That 1935 photo by Berenice Abbott shows the Chanin Building in all its glory. It’s a 1929 brick and terra cotta art-deco setback tower and deservedly both an NYC landmark and on the National Register. Of course, the photo isn’t about the beauty of architecture as much as it is a demonstration of what height really looks like.
I recently discussed playing detective, but the question that comes up here poses the easiest possible mystery: how did Ms. Abbott get that view? Skyscrapers tend to cluster around transportation hubs (including subway stations) because a lot of people are going to be traveling to and from such big buildings every day. Chanin is at the southwest corner of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, directly across the street from Grand Central Terminal and with its own entrance to the subway station below the train station. Its neighbor, catty-corner across the intersection, is the Chrysler Building, completed a few months later. Chanin is by any reasonable standard quite tall at 649 feet (198m) but Chrysler was briefly (until the completion of the Empire State) the tallest building in the world at 1046 ft (319m). The tip-off that Ms. Abbott was on top of the Chrysler building is the striped surface in the lower right, which is the standing-seam stainless-steel roofing on Chrysler’s spire.
If you don’t want to play “detecting for dummies,” the other way to know where she was is to look up her work and learn that she took a number of pictures of and from Chrysler.
