You broke my heart cause I couldn't dance, you didn't even want me around -- Chrysler Building sale, like that of Rockefeller Center, broke my heart.

The Chrysler Building as it stood in 1930. I have jogged by the building several times, and ventured into the lobby on several occasions when I thought the time of day might allow security to automatically not run off someone in running clothes (at such times and without fail, they would come up to run me off, and my southern accent explaining my love for this masterpiece would immediately win them over and they would say to please look around to my heart's content). Losing it is like some sovereign wealth fund buying the Washington Monument.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Last month, Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund forked over a reported $800 million for a 90% stake in New York's Chrysler Building. As with the Japanese acquisition of the equally iconic Rockefeller Center in the late 1980s, the Chrysler purchase may not wind up being a success, financially speaking. But if it was an architectural masterpiece -- or just a chunk of New York's heart -- that the oil sheiks were after, they got it.

That New Yorkers have long been in love with the Chrysler Building is not in doubt. . . . Among New York's skyscrapers, the Chrysler is New York in the way that the Twin Towers never were while they stood, notwithstanding their solemn bearing and size. Even the venerable Empire State, storied and iconic, has more mass than grace. And it's a tourist trap.

Not so the Chrysler, where the casual visitor cannot get beyond the lobby (though that alone is worth a trip). Instead, the building tends to be admired from afar, above all for its instantly recognizable top: the eagle-headed gargoyles, which seem ready to take wing from their perches on the 61st floor; the huge triangular windows arranged along the curves of seven concentric setbacks pushing centerward and pointing skyward; the ribbed, stainless-steel crown that sparkles by day and is lit from within at night; and, as befits any skyscraper worthy of the name, the needle-like spire.

Architect William Van Alen's original plan called for a fairly ordinary 56-story tower topped by a glass dome. Owner Walter P. Chrysler had the more ambitious idea of putting up the tallest building in the world. Plans changed first to a 67-story, 808-foot design; then to a 77-story, 925-foot one. The building reached its ultimate height of 1,046 feet in October 1929 only with the addition of the spire, constructed in secret and hoisted into place almost immediately after its nearest skyscraper rival, Wall Street's Bank of Manhattan, had topped out at 927 feet.