History

The Empire State Building was conceived in the final euphoric months of the 1920s boom as a direct response to the Chrysler Building, which had stolen the world’s tallest title with its secret spire in 1930. John J. Raskob, the General Motors executive who had recently lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Herbert Hoover, and former New York governor Al Smith formed Empire State Inc. to develop the site of the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue. The project’s design brief was brisk: William F. Lamb of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon later recalled that Raskob placed a pencil on his desk and asked “How high can you make it so that it won’t fall down?” The pencil’s tapered form reportedly inspired the building’s massing.

The construction schedule was extraordinary even by the standards of a decade accustomed to ambitious building projects. Beginning on March 17, 1930, the construction teams — at peak employment approximately 3,400 workers per day — erected the steel frame at a rate of about four and a half floors per week, with the entire building — 365,000 tons of steel, limestone, granite, aluminum, and glass — completed in 410 working days. The project opened on schedule on May 1, 1931, although its commercial success was initially limited by the Depression: the building was nicknamed the “Empty State Building” during its early years of low occupancy. The mooring mast at the top, designed as a terminal for transatlantic dirigibles, was never used for that purpose: the updrafts around the building made safe mooring impossible, and public concern about the safety of hydrogen-filled airships over Midtown Manhattan precluded any serious attempt.

The building achieved its eventual cultural status not through commerce but through cinema: the 1933 film King Kong, in which the giant ape climbs the building’s mooring mast, established the image of the tower as a symbol of New York’s vertical ambition that has persisted through every subsequent decade. The 86th-floor observation deck became one of the city’s signature tourist destinations from the 1930s onward. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986 and continues to generate substantial revenue from its observation decks and broadcast antennae, whose signals reach approximately 26 million viewers in the greater New York metropolitan area.