History

The Empire State Building was conceived in the late 1920s by John J. Raskob, a financier associated with General Motors and the Democratic Party, who wanted to surpass the Chrysler Building — then under construction at Lexington and 42nd Street — as the world’s tallest building. The site at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, previously occupied by the first Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, was acquired in 1929, and construction began in March 1930. The building’s structural steel was raised at a pace of approximately four and a half floors per week, and the building was completed in just 410 days — an achievement in industrial coordination that has not been matched at comparable scale.

The building opened on May 1, 1931 — just as the Great Depression deepened into its worst phase. The failure to fill its office floors with paying tenants during the 1930s led New Yorkers to call it the “Empty State Building,” and it did not turn a profit until 1950. Its economic difficulties during the Depression were offset, in terms of cultural standing, by its immediate adoption as a symbol of New York City and American ambition: it appeared in the 1933 film King Kong within two years of its opening, and has been reproduced, photographed, and referenced so frequently in the decades since that it has become genuinely ubiquitous as a sign for modernity, cities, and vertical aspiration.

The World Trade Center surpassed it as the world’s tallest building in 1970, but the Empire State Building remained the centerpiece of the Manhattan skyline in public consciousness, and its observation decks have attracted more than 130 million visitors since opening. The building’s National Historic Landmark designation reflects not only the quality of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon’s design but the building’s significance as a monument of American industrial and cultural history.