Who made the beams for Chrysler Building?
Was it Bethlehem Steel? Retired Morning Call journalist’s 20-year quest to separate fact from myth
First of two parts
When the Chrysler Building appeared on the Manhattan skyline 90years ago, it wasthe most magnificent skyscraper ever built and the tallest in the world, a gleaming testament to American ingenuity and can-do spirit even as the Great Depression closed in on the nation.
The tower still dazzles, in one writer’s words, as the avatar of an age. It lifts the renown of the company widely credited with producing its backbone — Bethlehem Steel, now only a memory. The multinational steelmaker that picked up Bethlehem’s pieces in 2006, ArcelorMittal, boasted that the New York landmark contains “our beams.”
At the former South Side plant along the Lehigh River, the ArtsQuest nonprofit sells Bethlehem Steel T-shirts and Christmas ornaments with Chrysler Building images. On the Hoover Mason Trestle alongside the blast furnaces, a photo panel informs tourists that “the Chrysler” was one of Bethlehem’s great achievements.
Magazines of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and even the Congressional Record, point to the Chrysler Building in praising the
company.
In December2003, right before the mighty name Bethlehem Steel was consigned to history, The Morning Call published “Forging America: The Story of Bethlehem Steel.” The 117-page special section celebrated the industrial titan that built the Golden Gate Bridge and, during World War II, more than a thousand ships.
I was co-editor and one of the four writers. We worked long and hard to get the narrative of the nation’s longtime No. 2 steelmaker right and were confident we’d avoided myth in favor of truth.
But a crack of doubt opened soon after “Forging” hit the streets.
The paper had given me a month off asa reward for my work on “Forging.” When I returned to the office the first week of January 2004, we faced a complaint from U.S. Steel Corp., the nation’s largest steelmaker with its own storied history in Pittsburgh going back more than a hundred years. The beef had us scrambling.
U.S. Steel spokesman John Armstrong had contacted one of our “Forging” writers to correct something we noted prominent ly in the chapter on buildings and bridges. The Chrysler Building, he said, was a U.S. Steel job, not Bethlehem’s.
He exchanged emails with the writer, sent promotional ads and spoke on the phone with Bethlehem Steel spokeswoman Bette Kovach, who pushed back on the claim. She emailed me: “My recollection is that Bethlehem supplied the steel for the building’s structure and someone else did the stainless trim.”
It wasn’t easy to resolve Armstrong’s complaint, which began an on-again, off-again 17-year search that had me scouring the internet, combing through newspaper and museum archives, and poring over Bethlehem Steel records and fat volumes of decades-old trade journals. I talked to historians and proud former steel employees, emailed companies and trade associations, tapped libraries across the state and beyond, and toured the long-shuttered Bethlehem plant. One day, I stepped inside the Chrysler Building for a look.
The other writers and I first turned to our other local experts. One was Stephen Donches, a former Bethlehem Steel executive wholed the nonprofit working to establish an industrial museum on the plant’s footprint. Another was historian Lance Metz, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the company’s past and was our go-to guy for “Forging.”
Donches and Metz disputed U.S. Steel’s assertion.
Soon, I hadin front of mea1929 New York Times story saying the Chrysler’s steel was being supplied by Carnegie Steel Co., the main subsidiary of the U.S. Steel conglomerate, otherwise known as “Big Steel” or “the Corporation.” But the article ran before the steel construction started, so it seemed possible Bethlehem also contributed to the project. There might have been a need to ship beams faster than Carnegie could make them. Or maybe Bethlehem had steel shapes that Carnegie couldn’t produce.
Locals familiar with the industry insisted Bethlehem had done work for the Chrysler, but couldn’t say how they knew it. In vain, we sought an answer from the Skyscraper Museum, the New York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York and the American Iron and Steel Institute.
Still luckless a few months later, three of us got on a bus to New York on a blustery day when the temperature barely climbed out of the 30s. I shivered as we walked to the Chrysler at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue in hopes of finding something, maybe an exposed beam that might have a steelmaker’s brand.
We wanted to go where we could see the building’s steel, but security wouldn’t allow us anywhere but the lobby. So we ambled around the triangular room on its travertine floor, admiring elevator doors with stylized designs on exotic wood, walls of Moroccan red marble and a ceiling mural with images of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the tower itself and other wonders of the era. A wall panel pays tribute to the trades men who built the 77-story tower for automotive czar Walter P. Chrysler.
Another stop was the city’s Department of Buildings, where we hoped to see a work order or some such paperwork that might reveal where the tower’s steel originated. Again we were thwarted. With 9/11 still fresh in everyone’s mind, there was no chance of our having access to a file containing a famous building’s plans.
It was on to the stately marble New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, where we settled in to a cluster of cubicles and got to work, boxes of microfilm stacked beside us.
For a few tedious hours, we scrolled through old trade journals that covered the city’s metalwork and architecture. We examined page after page for articles, ads, contract or project announcements — anything that would tell us who made the steel .“The Chrysler Building ,” a book published in 1930 by the Chrysler Tower Corp. to celebrate the $20 million building that formally opened in May of that year, says the tower contains 20,961 tons of structural steel, but not who made it.
We returned to Allentown empty-handed. A week later, three of us “Forging” writers visited Metz, who worked at the National Canal Museum, a holder of Bethlehem Steel records. He had invited us to look in boxes of company paperwork he kept in his Easton office. Lance and I had become friends. He died this year.
If I remember correctly, Lance told me that he had spoken with Bethlehem steel workers who said they’d done work for the Chrysler. But in his office that day in April 2004, we found no mention of the skyscraper.
Our search tailed off. Wenever nailed it down. When The Morning Call published “Forging” as a book in 2010, we revised the Chrysler part to say both U.S. Steel and Bethlehem claimed credit. After that, other than an occasional fruitless inquiry, I dropped the pursuit.
That changed in June 2019, when my wife and I visited the National Museum of Industrial History at SteelStacks, which was built on the site of the former Bethlehem home plant, where an all-time high of 31,523 people worked during World War II.
Affiliated with the Smithsonian, the museum opened four years ago in the Steel’s 1913 Electric Repair Shop and tells how America became an industrial powerhouse. Among its several hundred artifacts is a bevy of big equipment, including a900,000-pound hydraulic armor bending press used to make armor for battle ships from the Spanish-American War through World War II.
In the museum, I got a jolt when we came to a tall cutout model of the Chrysler tower. A panel had this: “The Chrysler Building — 1,046 feet high — was the tallest building in the world briefly in 1930 and one of the first skyscrapers with a metal exterior. It contains 20,291 tons of Bethlehem H-beams.”
Someone had finally gotten it! The exact tonnage was a giveaway. With detail like that, this exhibit had the ring of authority. I was astonished, but felt stung, too. Had I overlooked a source years earlier? Or was this a newly uncovered gem as researchers continued to pore over Bethlehem Steel records?
When I asked curator Andria Zaia, she pointed to a book, “The History of Stainless Steel,” and said she and museum historian Mike Piersa would try to provide additional sources.
“Stainless Steel” was written by Harold M. Cobb and published in 2010 by ASM International, a society for materials engineers and scientists — seemingly a solid source. Cobb lived not far from Bethlehem, in Kennett Square, and had worked on the book for 10 years. His credentials were impeccable. He had a degree in metallurgical engineering from Yale, worked in the metals industry for more than two decades and edited 22 books on steel.
In his chapter on the Chrysler, he wrote: “The Bethlehem Steel Company in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, would supply all 20,291 tons of the wide-flange structural steel beams required.”
Bethlehem made all of the steel? He didn’t directly source the line. I thought maybe I could find out by talking to him, but that was impossible. ASM’s senior managing editor, Karen Marken, told me Cobb had since died. She couldn’t clarify his steel source, but assured me that he had “dug deep” on the Chrysler.
He cited seven Chrysler Building books in his bibliography, but I found nomention of Bethlehem Steel in any of them. The “20,291 tons” is also baffling. I couldn’t find that figure anywhere else. The book by the Chrysler Tower Corp. puts the tonnage at 20,961 — 670 tons more — the amount commonly cited.
There’s another curious reference. In the same paragraph where he credits Bethlehem, Cobb wrote: “The tale is told that sometimes the steel was still warm upon its arrival.” That description shows up in print in other sources, not about the Chrysler, but about the steel sent from Pittsburgh for the Empire State Building.
So how did Cobb know? There had to be an answer somewhere, and it was important to set the record straight, once and for all. Having retired from The Morning Call in 2016, I had more time to do the research than I’d had a dozen years earlier, and with many records now digitized, access to information was easier. I got on the case.
Among the people who helped with “Forging” was Ilhan Citak at Lehigh University’s Linderman Library. I turned to him again.
“I checked so many academic publications also, but I have to admit it is a bit of detective work to get the right answer,” he wrote. “The short answer is that it is not Bethlehem Steel. It’s Carnegie Steel.”
Citak said the convincer was The New York Times story of March 10, 1929, that gives details of the project. Its last sentence says, “The Carnegie Steel Company is providing the steel, which will be fabricated by the American Bridge Company and will be erected by Post & McCord .”
I found a San Francisco Examiner story, also from March 1929, about Carnegie Steel President William G. Clyde and Chrysler, the Chrysler Corp. founder. They were meeting in that city to discuss “the progress of the new Chrysler building in New York, for which the Carnegie Company is supplying the structural steel.”
A January 1930 Pittsburgh Press story says Carnegie got the Empire State Building job, adding that the company “recently furnished the steel” for Chrysler’s project. A March 1931 story on Clyde’s death, also in the Press, says that when it appeared Carnegie “had lost out in the race for the Chrysler contract,” Clyde went to see Walter Chrysler and talked him into giving it to Carnegie.
Tellingly, I couldn’t find any contemporary articles linking Bethlehem with the Chrysler.
Even Chrysler architect William Van Alen, writing about “The Structure and Metal Work of the Chrysler Building” for the Architectural Forum, doesn’t give a clue. In his October 1930 article, he describes the work on the stainless steel crown and identifies such contributors as the company that made the steel frames for the tower’s windows and bulletin boards. He doesn’t identify the structural steelmaker or any of the three companies — Crucible, Ludlum and Republic — that made the specialty steel for the crown.
Trade journals reported on the fabricator that got the contract for the structural steel, not the company that rolled the products. The Nov. 8, 1928, issue of Iron Trade Review says the job went to “American Bridge Co., through Fred T. Ley & Co. Inc., general contractor.”
It was up to American Bridge to get the structural steel from rolling mills and prepare the beams, columns, channels and angles. Using shop drawings based on engineers’ schematics, fabricators cut or bent the steel, drilled or punched holes for rivets and bolts, and marked every piece to show where it went. The parts were then shipped, along with components the fabricator created, to the erector at the construction site.
American Bridge was a U.S. Steel subsidiary, so it’s no wonder Carnegie, U.S. Steel’s main subsidiary, rolled the steel. Why give the job to a competitor if you can keep it in the corporate family? A 1936 issue of U.S. Steel’s magazine for employees highlighted that relationship: In 35 years, American Bridge had provided orders for about 17 million tons of steel products to U.S. Steel’s rolling mills. American Bridge and Carnegie also worked together on the Empire State Building, which followed hard on the Chrysler’s heels and overtook it as the world’s tallest tower.
In 2004, I called American Bridge and got nowhere. Now I made another pass at the company, which was sold in 1988 and is headquartered in Coraopolis, near Pittsburgh. I asked if it has a record showing who supplied the steel for the Chrysler. If it did, that would be conclusive evidence.
Senior marketing manager Heather Engbretson wrote back: “We do indeed have an order number for this project in our original logbooks, which is F-5750. … Unfortunately, after finding the entry in the logbook, I hit a wall. I wasn’t able to locate the order card that corresponded with a logbook entry. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist, but wehave tens of thousands of these cards, and it is nearly impossible to search them all.”
Andthen she turned the whole inquiry on its head.
Coming next Sunday, How the Bethlehem Steel/Chrysler Building myth grew.