More about Ornamental Gargoyle, Chrysler Building

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Margaret Bourke-White was the photographer of the New York City skyscraper pissing contest.

Everyone and their mom (actually Dad is more like it) wanted to build the tallest building in the world and Walter P. Chrysler had done it...for about 11 months until those jerks on Wall Street added another few floors to their building. The real winner of this pissing contest though is Margaret Bourke-White, for scaling a gargoyle 700 feet in the air on an assignment for Time Magazine. I mean who in their right mind would risk their life for a picture? The answer time and again is Margaret Bourke-White aka “Maggie the Indestructible.”

To make this pissing contest a little more literal, Walter P. Chrysler, who lived in an apartment in the Chrysler building, boasted about “having the highest toilet in Manhattan.” (His ego was extra fluffed at the time because his building was home to a members only group called the Cloud Club for New York’s business elite.) But Margaret beat him there too because she lived in an apartment on the 61st floor. The men weren’t super jazzed about having a lady, let alone such a badass lady, live over their two-martinis-and-a-steak lunching Boy’s Club so Time Magazine had to co-sign Bourke-White’s lease. She didn’t let this get to her, though. She would take male friends out onto a terrace despite the fact that it was off-limits to her. And when her superintendent would remind her of this, she would sweetly reply, “of course” and continue to do whatever tf she wanted. If she didn’t let the front lines of war, Nazi concentration camps, and Joseph Stalin scare her then she wasn't going to take any ish from her landlord. That’s the Margaret Bourke-White way.

 

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