In 1928, five years after Chrysler's current part-owners Fiat inaugurated their stunning Lingotto plant, Chrysler's Argentine distributors opened a magnificent building to assemble, check, sell... and race cars in Buenos Aires
The district of Palermo Chico in Buenos Aires is emphatically not where you’d expect to discover a automobile factory. Immediately northwest of posh Recoleta, it’s a place of tree-lined avenues, condo towers, men in polo shirts and suede moccasins, ladies eating purposefully small desserts. You could, in fact, easily walk down Avenida Figueroa Alcorta and pass the only building with a rooftop check track in South the united states without knowing it.
Palacio Chrysler was built by the company of Argentine entrepreneur Julio Fevre, who had acquired the exclusive right to represent Chrysler in Argentina in 1927 after a decade & a half of importing American cars in to the country. The building was designed by Mario Palanti & occupied a complete city block in what was then a sparsely built-up area of Buenos Aires. Period photographs show the building tower over townhouses & empty land. The column-lined facade housed an exhibition area, while the back & upper parts of the building were used for administrative offices, workshops, & storage areas.
But it was the upper deck that stole the show. Equipped with a check track of slightly over a mile long, it was used for testing cars & inviting the high society of Argentina to look at them: the inside of the track had a capacity for 3000 people.
