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HIGHER: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City, by Neal Bascomb. Doubleday, 342 pp, $26.
GREAT FORTUNE: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, by Daniel Okrent. Viking, 512 pp, $29.95.
The tale is of the world's tallest building: It is set in New York's financial district, and it involves an unprecedented amount of office space (completed just in time for an economic crisis), a renowned Japanese architect, the heroic efforts of unheralded workers and a dash of political finagling. We could be talking about the World Trade Center, circa 1970; this tale, however, concerns the Manhattan Company headquarters at 40 Wall St. The year is 1929.
These days, 40 Wall St. does not garner much attention. It appears on few postcards, and no tourists queue to peer from its celestial ramparts. The "AIA Guide to New York City" does not even mention the singular ambition, pursued with almost reckless abandon, that forged its construction: to be the world's tallest building. As Neal Bascomb recounts in "Higher" - his riveting chronicle of, literally, riveting - there was indeed a brief, Dewey-defeats- Truman moment on Oct. 18, 1929, when the Evening Telegram announced: "New Skyscraper Race Is Won by Bank of Manhattan Building - Plans Altered Twice to Beat Out Chrysler."
A week later, however, at Walter Chrysler's competing edifice on 42nd Street, a towering, 54,000-pound steel-latticed vertex rose from the roof of the building, like a "butterfly from its cocoon." Bascomb notes that, oddly enough, no one seemed to notice; or perhaps they "simply mistook the slender spire for an unusually tall derrick."
But the stunning finale to the skyscraper race, Bascomb writes, "was right there in plain sight, if one knew what to look for." Shortly thereafter, a series of steel sheets were hammered into place, and the truth took shape: A "shining finial, fashioned of gleaming metal and flaunting its triumph like...