The Empire State Building is a skyscraper in the New York
borough of Manhattan. With a structural height of 381 meters -
up to the antenna tip around 443 meters - the building, which
was erected in an unusually short construction period between
1930 and 1931, was not only the tallest building in New York,
but also the tallest building in the world until 1972. After the
destruction of the World Trade Center in the attacks of
September 11, 2001, it was again the tallest structure in the
city until the topping-out ceremony for One World Trade Center
in 2013 in the new current World Trade Center.
The Empire
State Building is located on the southern edge of the New York
City borough of Midtown Manhattan on Fifth Avenue between 33rd
and 34th Streets on the southern part of the island of
Manhattan, which is surrounded by the Hudson River and East
River. His address is 350 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10118.
The rooms of the 102 floors of the Empire State Building are
mainly used for commercial purposes. On the open space on the
86th floor and on the 102nd floor are publicly accessible
viewing platforms, which are among the most visited sights in
the city. The skyscraper's name "Empire State Building" is
derived from The Empire State, a nickname for the US state of
New York. The Empire State Building has been a United States
National Monument since 1986.[3] The Empire State Building is
considered the "quintessential skyscraper". This validity is
mainly due to its great resonance in the media, especially due
to its diverse portrayal in films.
The historical context
To fully understand the challenge that led
to the construction of the Empire State Building, it is necessary to
know that the great demographic explosion that New York experienced in
the early years of the 20th century led it to reach ten million
inhabitants and therefore to surpass the metropolitan area of London,
until then considered the largest in the world. Thanks also to the
favorable geological conditions of the Manhattan district, it follows
that between 1908 and 1974 New York became the place where the tallest
skyscrapers in the world were built and this favored a constant
competition involving clients and architects.
Pre-existing
buildings
At the end of the 18th century, the site on which the
present skyscraper stands was on the farm land of one John Thompson,
which also included a small lake nicknamed Sunfish Pond.
In 1827
the entire property was purchased for $20,500 by the Astor family, who
had their residence built there. During the 19th century, the
descendants of the Astors had the first large hotel in the city built
next to their home, naming it the Waldorf Astoria. In the spring of 1929
the prestigious hotel, known for being also the meeting place of the
city aristocracy, part of the exclusive group known as the Four Hundred,
closed its doors to move to its current location at 301 Park Avenue. The
complex of buildings that housed the hotel was purchased in the summer
of the same year by a group of entrepreneurs, formed by John Jakob
Raskob, a former executive of General Motors, and other illustrious
personalities of city finance such as Coleman du Pont, Pierre S du Pont,
Louis G. Kaufman and Ellis P. Earle; together they formed the Empire
State Corporation, appointing Alfred E. Smith, former governor of New
York State, as president.
The project for the construction of the new building was entrusted to
the Lamb & Harmon studio which produced the definitive drawings of an
art deco style building in just two weeks, drawing inspiration from
those already made for the Carew Tower in Cincinnati and for the
Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem; the intended use of the new building
was immediately commercial, with the intention of hosting the numerous
offices of the city's growing activities. The initial project envisaged
a lower height of only eighty floors, a limit never surpassed by any
building up until then, but the fierce competition triggered by the
nearby Chrysler Building led however to vary the project during
construction, with the addition of further floors and the flagpole at
the top which brought the building to the attempted goal of one hundred
and three floors.
A large construction site
The
construction site of what was to become the tallest skyscraper in the
world opened on 24 September 1929 with the dismantling of all the
buildings that made up the old Waldorf Astoria, while the great
excavation operations for the foundations began on 22 January 1930,
months after the stock market crash of 1929.
On March 17, 1930
work began on the assembly of the steel structure, which was completed
on September 19, after just 23 weeks and twelve days earlier than
expected. The completion work proceeded just as rapidly at a rate of
four floors a week employing some 3,400 workers, mostly Italian and
Irish immigrants, joined by a sizable minority of native Mohawks from
Canada's Kahnawake Reservation, hired for their excellent balance even
at considerable heights; however the site had to register the death of
six workers during the works.
Due to its efficient organization
and the cutting-edge technology used, the construction site was visited
by many industry experts and university students from many countries;
altogether it lasted only twenty-one months, of which fourteen were
spent on the actual construction of the building, with the aim of
stripping the nearby Chrysler Building of its recent title of tallest
skyscraper in the world. The name was chosen in honor of the State of
New York, historically known as Empire State but was probably also
suggested by the curious coincidence with the name of the Indiana quarry
where the stone used for the external cladding came from: Empire Mill
Land.
The dedication ceremony was a solemn event, held as scheduled on May
1, 1931, in the presence of Mayor Jimmy Walker, New York State Governor
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Empire State Building Corporation President
Alfred Smith, and President of the United States of America Herbert
Hoover, who from Washington personally turned on the lighting of the
skyscraper via a radio link with the White House. The building went down
in history for its records: the tallest skyscraper in the world, the one
built fastest and the first to have more than a hundred floors, soon
becoming one of the symbols of New York and of America itself. The
inaugural event culminated in a luncheon from the 85th floor that was
remembered as "the highest luncheon in the world", while the following
day the building officially opened to the public.
A difficult
debut
Despite the remarkable result achieved, in the period
immediately following its construction, in the midst of the great
depression, the offices remained almost entirely empty, forcing the
property to turn on some lights inside to prevent this from being
understood; this useless ploy earned the skyscraper the ironic nickname
of the Empty State Building.
In the early 1930s, the skyscraper
suffered from competition from nearby Rockefeller Center and was only
leased for a quarter of its commercial area. It was precisely its
considerable height that saved the management company of this large
building from bankruptcy. The opening of an observatory on the
penultimate floor and the public access to the large terrace on the
eighty-sixth floor made it one of the major tourist attractions;
subsequently a chapel was also built in the internal rooms adjacent to
it where it was possible to get married. The income of the first years
derived from the constant flow of tourists equaled the total amount of
the rental income.
In 1933 the building enjoyed its first real
media notoriety when it was chosen as the hypothetical location for the
final scene of the famous film King Kong, in which the gigantic animal,
clinging to the building's flagpole, is intent on fighting against the
planes that they hunt him down.
In 1945 the building, still
partly vacant, was the object of an aerial collision by a military
aircraft which accidentally crashed on the north side, causing fourteen
victims.
The balance sheet of the building management company did not become positive before the end of the forties and in 1951 the Empire State Building Corporation, tried by the difficult economic management of the early years, sold the skyscraper to the real estate developer Roger L. Stevens for 34 million dollars, which in 1954 sold it again to a Chicago real estate group headed by Henry J. Crown[3] for the exorbitant sum of 54 million dollars, the highest paid up to then for a single building.[30] During the same fifties, a first external lighting system was installed starting from the seventy-second floor and antennas and repeaters for television broadcasts were added to the top flagpole. Since then, several floors of the building have housed television and radio studios.
After thirty-six years, the Empire State Building lost the title of
tallest building in the world in favor of the Ostankino tower completed
in Moscow in 1967, in the midst of the Cold War. In 1970 the North Tower
of the World Trade Center also took away the record of the tallest
skyscraper in the world and in New York.
It regained the record
for tallest building in New York with the collapse of the Twin Towers in
the attacks of September 11, 2001 and returned to second place in 2014,
with the inauguration of One World Trade Center. Nonetheless, it has
remained one of the most recognizable symbols of the city and, with its
illuminated top, it still invariably marks the major city, national and
world events.
In 1962 the skyscraper underwent an initial conservative intervention
on the external facades, which consisted of a thorough washing operation
which lasted about six months and at the end of which a new lighting
system was installed which replaced the original one installed in 1956.
In 1984 the second lighting system was also replaced with a new one made
up of neon tubes.
The building was inducted into the National
Historic Landmark Program in 1986 and has been a national monument ever
since. The skyscraper was put up for sale again in 1991, becoming the
subject of a fierce dispute between some of the major real estate
entrepreneurs in the world: the Japanese Hidekei Yokoi, the heiress
Leona Helmsley, the businessman Peter Malkin and Donald Trump, who
managed to acquire the majority of the property in 2000.
Following the dramatic collapse of the Twin Towers in the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Empire State Building
returned to being the tallest building in New York, but now only the
fourth tallest in the United States, after the Willis Tower, Trump
International Hotel and Tower in Chicago and 432 Park Avenue in New York
itself.
On March 19, 2002, the skyscraper was again sold to the
W&H Properties of real estate developer Peter Malkin.
The
regained New York record was broken again on April 30, 2012, the day on
which the Freedom Tower of One World Trade Center, still under
construction, reached and exceeded the height of the Empire State
Building. The new skyscraper was then completed on June 30, 2013.
In 2010, the Empire State Reality Trust, the building's management
company represented by Anthony Malkin, supported a major $550 million+
renovation that returned the building to its former glory.
The constructive scheme adopted for the entire building was not
particularly innovative, but proved to be extremely functional: the
construction times were so short as to become one of the most difficult
records to surpass. The skyscraper project provided for such speed of
execution thanks to the assembly of the 57 480 tons of steel beams of
the supporting structure. According to the laws in force at the time of
construction, the entire steel reinforcement was lined with bricks or
poured concrete to ensure greater resistance to heat in the event of a
fire. The foundations, placed at a depth of about 17 meters on a rocky
bottom of shale, have 210 pillars made up of steel beams embedded in the
concrete, essential to support the approximately 365,000 tons of the
entire building which rises to 103 floors, with a total area of 204385
m² and an overall height of 443.2 meters.
The external cladding
is made up of complementary prefabricated elements such as the aluminum
panels with sober deco decorations placed between the 6 514 windows and
blocks of Indiana limestone externally anchored to the steel structure,
while the internal cladding of the perimeter walls was made with about
10 million bricks. To complete the finishing work there was finally the
external installation of the panels and the anodized aluminum finishes.
The building, whose design is characterized by a typically Art Deco
austere and symmetrical sobriety, is the result of the overlapping and
intersection of various parallelepiped modules which add up at various
heights above the large rectangular base of only six stories, generating
a variety of terrace spaces and the characteristic tapered shape that
complied with the laws of the master plan of the time. The north and
south elevations differ from the two lateral elevations in that they are
wider and have an evident central groove, while the seventy-second and
eighty-sixth floors house a complex external polychromatic lighting
system originally installed in the fifties and renovated for the second
time in 2012, which illuminates the top 30 floors and the top of the
building at night with special plays of colored light on the occasion of
specific celebratory events. The entrance portal on Fifth Avenue is
surmounted by a carved slab of Swedish black marble, while the limestone
used for the facade is Limestone of local extraction. On the
eighty-sixth floor there is the largest panoramic terrace of the
building which can be reached via the 73 Otis lifts and equipped with
observation decks with binoculars from which one can enjoy a broad
panorama of the city and its surroundings up to glimpse the territories
of the neighboring states.
The terminal part of the building
consists of a mighty flagpole which was originally 46 meters high and
culminated with the 103rd floor terrace surmounted by a truncated dome.
It was built with the intention of anchoring the airships allowing
passengers to exit on the terrace but later this function proved to be
dangerous and impracticable, so the flagpole was brought to 62 meters
with the addition of a long metal rod which was used for the
installation of antennas, lights, radio and television repeaters and a
large lightning rod which is struck by electric discharges an average of
500 times a year. The original portion of the flagpole houses the 102nd
floor observatory at a height of 381 meters, which is also open to the
public.
The grand entrance hall at 350 Fifth Avenue is also an example of art
deco and is decorated with Belgian black marble, pink Formosa marble,
and Rocheron marble of European origin. Completing the decorative
apparatus of the atrium are a series of symbols of the modern era
depicted in chromed metal medallions set into the walls and finishes in
aluminum and 23-karat gold leaf. On the back wall of the entrance hall,
decorated with applications in relief in aluminum, there is an
anemometer restored in 2007 and connected to the meteorological station
housed on the 103rd floor, which however also has more modern electronic
detection systems. The extensive use of marble also extends to the
common parts of the building such as the large corridors, the numerous
lifts and some halls which are clad in an alternation of green marble,
Cardiff and Westfield marble of local origin for a total of approx. 30
500 square meters.
The building houses only commercial office
space, including about forty television and radio studios of private
broadcasters, a Bank of America branch, a few shops, a supermarket, and
half a dozen restaurants and coffee shops. In addition to the numerous
offices, the building hosts the incessant flow of visitors who access it
every day from 8 in the morning to 2 in the night. On the second floor
there is the ticket office, where there are also the accesses controlled
by the security personnel and a wide path which extends up to the lifts
which lead to the eightieth floor; from here the itinerary continues
with a visit to the permanent exhibition which contains historical notes
and images of the construction of the building. From the 80th floor,
continue to the remaining six floors by elevators or via stairs to reach
the 86th floor, where you have access to the terrace and can also
continue to the 102nd floor observatory with another elevator.
As
of 2007, the building hosts about 21,000 people who work in the numerous
offices every day; 250 are employed in the tourist management of the
building and 150 are the technicians dedicated to maintenance. This
large concentration of people makes the Empire State Building the second
largest office complex in the United States after the Pentagon.
Approximately 550 million dollars were spent in the radical and
ambitious internal restructuring of 2010, of which 120 million to
transform the skyscraper into an eco-sustainably powered building
according to the most modern criteria of respect for the environment,
which in 2011 earned it the highest LEED award (Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design). This new record makes it the tallest skyscraper
with LEED certification.
The Empire State Building offers one of the most popular observation
decks, as well as the first in the city for height and seniority, having
been the tallest building in the world until 1967. Since its opening it
has been visited by more than 110 million people . From the terrace on
the eighty-sixth floor of the skyscraper it is possible to observe a
vast 360-degree panorama of the city and, on particularly clear days, it
is possible to see the territories of the four bordering states:
Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. At the entrance
it is possible to ask the personnel in charge for the degree of
visibility of the panorama expressed in miles.
Since 2005, the
second observatory on the 102nd floor, created within the structure of
the summit flagpole, has also been accessible again; it is completely
enclosed by glass and can be reached with an elevator that starts from
the eighty-sixth floor.
Over the years there have been many suicide attempts, almost all
successful in their tragic intent. The first occurred in 1931 among the
workers themselves when, before the building was completed, a worker
jumped from the top floors just after being fired. During the following
years there were about thirty of them, including that of Frederick
Eckert, who jumped from the terrace of the observatory on the hundred
and second floor, landing on the terrace of the eighty-sixth floor
below, and that of former naval soldier William Lloyd Rambo, who threw
from the same 86th floor terrace in December 1943.
May 1, 1947
was the most notorious and baffling one, when 23-year-old Evelyn Francis
McHale leapt from the 86th floor terrace and landed fatally on a black
limousine parked on the street. What amazed her was the body of the
young victim lying supine and practically intact on the broken-down
passenger compartment of the car, so much so that it was photographed by
Robert Wiles, a student who rushed to the scene. The girl's extreme
gesture was justified in an autographed note that the victim left on the
eighty-sixth floor terrace which read the following sentence: "He's much
better off without me... I wouldn't make a good wife for anybody." The
photograph was also published on May 12 of the same year by the
well-known US magazine Life referring to it as "the most beautiful
suicide" and was purchased years later by the well-known exponent of Pop
art Andy Warhol, who elaborated it by titling the work Suicide ( fallen
body) and included it in the series of silkscreens entitled Death and
disaster.
Following this event, the eighty-sixth floor terrace
was equipped with adequate metal protections that prevent it from
leaning out. However, there were two other fortunately failed attempts,
one in 1979 by Elvita Adams who, after having dropped from the same
eighty-sixth floor terrace, was slammed into the building by a violent
upward current of air and landed on the ledge of the floor. underlying,
with only a hip fracture; the same fate befell the twenty-six-year-old
Nathaniel Simon, another would-be suicide who on April 25, 2013 landed
unscathed on the ledge of the eighty-fifth floor. In both cases, the two
survivors were rescued by building security personnel.
The most
recent cases of suicide date back to 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2010; on April
13, 2007 Moshe Kanovsky, a young lawyer from Brooklyn, died after a leap
into the void from the sixty-ninth floor. In 2010, Cameron Dabaghi, a
21-year-old Yale University student, committed suicide by jumping from
the 86th floor terrace on a rainy day.
The plane crash of 1945
In 1945 the building was accidentally hit
by an aircraft. At 9:40 on Saturday, July 28, due to a thick haze, a US
Air Force Mitchell B-25 piloted by Colonel William Franklin Smith Jr.
impacted the north elevation of the building between the 79th and 80th
floors, killing the pilot and thirteen other people who occupied the
offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council; however the blazing
fire was promptly extinguished and extinguished in about forty minutes.
One of the plane's engines flew out of a window on the opposite side of
the building and crashed onto the roof of an adjacent building, while
the other engine and one of the undercarriages fell into an elevator
shaft. During the impact, the operator Betty Lou Oliver, who was in one
of the elevators, fell seventy-five floors inside the cabin, but was
saved thanks to the system's braking system, entering the Guinness Book
of Records for the number of floors from which he fell unscathed.
The crashed elevator
On the afternoon of January 19, 2000,
another incident almost turned into a drama, when a car in one of the
many elevators fell forty floors, with inside Shameka Peterson and Joe
Masoraca, two employees of an office on the forty-fourth floor of the
skyscraper. The two survivors remained unharmed despite the free fall of
the cabin by more than one hundred and fifty metres, stopped only at the
last instant by the braking system of the plant. Following the episode,
the administration, at the time under the control of tycoon Donald
Trump, announced an extraordinary inspection of all 73 elevators, also
to reassure the thousands of tourists who visit the building every day.
Shootings
The Empire State Building was also the site of two
shootings. The first took place on 23 February 1997 on the terrace of
86th Street when Abu Kamal, a 69-year-old former teacher of Palestinian
origin, armed with a pistol killed one person and wounded six others
before committing suicide.
A second similar incident occurred on
August 24, 2012 along the Fifth Avenue sidewalk in front of the
building, where 59-year-old Jeffrey T. Johnson shot and killed a former
colleague at the workplace he lost in 2011. The the murderer was then
killed with sixteen shots by some policemen who rushed to the scene,
after having expressed their willingness to continue shooting. Nine
bystanders were also slightly injured in the shooting, only three of
whom were directly hit by bullets.
Radio and television broadcasters
The Empire State Building has
housed several commercial offices since its inception but is also home
to several radio and television studios. The first broadcaster to
transmit the first experimental radio and television signals on December
22, 1931 was RCA, which rented the premises on the eighty-fifth floor
and had a first antenna installed on the top of the flagpole. From 1940,
some other radio stations also established themselves, including the
commercial channel WNBT, established in 1940 and, later, the well-known
NBC station which maintained its headquarters until 1950.
Since 1978, the Empire State Building Run-Up has been held in the
skyscraper, i.e. the sporting competition which involves climbing up to
the eighty-seventh floor along the 1,576 steps of the numerous flights
of stairs.
In 1994, the building was scaled bare-handed by the
well-known French athlete and climber Alain Robert.
In April
2014, Ford celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Mustang by exhibiting
the latest model on the 86th floor terrace, similar to what already
happened in 1964 with the commercial launch of the first model.
The Empire State Building is one of the city's landmarks and, with
its illuminated top, it invariably marks the major city and world
events. The first external lighting system of the building was installed
in 1956 at the base of the seventy-second floor and consisted of 4
rotating projectors of one and a half meters in diameter.
In 1984
the system was renovated by Douglas Leigh and the projectors replaced
with 880 neon tubes of 75 watts each, 220 of which in a vertical
position installed on the upper part of the flagpole.
On November
26, 2012, a brand new show hosted by Alicia Keys inaugurated the new
lighting system which replaced the previous neon lights with a new
system of LED projectors programmed using a computerized system. This
new system makes it possible to illuminate the top of the building in up
to sixteen million colors but also offers the possibility of creating
more dynamic lighting, also allowing cross, wave or stroboscopic
effects.
In addition to the usual colors programmed for pre-established
events, on request it is possible to choose and book the color of the
lighting for a specific event. The top of the Empire State Building has
taken on other specific colors as listed below.
In 1995 and 1998,
respectively for the eightieth birthday and for the death of Frank
Sinatra, the lighting of the skyscraper took on the color blue, in
homage to the color of the famous singer's eyes, which earned him the
nickname of Old Blue Eyes.
In 2001, due to the death of Joey Ramone,
lead singer of the Ramones, the skyscraper took on the colors of the
American flag.
On June 24, 2011, when the law that legalized civil
unions between people of the same sex was approved in the State of New
York, the Empire State Building was illuminated with the colors of the
rainbow flag, symbol of the LGBT community.
While waiting for the
results of the presidential elections, it has become customary for the
building to be lit up in blue and red, the colors of the two opposing
parties. On November 7, 2012, as soon as the victory of Barack Obama and
the Democratic Party appeared certain, the top of the Empire State
Building turned completely blue.
In 2013 the Empire State Building
was lit up in the colors of the Swedish flag to celebrate the Swedish
House Mafia's arrival in New York and to show appreciation for their
Black Tie Rave, a fundraising event to support victims of Hurricane
Sandy which also hit New York City hard.
On March 4, 2022, the Empire
State Building was illuminated in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, as a
symbol of support for the Ukraine-Russia crisis.
On August 18, 2022
The Empire State Building was lit blue on Percy Jackson's birthday,
being the fictional entrance to Mount Olympus in Rick Riordan's books.
Cinema has greatly contributed to its fame, setting scenes from many
films. The first cinematic appearance is in King Kong, in which the
famous finale the gigantic gorilla is killed by aircraft fire right on
top of the skyscraper; however it was only a quote as the scenario was
rebuilt in Hollywood studios. Subsequently the building appears in the
film A splendid love by Leo McCarey where it is mentioned and used as a
set to celebrate the civil marriage between the two protagonists which
will not take place in the plot.
In 1964 Andy Warhol dedicated a
documentary to him, Empire, which consecrated his role as an emblem.
In 2000 the skyscraper was photographed and featured as the cover of
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, the fifth album by the British band
Oasis.
In the first chapters of the video game Max Payne it is
possible to find in the lair of the antagonists a large illuminated
reconstruction of the skyscraper with the neon writing "welcome 2 new
york".
In addition to various other film appearances, the
building is also the setting for some television series such as Gossip
Girl, Jessie and White Collar.
Finally, in the literary saga
Percy Jackson and the Olympians the skyscraper is the entrance to Mount
Olympus.
Cinema
King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper,
Ernest B. Schoedsack (1933)
A Splendid Love, directed by Leo McCarey
(1957)
Sleepless in Seattle, directed by Nora Ephron (1993)
The Thin Man, directed by Russell Mulcahy (1994)
Love Affair - A
great love, directed by Glenn Gordon Caron (1994)
Independence Day,
directed by Roland Emmerich (1996)
Frida, directed by Julie Taymor
(2002)
The Day After Tomorrow - L'alba del giorno dopo (The Day After
Tomorrow), directed by Roland Emmerich (2004)
King Kong, directed by
Peter Jackson (2005)
Enchanted, directed by Kevin Lima (2007)
Signals from the future, directed by Alex Proyas (2009)
Percy Jackson
& the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, directed by Chris Columbus (2010)
Oblivion, directed by Joseph Kosinski (2013)
Television
Gossip
Girl
How I Met Your Mother
Doctor Who
Jessie
White Collar
Fringe
Video games
Max Payne
The Godfather
Spider Man 2
Spider Man 3
Grand Theft Auto IV
lego marvel super heroes
Tom
Clancy's The Division (censored for copyright reasons)
Spider Man PS4