On St Patrick's Day 1930, workers began erecting a skyscraper on the site of the old Waldorf-Astoria hotel on Fifth Avenue. Four hundred and ten days later, on 1 May 1931, President Herbert Hoover pressed a ceremonial button in Washington and the lights of the Empire State Building came on: 102 storeys, 1,250 feet — about 381 metres — the tallest building on Earth, finished in less time than many cities now take to approve one. During the frantic middle months of 1930, the steel frame rose at better than four storeys a week, and at its peak the pace touched a floor a day — fourteen storeys once went up in ten days. No supertall building has ever been built faster.
The project was born in a brawl. New York in 1929 was gripped by the so-called Race into the Sky, with the Chrysler Building and the Bank of Manhattan tower at 40 Wall Street each scheming to be the world's tallest — a duel Chrysler won by assembling a secret spire inside its crown and hoisting it into place. The Empire State's backers resolved to make the argument irrelevant. The money came chiefly from John J. Raskob, a General Motors executive and Democratic Party grandee; the public face was Al Smith, the former governor of New York fresh from losing the 1928 presidential election. The story goes — and it is a story, though a well-loved one — that Raskob stood a pencil on end and asked the architect William Lamb: how high can you make it so that it won't fall down? Lamb's firm, Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, produced the design in a matter of weeks, and it was conceived from the start around speed: repetitive floors, standardised windows and spandrels, everything designed so it could be made elsewhere and simply bolted together in the sky.
The choreography
The builders, Starrett Brothers and Eken, ran the site like a vertical assembly line. Steel was fabricated in Pennsylvania mills and erected within days of being rolled, arriving on a timetable so tight that girders sometimes went from furnace to frame in under two weeks, each piece marked for its exact position. A miniature railway ran on each floor, with carts trundling brick and mortar from the hoists to the bricklayers, so that no man wasted minutes pushing a barrow. Temporary cafeterias were installed on multiple levels as the tower rose, saving workers the long descent for lunch. At its height the workforce numbered around 3,400 a day — ironworkers, including Mohawk steelworkers famous for high-steel work, riveting gangs, carpenters, water boys. The photographer Lewis Hine was hired to document them, dangling from cables to shoot men lounging on beams above Manhattan. One point trips up quizzers constantly: the celebrated Lunch atop a Skyscraper photograph of eleven men eating on a girder was taken at Rockefeller Center in 1932 — not at the Empire State Building. Officially, five workers died in the construction; given the era's safety standards, contemporaries considered that toll remarkably low. The building even came in under budget: the Depression had collapsed the price of labour and materials, and the final cost of roughly 41 million dollars, land included, was far below the sum first feared.
The Empty State Building
Speed could not outrun the economy. The tower opened into the pit of the Depression and stood largely vacant; wags called it the Empty State Building, and in the early years the observation deck's takings rivalled the office rents. The building did not turn a profit until around 1950. Its crowning mast had been sold to the public as a mooring post for transatlantic airships, but the updraughts around the summit made docking absurdly dangerous; after a couple of hair-raising attempts, the idea was quietly abandoned as the publicity stunt it had always been. In July 1945 a B-25 bomber, lost in fog, flew into the 79th floor, killing 14 people — and lift operator Betty Lou Oliver survived a plunge of 75 storeys when the damaged cables of her lift gave way, still the record for the longest survived lift fall. The Empire State Building remained the world's tallest for some four decades, until the World Trade Center's towers passed it in the early 1970s. The record is long gone. What remains is the schedule: 410 days from first steel to opening day, a tempo set by men on cold girders in a collapsing economy — and never matched since.
Quiz nuggets
- The Empire State Building was built in 410 days, from 17 March 1930 to its opening on 1 May 1931.
- Financier John J. Raskob and front man Al Smith, former New York governor, drove the project; Shreve, Lamb and Harmon were the architects.
- At peak, about 3,400 workers were on site daily and the frame rose fourteen storeys in ten days; officially five workers died.
- The famous Lunch atop a Skyscraper photograph (1932) shows Rockefeller Center, not the Empire State Building.
- In 1945 a B-25 bomber hit the 79th floor in fog; lift operator Betty Lou Oliver survived a 75-storey lift fall, still a record.