THE SILVER SPIRE.('The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon, Day by Day')(Book Review)

On a mild October day in 1929, the architect William Van Alen stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, shaking with fear as he stared at a spot a few blocks east and very high up. Nearly eighty stories in the air, from out of a dense web of steel, the tip of a needle gleamed and began to climb; Van Alen later wrote that the spire of the Chrysler Building had emerged that day "like a butterfly from its cocoon." But the butterfly stood a hundred and eightyfive feet tall and weighed twenty-seven tons, and nothing like the operation of securing such an object at such an altitude had ever been attempted before. Van Alen reported that he went on shaking whenever he thought about the possible danger to people on the street, who had received no warning of the architectural coup taking place above their heads. The previous week, the Times had announced that the Chrysler Building's framework was complete, after less than a year of construction, and that the building had reached its full height of eight hundred and eight feet, or sixty-eight stories, a figure that allowed Walter Chrysler's competitors to sit back on their foundations and gloat: he had, with remarkable docility, ceded his goal to build the tallest building in the world. Although the newspapers had been following the skyward contest almost foot by foot, there were no reporters or photographers on hand to share Van Alen's anxious vigil. The spire, a triumph of nerve as much as of ingenuity and steel, was meant to take the city by surprise. The highest thing on the Manhattan skyline rose into view in ninety minutes flat.

But the exquisite execution of this insane plan was kept so secret that the newspapers failed to report it at all, and historians have never known exactly what day or even what month the renowned event took place. The eminently practical Christopher Gray, in a brief introduction to a new volume of rediscovered photographs, "The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon, Day by Day" (Princeton Architectural Press; $45), scoffs at the notion that the spire's emergence actually came as a surprise--how many workmen had to be in on the plan?--but he allows only that it must have been erected sometime in October or November; that is, after Chrysler's long-standing rival, the Bank of the Manhattan Company, down at 40 Wall Street, had gone as high as it could go. One of the many gripping photographs that follow, however, catches the drama nearly in the act.

According to the book's catalogue, the negative is dated October 23rd. The photograph shows a small celebratory flag--a sure sign that a building has just "topped out"--flying like an exclamation point above the triumphant obelisk-shaped spire, which thrusts up from the skeletal ovoid ridges of the dome. Both structures are in their raw steel state. In fact, the ineffably metaphorical Chrysler dome had only recently taken its final form. The quintessential jazz baby of buildings turns out to have been, in several vital aspects, an improvisation: a riff on height and speed which kept altering shape as dares and provocations forced it higher, the perfect symbol of an age of endless possibilities. How eerily apt that the last risky upward rush seems to have taken place on the eve of Black Thursday--October 24th, when the stock market brought the boundless world that the Chrysler Building represented crashing down.

These photographs are themselves a remarkable souvenir. Large in format, nearly tactile in detail, they have been printed from a cache of negatives, many on flammable silver-nitrate film, found in the crumbling office of an elderly photographer who was going out of business. In another week, their rescuer, David Stravitz, writes, they would have been sold off and converted into silver. This magic, mercurial aura suits the subject well. Still, these are utilitarian pictures, most of them taken by a commercial firm for the purpose of getting the contractor paid. The majority are dated in bold white print at the corner of the plate, and some bear inscriptions such as "Boiler Room Vault Wall." No one intended these as works of art. Yet, from the moment that the site is blasted down to bedrock, in November, 1928, to the slow striptease of scaffolding in 1930, from workers straddling the majestic eagle gargoyles to taxicabs the size of pumpkin coaches lined up in front of Schrafft's below, these coolly objective records can inspire intense emotion.

Although the pictures were discovered more than twenty years ago, it seems clear why they are being published now: it is heartening to see images of a great building going up. And if, as seems inevitable with historical photographs, the surrounding cityscape evokes nostalgia for a ...