17 March: The Empire State Building

On this date in 1930, construction started on the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building is an Art Deco Skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, which was at one time the world's tallest building.

1. Its name is derived from "Empire State", the nickname of the state of New York.
2. Some vital statistics: the building is 1454 ft (443.2 m) tall (including the spire) and has 103 floors. It has 6,514 Windows and 73 elevators. (1,172 miles (1,886 km) of elevator cable.) Should the elevators all be out of order, there are 1,872 steps from street level to the 103rd floor. Every year, there is a race in which athletes run up the stairs as far as the 86th floor. According to official fact sheets, the Empire State Building weighs 365,000 short tons (331,122 t) and has an internal volume of 37 million cubic feet (1,000,000 m3). Its footprint at ground level is 2 acres.
3. It was built as part of a race to build the world's tallest building. New York was booming in the late 1920s and the competition was on between 40 Wall Street’s Bank of Manhattan building and the Chrysler Building. As they were busy trying to outdo each other by adding more floors as they went along, General Motors executive John J. Raskob and former New York Governor Al Smith announced that they were going to outdo both by creating a thousand foot high building. Chrysler responded by adding a spire to his building, but Raskob and Smith simply added more floors. The Empire State Building kept its crown as the tallest building in the world until the World Trade Center towers were built in the early 1970s. Even then, plans were made to add 10 floors to the Empire State so it would be taller than both the World Trade Center and Chicago's Sears Tower. However, there were complaints that such a scheme would ruin the look of the building and so they were shelved.
4. The architect was William Lamb of the firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon. He is said to have based the design on two of his previous buildings, North Carolina’s Reynolds Building and Carew Tower in Cincinnati. On the Reynolds Building’s 50th anniversary in 1979, the Empire State Building’s general manager sent a card that read, “Happy Anniversary, Dad.”
5. The building was completed in just 410 days. 3,400 men worked on the building each day, assembling four and a half stories per week. It was actually finished ahead of schedule and under budget. However, official records say five workers lost their lives during construction and unofficial estimates put the death toll at 42. A photographer named Lewis Hine took his life in his hands, climbing out onto the structure himself to document the work. Onlookers at street level marvelled at the workers, "toiling like Spiders".
6. It was originally designed with a mooring mast for airships. In the 1920s it was believed that airships were the future in terms of long haul travel. The idea was that the pilot would manoeuvre alongside the building and tether the ship to a winching apparatus. Passengers would disembark via an open-air gangplank, check in at a customs office and make their way to the streets of Manhattan in just seven minutes. However, it soon became obvious this would never work because of the high winds at the top.
7. Thanks to the 1929 stock market crash, the building didn't get off to a profitable start. Less than a quarter of the office space was occupied when it opened and it was dubbed the “Empty State Building.” In desperate attempts to draw businesses in, the owners had workers turn the lights on in empty offices to make it look as if people were in there. They even held a séance on the 82nd floor to contact the ghost of Thomas Edison, but despite it all the building didn't turn a profit until World War II. In some years in modern times, the observation deck actually brought in more money from ticket sales than the renting of office space in the rest of the building.
8. Requests can be made via the building's website to have the top floors illuminated for special occasions and anniversaries. In the early days there were white searchlights at the top, which were first used in November 1932 to signal Roosevelt's victory over Hoover in the presidential election. In the 1970s different colours were added so the tower could be lit in sports teams' colours. In 1998, the building was lit in blue after the death of singer Frank Sinatra, aka "Ol' Blue Eyes"; and in red, white, and blue for months after 9/11. There were only 9 colours available until 2012 when the floodlighting went LED, making over 16 million colours and moving displays possible. CNN used the top of the Empire State Building as a scoreboard for the presidential election that year. A few days later, the building had its first synchronized light show, using music from recording artist Alicia Keys.
9. Disaster struck on a foggy day in 1945 when a B-25 bomber lost its way and crashed into the 78th and 79th floors of the Empire State at 200 miles an hour. The resulting explosion killed the pilot, Army Lt. Col. William F. Smith, two crewmen and 11 people inside the building. One person who had an extremely lucky escape was Betty Lou Oliver, a 19 year old lift attendant. Several pieces of the B-25’s engine sliced through elevator cables sending an elevator with Betty Lou inside, plunging from the 75th floor to the basement. Piles of cable which had collected at the bottom of the shaft cushioned the fall, which may also have been slowed by the compressed air the fall generated. Betty Lou was badly injured, but survived.
10. The building has featured in more than 90 films, including An Affair to Remember, Sleepless in Seattle, Independence Day and Empire, an eight-hour black-and-white silent film by Andy Warhol. It was also the location for Daleks in Manhattan, a 2007 episode of the TV series Doctor Who. Its best known film appearance was probably its first, King Kong, in which Kong climbs the Empire State Building and bats at aircraft. For the 50th anniversary of the film, there were plans to attach an 84 foot inflatable King Kong to the side of the building and have it buzzed by vintage aircraft, at a cost of $150,000. Sadly, the inflatable wasn't made of strong enough stuff, and two rips in its fabric put paid to the whole project.

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