Steel’s mythical link
How did two landmarks of American commerce become tied?
Last of two parts
The company that fabricated the Chrysler Building’s steel punched a hole in my assumption about who supplied it. To me, it only made sense that American Bridge, a subsidiary of mammoth U.S. Steel Corp., would get the tower’s beams and columns from corporate sister Carnegie Steel.
But American Bridge said this year it was common for steel to be sourced from multiple companies, which could have included Bethlehem Steel.
“This is especially likely on a building like the Chrysler,” senior marketing manager Heather Engbretson emailed.
I heard the same from the Steel Solutions Center at the American Institute of Steel Construction, which wrote: “We can’t find anything definitive about which of them provided the steel. However, based on the age and amount of steel, it is very possible that both U.S. Steel and Bethlehem did provide steel for the building and that it wasn’t a single source for the steel materials.”
Still, Carnegie could have done the Chrysler job on its own. The New York tower’s skeleton was erected by October 1929, just a few weeks before the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. Carnegie soon started making the steel for the Empire State Building. That steel — 57,480 tons — was almost three times what went into the Chrysler. It was rolled at Carnegie’s fabled Homestead Works, at a bend in the Monongahela River seven miles southeast of downtown Pittsburgh.
While Chrysler was going up, Bethlehem was supplying 18,500 tons for the Bank of Manhattan Building six miles away. The two projects were in a “race into the sky” for tallest-building bragging rights — a race
the neo-Gothic bank building, at 927 feet, would lose. Today that building at 40 Wall St. is known as the Trump Building.
If Bethlehem had contributed just a portion of the steel for Walter P. Chrysler’s skyscraper, wouldn’t it have crowed about playing a role in architect William Van Alen’s art deco masterpiece? After all, the company listed Rockefeller Center among its top projects of the 1930s, but made only a fraction of the tonnage for the mid-Manhattan cluster of commercial buildings.
And yet there’s no mention of the Chrysler in any Bethlehem documents I found.
The Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, a keeper of Bethlehem Steel records, digitally searched its files and found no Chrysler entry for Bethlehem. I found no reference to the skyscraper in company newsletters kept in locked storage at the Bethlehem Area Public Library.
A local holder of Bethlehem Steel documents, the National Canal Museum in Easton, has more than 200 boxes of the company’s public affairs paperwork dating to the early 1960s, but none of it touches on buildings Bethlehem made steel for.
The Steelworkers’ Archives, formed in Bethlehem in 2001 to preserve the workers’ cultural history, doesn’t have any items pertaining to the Chrysler that coordinator Susan Vitez knows of. There’s no mention of the tower in oral histories Lehigh University collected from dozens of retired company employees in the mid-1970s.
Most telling, Bethlehem Steel publications touting its achievements don’t mention the Chrysler. It’s not in “Half-a-Century of Fabricated Steel Construction,” a 1948 pictorial review of the company’s significant projects. It’s not in “Recollections: In Celebration of 75 Years,” a 1979 booklet that lists the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York and the George Washington and Golden Gate bridges as the company’s major works of the 1920s and ’30s.’
Were normally ardent admen asleep at the switch, missing a perfect opportunity to promote the company?
U.S. Steel, on the other hand, didn’t miss a beat. In 1929, the year the Chrysler frame was built, Carnegie Steel published a picture book of its achievements, “The Skyline of America.” It identifies the Chrysler as one of the buildings that used “Carnegie beams.” Books published in 1951 to mark U.S. Steel’s 50th anniversary, and in 2001 for its hundredth, celebrate the Chrysler and Empire State buildings as U.S. Steel projects.
Vincent Curcio’s richly sourced, 699-page biography “Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius,” published 20 years ago, devotes an entire chapter to the tower. Curcio wrote: “The steel was supplied by the Carnegie Steel Corporation and fabricated in a Brooklyn steelyard by the American Bridge Company.”
An ally in my quest for the truth, Kenny Woolley III at the Allentown Public Library, alerted me to the website Phorio, a database on buildings. It listed both Bethlehem and U.S. Steel as “steel fabricators” for the Chrysler. I raised questions in an email and got a prompt response from Daniel Kieckhefer, president of Phorio Systems Corp.
“I dug into our data on the Chrysler Building,” he wrote, “and its connection to Bethlehem Steel was entered many years ago without a source. ... I’ve deleted Bethlehem Steel from our Chrysler listing.”
Kenny, who’d gotten invested in the hunt, found a Carnegie Steel ad from the October 1930 issue of the Architectural Forum that has pictures of 14 towers built with Carnegie steel, the Chrysler among them. A fullpage Carnegie ad in the January 1931 Forum calls the company’s beams “conspicuous in recent notable construction,” including the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.
We found no Bethlehem ads about the Chrysler. One ad in the Engineering News-Record of February 1930 touts Bethlehem’s wide-flange structural shapes and shows the Steuben Club Building, now Randolph Tower, in Chicago.
When Kenny found a photo showing Chrysler Building workers standing on a pile of beams, he had a terrific idea: Compare the beams in the picture to diagrams of the ones Bethlehem and Carnegie were making at the time. It was the next best thing to seeing original construction drawings or an exposed beam at the tower, two things I’d gotten nowhere trying to find. Kenny gave it a shot because photo analysis is a hobby of his. He found the diagrams in old technical journals and used a computer graphics program to highlight one beam’s profile.
Despite the photo’s age, he could see that the beam’s flanges, or horizontal planes, matched those of Carnegie beams made in 1928.
Kenny suggested we seek an expert’s opinion. I turned to Lehigh University, which set me up with a professor of structural engineering, Richard Sause. Using the same image Kenny had, Sause wrote a five-page analysis illustrated with diagrams. He began by noting that a transition in the geometry of rolled steel shapes was taking place while the Chrysler was being built. Flanges of uniform thickness were replacing flanges that were tapered, or thinner at the tips and thicker where they met the central plate.
By 1928, Sause wrote, Carnegie Steel was selling sections with uniform-thickness flanges. These were I-shapes for use as beams, which are deeper than they are wide, and H-shapes for use as columns, which have a similar width and depth. Between 1928 and 1931, Bethlehem Steel was also selling H-shapes with uniform-thickness flanges. But Bethlehem’s sections that were intended to be used as beams had tapered flanges.
Sause, director of the Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems Center at Lehigh, said the photo appears to show rolled beam sections, and their flanges appear to have uniform thickness.
“Therefore,” Sause concluded, “these steel sections are most likely from Carnegie Steel and not from Bethlehem Steel.”
His analysis doesn’t sink the idea that Bethlehem might have done some work for the Chrysler Building. The construction scene is just a shutter-click in time, a moment when erectors were working with Carnegie beams. A few hours before or later, maybe they handled steel from Bethlehem.
Still, Sause’s work, combined with the avalanche of evidence already uncovered, offers a solid case against a Bethlehem role in the tower. Wherever I looked, the record in favor of one was blank.
Last February, I paged through trade journals at the Industrial Archives & Library in Bethlehem, a nonprofit run by Stephen Donches, Bethlehem Steel’s former vice president of public affairs. Donches previously ran the nonprofit aiming to build the National Museum of Industrial History, but got caught in a scandal. In 2014, a Northampton County grand jury found the group had squandered millions in grant money and donations. Though no criminal wrongdoing was alleged, Donches later stepped down as part of a deal with Pennsylvania’s top prosecutor that kept the museum project going.
I also spent an afternoon reading bound volumes of Iron Trade Review from the 1920s and ’30s at the museum’s archives building near Lehigh Valley International Airport. Mike Piersa, the museum historian, pulled the volumes I needed and looked through some himself.
Curator Andria Zaia was there too. She emailed tenacious researchers, asking about a Bethlehem/Chrysler connection. The museum’s marketing and public relations director, Glenn Koehler, who Zaia said is “one heck of a detective,” took up the challenge. In just a few days, he found the same references I’d found, and some additional ones, showing there was no evidence Bethlehem had made steel for the tower.
“Given the extensive digging we have both done, even independently,” Koehler said, “I would be personally 100% on board with saying with some finality that Bethlehem Steel did not produce steel for the Chrysler Building. Until someone can turn up a primary source that says otherwise — and I challenge them to try — there’s absolutely no hard evidence to the contrary.”
He said if Bethlehem had contributed to the Chrysler, it likely would have been noted in older materials such as the company’s 1948 promotional book.
“From talking to some,” Koehler said, “it seems like some old steel guys are sure in their hearing of the Chrysler Building using Bethlehem steel at some point, but can’t point to anything in particular.”
He removed the Chrysler reference from the Bethlehem Steel Wikipedia page.
So there it was: Bethlehem never said its steel was in the Chrysler. After all the searching, the conclusion was that Bethlehem’s part in supplying steel for the Chrysler Building was a myth.
But how did that myth start? Robert Bilheimer, general manager of the Industrial Archives & Library and former Bethlehem Steel general manager of public affairs, has a theory.
Wide-flange or H-shape sections made taller buildings and longer bridges possible. Bethlehem patented Englishman Henry Grey’s process for making those sections and rolled them exclusively for almost 20 years. Bilheimer said wideflange beams became so synonymous with Bethlehem that they became known as “Bethlehem beams” or “Bethlehem sections.”
U.S. Steel at first wasn’t interested in the innovation, but then started selling wide-flange sections early in 1927 as “Carnegie beams.” The industry leader by far, making 46% of the nation’s steel, was cheating to get ahead even further. Bethlehem cried foul, and in a lawsuit the next year seeking $250 million, squawked that U.S. Steel pirated its process for making the revolutionary Grey beam.
The case was settled around the time the Chrysler’s framework, erected with Carnegie beams, was completed. U.S. Steel agreed to get a license from Bethlehem.
“So it is correct to say that the Chrysler Building was built with Bethlehem beams, meaning the commercial term for the wideflange beam, just that they were rolled in this case by someone else,” Bilheimer said. “Hence the confusion — and the myth — has grown.”
The earliest published Bethlehem/Chrysler reference Kenny and I found appeared 65 years after the tower was built. It was a Morning Call story in October 1995, a month before the last cast of iron, at Blast Furnace C, that signaled the end of steel-making at the flagship plant. The next was the August 1997 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, in a story about the Smithsonian and Bethlehem Steel teaming up to launch a museum. That article was then excerpted in the December 1997 issue of Iron and Steel Engineer.
But the Chrysler reference is most prominent in a 1999 picture book, “Bethlehem Steel,” by photographer Andrew Garn. It mentions the tower not only in the text, which was written by my friend Lance Metz, the National Canal Museum historian, but on the jacket and in the foreword by a college professor. There’s also a large photo of the Chrysler skeleton, with a caption saying the H beams were produced at the Bethlehem plant.
“This, I assume, is where many of the modern citations of Bethlehem Steel’s involvement are born from,” Koehler said.
The foreword is by a Cornell University professor of historic preservation planning, Michael Tomlan. This year, he emailed that he “cannot recall now what documentation was at hand” when he wrote the Chrysler line.
Lance and I hadn’t stayed in touch, to my regret. I wanted to ask him again about the Chrysler, but he was in a Lower Macungie Township nursing home
closed to visitors because of the coronavirus. He died there in May, at age 72, of complications from COVID-19.
He never told me Bethlehem was involved with the Empire State Building, but that’s another super skyscraper erroneously credited to the company.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, as Bethlehem was tumbling toward calamity, stories in The Morning Call and other newspapers across the country hailed it for making Empire State steel. Many papers picked up Associated Press reports, which repeated the error several times over a decade.
All of the Empire State’s steel was made by Carnegie Steel, according to “Building the Empire State,” a reproduction of an early 1930s notebook kept by the tower’s general contractor. But Bethlehem did have a tie to it — a tenuous one.
Because of the tonnage involved and to save time, two companies fabricated the Empire State steel — American Bridge and then-independent McClintic-Marshall Co. In February 1931, four months after the framework for the tower’s 85 stories had been erected, and two months before the building was completed, Bethlehem Steel acquired McClintic-Marshall.
So a company about to become a Bethlehem subsidiary helped to build the Empire State’s backbone.
McClintic-Marshall was founded by two Lehigh engineering graduates in 1900, had its main plant in Pottstown and became the largest independent steel manufacturer in the world. While it was building San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in 1936, Bethlehem Steel changed McClintic-Marshall’s name to the Fabricated Steel Construction Division.
Correcting the record
I wrote to the U.S. Steel spokesman, John Armstrong, who had raised the red flag 17 years ago, after The Morning Call’s special section “Forging America: The Story of Bethlehem Steel” credited Bethlehem with making the Chrysler beams. Armstrong is retired now and living in a Pittsburgh suburb. He remembered a little of the back-and-forth with the paper and having a strained conversation with Bethlehem Steel’s spokeswoman, Bette Kovach.
“You know, with all the great things Bethlehem Steel has done, including the George Washington Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, you really don’t need to claim the Chrysler Building,” Armstrong recalled telling Kovach.
He said she wouldn’t back down, insisting that Bethlehem had made some steel for the Chrysler.
That same week, I spoke with Kovach, who had listed the Chrysler as a Bethlehem project in her 2007 book with photographer Peter Treiber, “Inside Bethlehem Steel.”
“Well, I guess I was wrong back then,” she said, adding later: “I amat a loss as to how I believed the Chrysler had [Bethlehem Steel] material when I never saw any information within the company that it had a role in the building.”
She suggested a reason for the confusion.
“One of the stats I used to throw out with regularity was Bethlehem, between 1910 and 1970, built 85% of the New York City skyline, but not the Empire State Building. The signature building to me, other than the twin towers, was the Empire State Building. I didn’t need to bring Chrysler into the conversation.”
Kovach said Bethlehem Steel never promoted the Chrysler or Empire State buildings as having Bethlehem beams.
Even without those icons in its stable of accomplishments, Bethlehem Steel will forever stand tall. Its pioneering production of wide-flange beams made the two super skyscrapers and countless other structures possible. In the 99 years the Bethlehem corporation helped to build America, it also armed the nation and its allies through two world wars. Its global stature lives on today.
The mixup over the Chrysler Building is a lesson in how easily mistakes and misunderstandings take hold and are perpetuated. We’re left with an inaccurate record of the past — one I hope this story will correct.