Chrysler Building Fetes 75th Anniversary

By VERENA DOBNIK
.c The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) - The Chrysler Building's spire was secretly installed 75 years ago in the Manhattan night, becoming the world's tallest edifice and an Art Deco monument to America's private wealth and its jazz age. On Friday, the anniversary of its opening on May 27, 1930, the 77-story high-rise was honored with a U.S. postage stamp unveiled in its lavish marble lobby.

The building - made of 20,961 tons of steel and 3,826,000 bricks held together by 391,881 rivets - is ``dedicated to world commerce and industry,'' wrote its builder, auto industry mogul Walter Chrysler.

The new 37-cent Chrysler Building stamp may be purchased at any post office, but only as part of a sheet of a dozen stamps, each bearing the image of a different American work of architecture. Stamps in the series include two other New York buildings - the Guggenheim Museum and the TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport.

The Chrysler Building stamp is based on a photograph taken by the late Margaret Bourke-White, whose studio was in the landmark building.

Tishman Speyer Properties, which co-owns the building with TMW Real Estate, has modernized the high-rise at Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, but the elevator cabs retain their intricate woodwork in ebony, Japanese ash, Cuban plum and Oriental walnut.

Also intact is the building's basic design, an homage to America's first automobiles by Brooklyn-born architect William Van Alen.

The mammoth steel wings jutting out from the 31st floor and the eight eagle gargoyles outside the 61st floor are stylized renditions of 1929 Chrysler hood ornaments, while the exterior surface bears hubcap patterns.

The building is inhabited up to the 71st floor, where the stainless steel spire rises another half-dozen stories.

The spire was born of Walter Chrysler's ambition to beat a skyscraper at 40 Wall Street as the world's tallest.

On the eve of his building's opening, the five pieces of the spire were secretly hoisted to the 65th floor, assembled and raised through the dome - creating the world's tallest building at 1,046 feet.

The Chrysler held that distinction for only about a year, until the Empire State Building rose in 1931, a whopping 204 feet higher.

While the lobby and atrium of the Chrysler are open to the public, the rest of the building's 1.99 million square feet have been off-limits since the 1940s except to its exclusive tenants, which include financial and legal firms, as well as a dentist.