The Chrysler Building Has Towered Above New York City for Nearly a Century. Now, the Art Deco Skyscraper Is for Sale
When it was completed in 1930, the 1,046-foot building was briefly the tallest in the world. In recent years, it’s fallen into disrepair
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The Chrysler Building in New York City is for sale—and despite its iconic status, it could go for cheap.
While the building is still a staple of the city skyline, real estate experts say it has fallen into disrepair. According to the New York Times’ Anna Kodé, tenants complain of faulty elevators, murky water fountains and pests.
“It’s a tale of two buildings,” Ruth Colp-Haber, a real estate broker who shows spaces in the building, told the Times last summer. “It’s arguably the most famous building in the world. However, the windows are smaller than a Hudson Yards building. It doesn’t have all the amenities that so many other trophy buildings have.”
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The Chrysler Building was commissioned by the car company founder Walter P. Chrysler, who called it “a monument to me.” Constructed between 1928 and 1930, it rose to a staggering 1,046 feet. It was briefly the tallest structure in the world—until the nearby Empire State Building took the title upon its completion in 1931.
The skyscraper was designed by the architect William Van Alen in the Art Deco style, a design movement characterized by luxurious materials and geometric, stylized shapes. The building’s iconic stainless steel spire, which appears in countless movies and TV shows, is an instantly recognizable New York landmark.
“With its eccentric steel helmet and grandiose lobby, a temple to the power of American industry, the Chrysler Building encapsulated the giddy excess of its time—an Art Deco exclamation point to mark the end of an optimistic decade,” Smithsonian magazine’s Michael Snyder wrote in 2023.
The land beneath the Chrysler Building is owned by the college Cooper Union, which charges rent to the owner. In 2008, the government of Abu Dhabi bought a 90 percent stake in the building for $800 million. But in 2019, it sold to RFR, an American development company, and Signa, an Austrian real estate company, for just $150 million.
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Signa filed for insolvency in 2023, and an Austrian court ruled that it would need to sell its share of the building. Earlier this year, Cooper Union moved to evict RFR, which had stopped paying rent, according to Crain’s New York Business’ Aaron Elstein. Now, Cooper Union is working with the real estate firm Savills to manage the sale.
“Given the strength of the leasing market, and given where this sits in the market, we feel it’s a great opportunity to reimagine what is the crown jewel of the New York City skyline,” says David Heller, executive vice president at Savills, per the Commercial Observer’s Lois Weiss.
But in recent years, “the Chrysler, the jewel of the city’s skyline, has lost much of its shine,” per the Times. These days, architectural trends tend to favor “bright and contemporary open-floor offices popularized by tech companies,” and tourists have many towering skyscrapers to choose between.
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However, some New Yorkers still feel a sense of awe when they walk into the building. Sophie Smith felt it when she got a job at the Creative Artists Agency soon after graduating college.
“Walking through the lobby every day was such a treat,” she tells the Times. “Whenever we had guests to the office, you felt proud to work there.”
Woody Heller, founder of Branton Realty Services, helped conduct several previous sales related to the Chrysler Building. As he tells the Commercial Observer, the structure “hasn’t been actively marketed since the pandemic. Now, with the resurgence of the office market and notoriety of the building, in theory, if fixed up and rejuvenated, it could be able to lease.”
Heller adds: “There aren’t that many global icons in the world, and this is one of them, so there will be an enormous appetite for the building.”
