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Building History: The Empire State Building By Marcia Amidon Lüsted Table of Contents Introduction: New York City and the Age of the Skyscraper Chapter One: The Birth of the Empire State Building Chapter Two: Preparations for Building Chapter Three: The Construction Process Begins Chapter Four: A Story a Day Chapter Five: The Mooring Mast Chapter Six: The Empty State Building and Beyond Notes For Further Reading Works Consulted Important Dates in the Construction of the Empire State Building 1827: William B. Astor buys a small farm on the site of what will someday be the Empire State Building. 1897: The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel opens. 1916: New York City enacts new zoning laws concerning the size and shape of skyscrapers. 1928: The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel is sold for demolition. August, 1929: The group Empire State, Inc. is formed and announces plans to build the Empire State Building. September 1929: Starrett Brothers and Eken are hired to construct the Empire State Building. October 1929: The architects Shreve Lamb and Harmon finalize the design for the Empire State Building. Demolition of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel begins. October 24, 1929: The stock market crash brings America into the Great Depression. December 1929: Plans for the Empire State Building's mooring mast are unveiled. 1929-1930: The Chrysler Building and the Bank of Manhattan Building, under construction, vie for the title of world's tallest building. March 1930: Demolition of the Waldorf-Astoria is complete and excavation of the Empire State Building's foundation begins. September 1930: Al Smith lays the cornerstone for the building. The structural steel skeleton is completed. October 1930: The concrete floor arches are completed and exterior metal work is finished. November 1930: Exterior stonework is finished. May 1, 1931: The Empire State Building officially opens. 1933: The movie King Kong opens, bringing additional publicity to the Empire State Building. 1941: During World War II, the Empire State Building is used as an anti-aircraft surveillance post. July 1945: A bomber crashes into the Empire State Building, causing fourteen deaths and extensive damage. 1950: A permanent television transmission tower is built on top of the mooring mast. 1955: The American Society of Civil Engineers names the Empire State Building as one of the seven greatest engineering achievements in United States history. 1962: The Empire State Building receives a complete cleaning and waterproofing of its exterior. 1972: The World Trade Center is built, taking the title of world's tallest building away from the Empire State. 1976: The Empire State Building receives its fifty millionth visitor. 1981: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Empire State Building. September 11, 2001: The World Trade Center is destroyed and the Empire State Building, once again the tallest building in New York, takes over many of the radio and television transmissions for the area. Introduction: New York City and the Age of the Skyscraper By the early 1920s, American cities, and especially New York City, had become the domain of a new kind of building known as the skyscraper. Because of the constant and increasing need for more office space for businesses, and the rising land values in the city, the skyscraper, or literally, a building tall enough to scrape the sky, was the wave of the future. The island of Manhattan, with its limited size, forced builders to build up rather than out. New construction methods and the invention of passenger elevators allowed builders to create buildings of increasing height and numbers of stories, even if critics complained that New York and Manhattan were becoming cities without sunlight, as the taller buildings blocked the sun's light from reaching the streets. Skyscrapers symbolized progress and the growth and leadership of America in the new twentieth century. As skyscrapers were built all over New York City during the 1920s, there also emerged a race to build the world's tallest building. In the summer of 1929, a competition took place between the Bank of Manhattan building and the Chrysler Building, both under construction and vying for the title of world's tallest. The Chrysler Building took the title temporarily, until the construction of the Empire State Building, which eclipsed the Chrysler Building and became, for forty years, the tallest building in the world and the tallest in New York. Though the Empire State was eventually surpassed by the construction of the World Trade Center in 1972, and the title of world's tallest building now belongs to the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the Empire State Building has become an American icon, a symbol of both New York and the country. The Empire State Building, on the drawing board in 1929 and officially opened in 1931, was a product of a changing America. It had its birth in the last months of the 1920s, but by the time construction actually began, America had entered the Great Depression. Suddenly the optimism of the past decade, when the economy was booming and things could only get better for everyone, had been replaced by hopelessness and economic hardship for most Americans. People lost not only their life savings, but their jobs and often their homes as well. The construction of the Empire State Building, with its original estimated cost cut in half by the economics of the Depression, was a huge source of employment for hundreds of workers, and a symbol of hope for New Yorkers as they watched the building grow at an astonishing pace. Completed in only thirteen months, the Empire State Building became the epitome of New York City, the city where the idea of the skyscraper was born. After the destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists on September 11, 2001, the Empire State Building once again became the tallest building in New York. The return of this title, however, has brought with it additional fears that the Empire State itself will become a target for terrorism. For many people, the Empire State Building is the first thing they think about when they think of New York City, and its status as an icon for the city and America itself is even more important in an uncertain age. As one critic said, on the occasion of the building's completion in 1931: "Empire State seems almost to float, like an enchanted fairy tower over New York. An edifice so lofty, so serene, so marvelously simple, so luminously beautiful, had never before been imagined...it will gleam in all its pristine beauty for our children's children to wonder at."1
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
Empire State Building (New York, N.Y.) -- Juvenile literature.
New York (N.Y.) -- Buildings, structures, etc. -- Juvenile literature.
Skyscrapers -- New York (State) -- New York -- Design and construction -- Juvenile literature.