Jan. 10 (UPI) — Manhattan’s iconic Chrysler Building is up for sale and the current owners have hired CBRE Group to market the property globally.
The skyscraper, at one point the world’s talles building, is currently owned by an Abu Dhabi government fund and New York developer Tishman Speyer.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Abdu Dhabi Investment Council purchased a 90 percent stake in the property in 2008 for $800 million. But that came before the Great Recession, leaving some to wonder if they could get such an offer again for an office building finished in 1930.
“There might be a billionaire who comes along and says, ‘I want to tell the world I own the Chrysler Building,'” Adelaide Polsinelli, vice chair of the commercial investment sales and leasing division at real-estate services firm Compass, said about the potential sale.
A Chinese firm paid $1.95 billion for the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 2015, which also is located in Manhattan.
Known for its distinctive art deco design, automobile mogul Walter Chrysler won a race for the title of world’s tallest building in 1930 when it topped out at 1,046 feet, thanks to its needle top, PBS reported. That title, though, would last only months with the completion of the Empire State Building at 1,250 feet.
Fox News reported that the skyscraper remains the tallest brick building in the world with a steel framework and is now New York City’s eighth tallest structure.
The building has long been embedded in U.S. pop culture, appearing in movies from Young Man with a Horn, The Wiz, Two Week Notice, Armageddon, Spider-Man and Marvel’s The Avengers.
The 77-floor building today, though, competes for office tenants with state-of-the-art skyscrapers throughout Manhattan with today’s amenities employees and employers took for, like outdoor terraces and fitness centers.
“When things break, it takes much longer to fix because there’s only one guy on the planet that has the tools to fix something from the 1920s and 1940s,” Polsinelli added.
