37. Manhattan Company Building

AKA: Bank of The Manhattan Company Building; The Trump Building
Location: 40 Wall Street
Built: 1929-1930
Architect: H. Craig Severance
National Register Number: 00000577
Listed: June 16, 2000
Visited: September 28 and November 10, 2007



I was taking pictures for this blog when somebody, perhaps sensing from my guidebook that I might know something about architecture, asked me what building that was -- the one with the pyramid roof down the street. I told him well I uh...I dunno! The bitter irony was that I had just taken plenty of pictures of it just minutes before. When you get too close, the pyramid's angles are such that it pretty much disappears your line of sight. It was probably meant to be devoured from a distance, then: a beacon announcing its presence far and wide. It was the tallest building in the world for a few mere months until the people behind the Chrysler Building decided to totally cheat and top it with a 125 foot spire constructed within the building. It in turn was eclipsed by the Empire State Building, which was eventually eclipsed by the Twin Towers, which was etc. etc. As I learned from Dave Marsh's Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream (a great rock book, btw -- rock is often my frame of reference for all sorts of far-flung aesthetic artifacts), his disquisition on Thriller and the cultural context that made it (for a time) an omnipresent thing, being the biggest is always a set-up for being eclipsed, becoming #1 invariably leads to being #2. Today, while it's the fifth tallest building in New York even after all these years, its stature is a bit diminished: Donald Trump boasted on The Apprentice that he bought 40 Wall for a mere million, practically nothing even in the 20th century.