Chrysler Building Chrysler eventually built and paid for the building's subway entrance. Work on the new entrance started in March 1930 and it opened along with the Chrysler Building two months later. The basement also had a "hydrozone water bottling unit" that would filter tap water into drinkable water for the building's tenants. The drinkable water would then be bottled and shipped to higher floors. The private Cloud Club formerly occupied the 66th through 68th floors. It opened in July 1930 with some three hundred members, all wealthy males who formed the city's elite. Its creation was spurred by Texaco's wish for
Cosmopolitan Club (New York City) Pablo Picasso. Guest speakers in that era included poets Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, and Siegfried Sassoon, educator Maria Montessori, and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover. In 1932, the club moved to its current home, a ten-story brick building with white marble trim and wrought-iron balconies, situated at 122 East 66th Street, across the street from the Seventh Regiment Armory. The architect Thomas Harlan Ellett designed the new clubhouse, for which the Architectural League gave him its 1932 gold medal, calling his design "a fresh and personal interpretation, beautiful in its simplicity of form and material." In the years following its