In 1930, competing American car mavens Chrysler and General Motors were directly and indirectly responsible for the two tallest buildings in the world. Walter Chrysler would have the diamond-studded, spear-shot spire of his titanic building designed in the style of the front-grill of a 1928 Chrysler automobile. John Jakob Raskob, the former V.P. of GM (and credit aggravator of the stock exchange) would corral the financing of the Empire State Building.

Today, in consequence of events down at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House nee’ Southern District Bankruptcy Court, the moguls of these auto behemoths might have thrown themselves from the tops of their own towers and splattered at the foot of the Capitol building – their dismemberments seized and beholden to Union retirees and Canadian taxpayers.

The present discourse has repeated more times than John 3:16 that the world is in financial crisis of such magnitude not felt since the Depression.  The Depression began as the Empire State and Chrysler buildings capped off a major wave of idealistic skyscraper construction in NYC – in the first 30 years of the vertical century NYC built the tallest building in the world every few years, and was the only city enlisted in that race.  Rockefeller Center notwithstanding, new office buildings in the city would abate up through the early 1950s, when Bauhaus refugees were commissioned for glass quadrangles like the seminal United Nations, and the Seagrams Building on Sixth Avenue’s midtown corporate media gulch.

It would seem that the bankruptcy of Chrysler & GM and their assumption by the Federal government, though perhaps unprecedented in United States annals, is the sort of fail-safe by which neoconservative fiscal morality always knew its bloated policies could safely fail – that such a prodigious lack of respect of centralized government should result in the saddling of citizens with the fat limp dick hot potato that these businesses have become.  The Empire State Building had turned to the public, too, but took its cue more from Coney Island than Congress: the infamous “Empty” State Building would compensate for its initial 77% vacancy rate by selling tickets as a tourist attraction, as if its office space were as inconsequentially rentable as the Eiffel Tower.  The observation deck has been visited by everyone from King Kong to Castro.

In the early 20th century, before the buffer of the Depression and World War II wiped out the slang and jargon of the roaring twenties and hobohemiando thirties, skyscrapers were still influenced by old Europe:  The Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower in 1909 modeled upon San Marco in Venice, the Gothic kracken scales of the Woolworth Building in 1913, the Art Decoratif of Empire State and Chrysler.  It might only seem appropriate that, as eighty years ago American industrialists sought Italian stonecutters to adorn their entranceways with grotesques and gargoyles, now Chrysler supplicates for the investment of Fiat – a company whose spoof acronym is the epitome of continental post-WWII devolution – Fix It Again Tony!

Also, regarding Art Deco skyscrapers, the tallest building in Lower Manhattan since 9/11, at 952 ft, is the American International Building at 70 Pine Street.  It is a Machine Age syringe from 1932 that, though the tallest, does not command the skyline and has afforded zero New York mythology.  But insurance fraudster AIG resides here, only a few months ago Bailout Public Enemy #1.  Old President Bush always called the original economic stimulus plan “a shot in the arm.”   Who knew that shot might be the 200 foot antennaes of New York City’s tallest towers?  The AIG building just sold for about a little more than a three-story townhouse on East 64th St. in 2006 – its plush executive observatory newly inhabited by the up-flown polyglot phantom wharf merchants of 1640s Nieuw Amsterdam. . .