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Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City
by Neal Bascomb
When Size Mattered
A review by Adrienne Miller
The story is so unbelievable, so rich with treachery and intrigue, that it seems ripped from the pages of a novel. In the 1920s, architects William Van Alen and Craig Severance (friends, then partners, then rivals), were engaged in a fierce battle to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. Van Alen, the mad genius, the visionary of the two, found his patron in Walter Chrysler; Severance worked for a young investment banker named George Ohrstrom, whose building at 40 Wall Street would be called the Manhattan Company Building. Van Alen's Chrysler Building won the race, thanks to the tricky late-edition of a 182-foot spire at the building's top, but his triumph was only temporary. General Motors' John Jacob Raskob and Al Smith, a former governor of New York, got into the game, too, setting plans for the Empire State Building in motion. The massively hubristic Van Alen/Severance rivalry also ending up killing scores and scores of the men who worked on the construction of these buildings, and Bascomb brings the danger dramatically alive: " 'You don't retire from this job,' said one heater on the Manhattan Company Building who had a scar on the side of his head from a rivet he failed to catch." Bascomb's debut is both a page-turner and an awesome piece of detective work.
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