NYC: American Intl Building and Manhattan Company Building

The American International Building (70 Pine Street, center), built in 1930-1932 for the Cities Service Company, was the tallest building in the Downtown area until the completion of the World Trade Center. It also was to be the last skyscraper to be built in Financial District in the pre-WW II years. It took until 1960 that another tall skyscraper rose to the area, in the form of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Today building is owned by AIG.

40 Wall Street (right), built in 1928-1930 for the Bank of the Manhattan Co., is best known for its race for the world's tallest building neck to neck with the Chrysler Building. Designed by H. Craig Servance, along with Yasuo Matsui and Shreve & Lamb, it was built simultaneously with the rivalling building. Both made design revisions as they were being built to add height, first with a raised spire in the Chrysler Building, countered by a heighened pyramid roof in the 40 Wall St. Finally, the 70-storey building was topped out with the raised pyramidal top and lantern, escalating the height to 927 feet, the builders being certain that they'd won. But when the Chrysler Building's secretly-raised needle-like vertex, raised three weeks earlier, was finally publicized, 40 Wall was left to hold the second place in skyscraper rankings. (Although according to the Real Estate Weekly, the 282.5 m tall building still holds the title of the "tallest mid-block building".) In 1946, 40 Wall Street was hit by a United States Coast Guard airplane in 1946 during fog. The crash killed five people, and the pyramidal tower was damaged. Though zoned for commercial use only, it has been said that Governor Thomas A. Dewey took residence below the observation deck for a time. In 1995, Donald Trump bought the building for $8 million and renamed it the Trump Building. He intended to convert the upper half of it to residential space, leaving the bottom half as commercial space. However, today it remains 100% commercial space.

40 Wall Street was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1998.

Manhattan Company Building National Register #00000577 (2000)