Dan's Papers - October 10, 2008 - Skyscraper to Nowhere

I read in the paper a while ago that some investors from Abu Dabi, UAE have bought the Chrysler Building in Manhattan. I thought it a rather fitting bookend to another event going on in Abu Dabi. Other investors from that country are this month topping off - or nearly topping off - the newest and tallest building in the world. The Burj, it is called, and it is being completed on the sands of Dubai.

I say almost topping off because indeed those who are building it are, as we speak, scanning the horizon and looking at things over their shoulders to make sure that what they are building will not be challenged for perhaps the next 100 years.

The Burj is 162 stories tall and nearly half a mile high. And from the beginning, when they started building it last year, they kept it secret as to exactly how tall it would be when the construction stopped. They wanted to make sure nobody else would even come close, and if they saw somebody trying to do that, they'd just go up and up even farther.

This was the same concept followed by Walter Chrysler back in 1930, when he was building his great skyscraper in Manhattan. The tallest building on record before he began construction of his building was the Woolworth Building, about 40 blocks to the south in the Wall Street area. It was 60 stories, 886 feet high, and had been the tallest building in the world for 20 years. Chrysler decided he would build his building 70 stories and 925 feet high. It was a very big deal and a great feather in your cap to build the tallest building in the world.

But a few weeks after he broke ground, there was a challenge.

Back downtown, a group of bankers started construction of what they would call the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building. The bankers announced that it would be 70 stories and 927 feet high, two feet higher than the Chrysler Building. When the bankers got to topping off at that height, they had the workmen put down their tools for a week to watch and see if the Chrysler building would stop at 925 feet. When it did, they triumphantly claimed the title.

But Walter Chrysler had a surprise. While the Bank of Manhattan building was going up, he was secretly building, inside his building, a magnificent seven-story tower that had a needle on the top. It filled the inside of the final 10 stories of the Chrysler Building, and, after the bankers spent days and weeks crowing and chest thumping about having the world's tallest building honors, Chrysler simply had his workmen push up his tower through the top of his "finished" Chrysler Building to reveal what he really had in mind when he had started. It went up in less than an hour and a half. And so, with this magnificent, gleaming, soaring art deco top, the Chrysler claimed the crown at 77 stories and 1,046 feet high.

Chrysler kept that crown, as you probably know, for only another year. The following year, developers built the Empire State Building even taller than the Chrysler Building. And so the reign of Chrysler ended.

Today, the Burj keeps going up and up. At 2,257 feet high, it is nearly two and a half times the height of the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building. It is half again taller than the Petronas building in Maylasia (1,483 feet) and the Taipei 101 building in Taiwan, (1,671 feet) and the Sears Tower in Chicago, (1,518 feet to the top of the radio masts) which, for the last 10 years, have one after the other had the honors of "the world's tallest building."

The Burj even dwarfs all other buildings under construction, in the planning stages or even in the minds of some builders who might be thinking of building something that would be "the world's tallest building." As I said, the builders of the Burj are taking this all very, very seriously and, if challenged, I think would reopen the construction and beat whatever came along.

What keeps the Burj standing upright, I do not know. They built it on sand. They built it where there are sometimes great windstorms. They built it in a place where temperatures on a summer's day reach 112 degrees. They built it where there is absolutely no need to have a building this tall. And they built it with impoverished foreign workers whom they gave low pay. But they had it designed by Merrill Lynch of New York City. So they've taken the best shot at things. There is a hotel on the bottom (designed by Georgio Armani), there are apartments in the middle, and up top there are the offices and condominiums. I don't know about you, but even with all this, I find it hard to believe that people would open an office or an apartment in this building. But they are doing so. The apartments sold out 12 hours after they went on sale. Office space is renting for $4,000 a square foot. And yet, a great wind might blow it down. A typhoon might tear it apart. How can you build something this tall and narrow with only gravity keeping it in place? I'm not going up there, anyway.

And have you thought why this is going on in Abu Dabi, UAE? Abu Dabi expects the Burj to be the centerpiece of the island city of Dubai, which they expect to become the Arab version of Hong Kong (business), Singapore (banking) and Las Vegas (fun) for this side of the world. If the oil billions and trillions keep pouring in, it will do just that.

The other day, I drove halfway up Long Island, a roundtrip of about 90 miles, to have a book reading at a giant bookstore in a shopping center in Centereach for my new memoir In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years With Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities.

I left the house at 5 p.m., drove two hours through the rush hour traffic, did the reading, returned at 10 p.m. and went to bed. Before I did, however, I opened the refrigerator and took out a gallon container of milk and poured myself a glass. I looked at this container. We all know the size of a gallon of milk. Now put six of them side by side. And that's how much gasoline at $100 a barrel I burned in the engine of my car during the four hours of driving up the island and back. I sent the fumes from it up into the atmosphere. I bankrolled more Abu Dabi nonsense. I saw about 50,000 other people behind steering wheels doing exactly the same thing. And I hadn't, and I don't think anybody else had, even given this a second of thought.

Staggering, isn't it.

As we go to press, we learn that a 3,350 foot, 200-story building is to be constructed in Bahrain, while a building just 80 feet shorter than that has been proposed for Kuwait. As for the Burj, they have decided to NOT top the building off at 2,257 feet or so in the next few weeks, but to continue on. It will be finished, they say, in September 2009, and at that time, when the last crane and cement bucket and tool is put down, they will announce how tall it is.