slender and elegant.
The slender tower was much smaller than the wide building that could have fit there. So, there was less office space to rent. But space in the tower was very valuable. In the 1930s, natural daylight was important for office buildings. If the upper floors had been made as big as possible, much of the space would have been very far away from windows. It would have been difficult to rent at a good price. Now most of the building was in the tower. All offices would be near a window. And they would all be set back far enough from the street to be quiet. They could be rented for a lot more money.
The company hoped to rent out some whole floors to single businesses. But it was also willing to rent single-room offices. It planned to leave the space unfinished on the inside, so that each renter could make his office any size or shape he wanted.
Lamb had created the pencil-shaped building Smith and Raskob wanted. But something still wasn’t quite right. The top of the tower was flat and looked a little stubby. Al Smith was famous for wearing a round brown derby hat. He and Raskob thought the building needed a hat, too. The architect tried designing a dome, but a little round top on such a huge tower looked silly.
Then one of the men came up with an insane idea. They would build a special feature that would add two hundred feet to the height of the building. The addition would show what modern thinkers the building’s owners were. The world would see that they were planning a building for the future.
Smith announced the crazy new idea to the newspapers in December 1929. He said that the top of the building would be a mooring mast for flying ships! Dirigibles—enormous floating balloons that could be steered—would dock there.
People thought that one day passengers would be flying all over the world in dirigibles. But they were so enormous that it was hard to find anyplace to dock them. Al Smith imagined them floating right up to his building. The passengers would walk down a gangplank on the 102nd floor and then take the elevator to the ground floor. And there they would be, in the heart of Manhattan.
It was an absolutely impossible idea. Who would risk walking down an open gangplank so high up in the air? That far up, the wind would be very unpredictable. (Workers in the upper offices of the Empire State Building can sometimes watch snow falling upward.) A huge, floating balloon tied to the mooring mast would bounce around like a bucking bronco.
Al Smith may have really hoped that his building would become a station for flying ships. Or the idea might have been just a publicity stunt. In any case, it never happened.
A tall, slender mooring mast was added to the top of the building. This made its final height 102 floors and 1,250 feet—much taller than the Chrysler Building. But no dirigibles ever really docked there. However, the spire did not go to waste. As the highest place in the city, it turned out to be the perfect spot for radio and television broadcasts. It is still used for that purpose.
