Skyline Silhouette Mist
©Copyright, All Rights Reserved,
Barry W. Hollritt,  2004 

This is really the first image I’ve ever photographed of the famous Chrysler Building in New York City and it came about unintentionally on a warm May evening while I was sitting at dinner with a close friend at a New York City restaurant ( a unique place where your dog may join you for a meal)!  After living most of my life in the proximity of the building, it suddenly became apparent on that night that the image was meant to happen… serendipitously!  The facts of the building are many but the fact that the Chrysler Corporation moved out in the mid-1950s  makes the name that much more… ideal, since the building retains the name and many of the neat automotive details that a yuppie remembers from his father’s automobile.  Wonderful gargoyles shaped like car-hood ornaments sprout from the building's upper stories -- wings from the 31st floor, eagle heads from the 61st. Yes, you may find some mud flaps if you look close enough.  The building retained the title of tallest building in the world for a stupendous 40 days in 1929, until the Empire State Building managed to creep higher in the sky.  The building stands1,048 feet tall and surprising has no observation deck!  Each elevator is (there are 32) lined with a different inlay of wood, each of which comes from another corner of the world!   The building is truly one of the greatest art deco displays one can find and it should be viewed in the early evening for the wonderful contrast of lights and angles.  As I sat having dinner with a friend and bijon named Sophie, the mist and the humidity of the early evening seemed to be rising upwards.  As I looked up through a wide alley across the street, I found a very distinctive and unexpected Manhattan cityscape evolve before my eyes.  The mist was veiling the building ever so softly and came and went as if on cue with the light.  I photographed the building and have kept the other buildings framed around it as part of the very distinctive image.  Dinner ended as my photographs ended and as I traveled back to New Jersey that night… I new the reason why I had really come into Manhattan that night was not only to have dinner with Sophie.