NEW YORK — Walking into the Chrysler Building for the first time in 2018 was a “pinch-me moment” for Sophie Smith. She was there for an interview with the theater department of Creative Artists Agency, and it would be her first job out of college.
Every time Smith, who left the talent agency for another job in 2022, thinks of the Chrysler Building now, the song “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” from the musical “Annie” starts playing in her head — particularly the line that goes, “You’ll stay up ’til this dump shines like the top of the Chrysler Building.”
“Being in ‘Annie,’ that was the first show I ever did as a child, so it was a very full-circle kind of thing,” said Smith, 27. “Walking through the lobby every day was such a treat. Whenever we had guests to the office, you felt proud to work there.”
That grand, art deco-style lobby — with its red Moroccan marble and vast Edward Trumbull ceiling mural — evokes a sense of nostalgia and glamour. Since it opened in 1930, the Chrysler Building has remained an architectural marvel that is recognizable to people who’ve never even been to New York, with its terraced crown and countless references in pop culture. It is prominently featured in the intro sequence for “Sex and the City,” is the site where Annie Leibovitz photographed dancer David Parsons and is the brink that Will Smith plunges from in “Men in Black 3.”
But in more recent years — amid ownership changes, the rise of bright and contemporary open-floor offices popularized by tech companies and the arrival of a new class of tourist-friendly skyscrapers in New York — the Chrysler, the jewel of the city’s skyline, has lost much of its shine.
With age comes distress. In interviews, employees who’ve worked in the building complained of bad cell service, the lack of natural sunlight, elevator troubles, murky water coming out of fountains and pest infestations. At one point, Smith recalled, there was “a mouse problem” on the 19th floor, and employees were barred from having any food at their desks.
“It’s a tale of two buildings,” said Ruth Colp-Haber, a broker who frequently shows space in the Chrysler Building and CEO of Wharton Property Advisors. “It’s arguably the most famous building in the world. However, the windows are smaller than a Hudson Yards building. It doesn’t have all the amenities that so many other trophy buildings have. There’s no basketball court, no pool or huge outdoor deck.”
Is the Chrysler Building’s reputation enough for it to endure as an icon, or is it at risk of fading away from the skyline, as newer, taller and glitzier glass buildings surround it?
A storied past
In 2019, the 77-story building sold for around just $150 million to co-owners Signa, an Austrian real estate company, and RFR, a New York-based development firm. For comparison, about a decade prior, a 90% stake in the building was sold to the government of Abu Dhabi for $800 million. But late last year, after Signa filed for insolvency, an Austrian court ruled that it would have to sell its share of the building, throwing the Chrysler’s future into question.
In an email, Michael Grof-Korbel, a representative for Signa’s liquidator, said that the company’s stake in the Chrysler Building has been “transferred to the sale process” and that talks are “ongoing.” A representative for RFR declined to comment for this story.
Before its fall, the Chrysler Building rose in a glorious, flashy manner, as part of New York’s skyscraper boom of the Roaring ’20s. With demand for office space and real estate prices soaring, developers expanded upward — though building into the clouds was often about ego as much as it was about necessity.
A “monument to me” — that’s how Walter P. Chrysler, founder of the Chrysler car company, referred to his namesake skyscraper.
In 1928, the automobile titan took over the project started by William H. Reynolds, the developer behind Coney Island’s Dreamland amusement park, who was working to erect a building designed by architect William Van Alen in midtown Manhattan. Chrysler kept the architect, but the two increased the building’s height to beat out the roughly 920-foot-tall Bank of Manhattan Building that was going up in the financial district. Covertly, Van Alen had a 185-foot spire constructed, which made the Chrysler 1,046 feet tall. The stunt allowed the Chrysler Building to briefly claim the status of being the world’s tallest building in 1930, until it lost that title to the Empire State Building the following year.
Whatever cachet Chrysler lost in the height battle, he gained by sustaining the building’s status in other ways. The Chrysler opened with nearly 70% of its space already leased, higher than the opening occupancies of most other office buildings of the era. It held a strong occupancy rate throughout much of the Great Depression, when the Empire State Building was referred to as the “Empty State Building.”
In 1940, Chrysler died, and his monument started to crumble. New owners didn’t maintain the interior, tenants vacated and in the 1970s it faced foreclosure proceedings. It was eventually designated as a New York City landmark in 1978, but its storied Cloud Club — which occupied the 66th through 68th floors, where executives would dine privately behind leather-clad doors — shut down.
Still, yuppies yearned to work there. Joan Amenn, 59, worked at a law firm based in the building in the late ’80s. “It was a bragging right. 405 Lexington Ave., the Chrysler Building — how could you be more iconic than that?” she said.
Even back then, the elevators didn’t work smoothly, she recalled. “They frequently got stuck midfloor. They’d often vibrate, and you’d wonder, ‘Am I going to plummet?’” Amenn said. Getting stuck in an elevator and being 15 minutes late to a meeting was “just part of the culture,” she added.
Things started to look up in the late ’90s, when Tishman Speyer Properties acquired the building and restored many of its art deco features. Office tenants returned, and its occupancy rate ticked up to 95%, according to a 2005 New York Times article. But it wouldn’t be long before new ownership came in through the lobby’s revolving doors once again.
Ceiling cracks, brown water and rodents
Today, those revolving doors frequently jam and get stuck. The rest of the Chrysler’s lobby is still majestic, if you don’t look too closely. Overhead, parts of the ceiling have deteriorated, and some of its cracks are covered in what appears to be duct tape. The ghost of a now shuttered Amazon Go store remains on the ground floor, and tourists visiting Chrysler’s monument are restricted to that level — the Chrysler lacks an observation deck, unlike the Empire State Building, where Tom Hanks met Meg Ryan in “Sleepless in Seattle,” or the newly constructed One Vanderbilt, which has a Yayoi Kusama-esque mirror installation with wraparound views of the city.
With nowhere else to go, tourists often crowd the lobby and attempt to “mob the turnstiles” that lead to the elevator banks, said Tehseen Islam, 28, who works at a tech startup on the eighth floor of the building. But that hasn’t been her main frustration. “There’s been times where we would get water from any of the fountains and it would just be completely brown,” she said. “It’s so gross. My office just ended up shipping giant bottles of water from Costco.”
Like other current and former employees, Islam added that because of the closed-floor layout, natural light is scanty and cell service is spotty. “Sometimes a call will come through, but then if you try to answer, it doesn’t connect at all.”
Last year, she recalled, there were rats in an empty retail storefront on the ground floor. And one time, “one of the rats made it to the elevators,” Islam said. “I stood there for like a solid 10 to 15 minutes making sure it was gone before I went up.”
Clune Construction, which occupies the entire 28th floor and part of the 35th floor, has been a tenant since 2012. “The stature and the status of the building was the primary reason” for coming to the Chrysler in the first place, said Ben Walker, chief operating officer.
Next month, the company is relocating a block away into a building where it can fit all its employees onto one floor. In the Chrysler, “the upper floors, the layout is not great — there’s a lot of unusable space,” said Walker. “Our floor on 28, we can’t do a full circle around the floor because there’s a mechanical room on one end, and then the elevators are right in the middle.”
One of the Chrysler’s current main tenants is Spaces, which functions similarly to WeWork and rents out its office space to multiple individuals and small companies. Spaces occupies over 100,000 square feet in the building — which in total has over 1.25 million square feet, per co-owner RFR’s website. On the Chrysler Building’s official website, over 650,000 square feet — or more than half the total amount of space in the building — are listed as immediately available for rent, as of July.
For May, the average asking rent was $74.59 per square foot for office space in Manhattan, according to the real estate firm Colliers. At the Chrysler, rent per square foot tends to be around $80 to $90, said Colp-Haber, “which isn’t cheap.” But it’s more affordable than the nearby One Vanderbilt, where the price per square foot exceeded $300 for a top floor. The 1,401-foot-tall, amenity-rich One Vanderbilt opened in 2020, and is home to a Daniel Boulud restaurant and American Express’ first Centurion members club.
“Meet me at the Chrysler Building”
The land below the Chrysler Building is owned by Cooper Union — owners of the building itself must pay rent to the private college as part of a ground lease. In 2018, that rent amount went up from $7.75 million to $32.5 million and is set to increase to $41 million by 2028.
Below the lobby and connected to the subway, the building’s arcade was once home to cherished mom-and-pop retail stores, including a barbershop, dry cleaner, shoe shiner and deli — RFR reportedly declined to renew their leases. Instead, the building’s website states that the arcade “offers a wealth of lifestyle-focused services and amenities” with renderings of a florist and “boutique wine shop.” But some workers say they’ve been awaiting these changes, and the space is currently desolate, void of any retail tenants.
“We’re looking to upgrade the tenancy,” said Brandon Singer, founder of the retail leasing firm Mona, who is working on renting out the retail spaces in the building.
“Think of a super high-end florist instead of, you know, some crappy one,” said Singer. “Instead of it being just a shoeshine place, a really upscale shoeshine place — I would say Leather Spa, someone like that, but maybe even more hip. A barbershop that’s not Joe’s barbershop, it’s Fellow Barber.” Typical price per square foot for retail space will run between $300 to $400, Singer said.
For some New Yorkers, having an office in the Chrysler Building is a deep-rooted aspiration.
“It was always my dream to work at the Chrysler Building,” said Carla Mannino, a 57-year-old psychotherapist who moved her practice there in 2020. “I was able to secure a corner office with the most incredible view of one of the gargoyles outside of my window.”
Similarly, Mo Elyas, founder of a framing business called Big Apple Art Gallery and Framing, moved to the building during the pandemic. Rent was equivalent to “the amount of money you spend buying coffee in a month,” said Elyas, 52. “It’s cool to say, ‘Hey, meet me at the Chrysler Building.’”
