The Empire State Building: American icon

“Look! There’s the Empire State Building!” First-time visitors to New York have been pointing excitedly to the pencil thin profile of the Empire State Building for more than eighty years. Lit up by night in coats of many electric colours celebrating high days and holidays, its spire sometimes vanishing into low cloud, at others crackling with lightning, this commanding and supremely elegant skyscraper is, beyond doubt, one of the world’s most revered buildings.
In some ways this is surprising. To bring the 1,454-ft (443 m) skyscraper down to earth, the Empire State Building is nothing more than an office block, and for several decades many of its 102 floors were rather shabby. It got off to a less than auspicious start. Declared open by President Herbert Hoover on 1 May 1931, the ‘tallest building in the world’ was hit by the Great Depression. A year on, just a quarter of its floors had been occupied; and it took until 1950 before what New Yorkers dubbed the ‘Empty State Building’ turned a profit.
Worse still, on 28 July 1945 a North American B-25 Mitchell bomber flying through fog smashed into the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council housed on the 79th and 80th floors, killing fourteen people. Today, the Empire State Building – home to some 1,000 businesses – is profitable and, enjoying a major renovation, becoming cleaner and ‘greener’ than it has ever been.
Clad in Indiana limestone, this slim steel-framed 20th Century ziggurat rockets up from the site of the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel. This was bought by a consortium led by John J Raskob, a high-rolling New York financier – a papal knight and father of thirteen children – who worked for General Motors. In 1929, GM’s principal rival, Chrysler, had just put the finishing touches to the svelte 1,046-ft (319m) Art Deco skyscraper that bore its name in central Manhattan.
Empire building
Through Raskob’s towering ambition, GM would go one better than Walter Chrysler. Raskob is said to have asked his architect, Brooklyn-born William Lamb of Shreve Lamb and Harmon, “Bill, how high can you make it so it won’t fall down?” The answer was, of course, higher than the Chrysler Building. Drawing on the design of his earlier 314-ft (96m) Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Lamb prepared his design drawings in a fortnight.
So, up went the Empire State Building at truly breathtaking speed. Construction work began on St Patrick’s Day, 17 February 1930, and with the help of up to 3,400 workers on any one day, it was completed in just 410 days, three months ahead of time and, at $40.9m, comfortably within budget. Fifty-eight passenger elevators, ‘going up’ at a new record speed of 1,200-ft (366m) a minute rushed the first visitors to sensational observation platforms on the 86th and 102nd floors.
Airships, some having crossed the Atlantic, were to have moored on the building’s steel mast looming even higher into the Manhattan sky; they never did as potential dangers were too great for anyone’s peace of mind. It was up here, though, that King Kong fought for his filmic life in the famous Hollywood epic of 1933: the Empire State Building has never been less than the stuff of epic drama.
Tall tales
As for its popularity, this has never been in doubt, even when in 1972 it lost the title of the world’s tallest building to the North Tower of the World Trade Center soaring above Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan. When, on 11 September 2001, the Twin Towers were destroyed by a pair of hijacked airliners in a horrific and world-changing terrorist attack, the Empire State Building was once again New York’s tallest.