1930 - Architecture, Real Estate

Architecture, Real Estate

Cleveland's 52-story Terminal Tower building opens January 26. The north wing of the $110 million building, put up by the Van Sweringen brothers, is a hotel that was built several years ago.

Atlanta's $1 million City Hall is completed in March to designs by architect Ten Eyck Brown.

The Chicago Board of Trade building is completed to designs by Holabird and Roche at 141 West Jackson Boulevard; it towers 45 stories above the city and will be the city's tallest structure for 40 years.

Chicago's Merchandise Mart is completed for Marshall Field and Co., whose management will sell it to financier Joseph P. Kennedy in 1945. The world's largest commercial building, the $32 million Mart has 4.2 million square feet of floor space and rises 18 stories with a 25-story tower.

Chicago's Palmolive building is completed to designs by Holabird and Roche. A Lindbergh Beacon flashing 500 miles out over Lake Michigan tops the $6 million, 37-story structure.

Air conditioning is installed in the White House at Washington, D.C., and in the Supreme Court quarters of the Capitol Building, whose House and Senate chambers were air conditioned in 1928 and 1929, respectively (see window units, 1946).

The 77-story Chrysler Building opens May 27 at the northeast corner of New York's Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street and will be the tallest building in the world until the spring of next year. Designed by William Van Alen for automaker Walter Chrysler, the 1,048-foot art deco tower of steel and concrete is the first structure to rise higher than the Eiffel Tower erected at Paris in 1889. It has eight stainless steel American eagles that extend like gargoyles from its 61st-floor level, and the 185-foot spire that caps it is of highly polished nickel chrome stainless steel produced by Nirosta Metalldach of Netphen, Germany, and brought by ship to America. (Architect Van Alen has had to sue Chrysler for his fee and put a mechanic's lien on the building.)

Chrysler Building
New York's 77-story Chrysler Building was the world's tallest skyscraper but would remain so only briefly. (© Corbis.)

Westin Hotels has its beginnings in a chain of 17 Pacific Northwest hotels founded August 27 under the name Western Hotels. The chain will expand to California in the 1940s and grow to become a global business offering franchises, management, marketing, reservations, and technical services with more than 85 properties in 23 countries.

New York's 44-story Hotel Pierre opens in October on Fifth Avenue at 61st Street, replacing the mansion of Commodore Elbridge T. Gerry. Walter P. Chrysler, E. F. Hutton, and Otto Kahn have financed the structure, designed by Schultze & Weaver for Corsican-born restaurateur Charles Pierre (originally C. P. Casalasco), who has had a restaurant at 230 Park Avenue. The hotel boasts a splendid ballroom and banquet halls, contains more than 700 rooms, and will become recognized as the city's most luxurious hotel (in later years most of its rooms and suites will be leased on a year-round basis).