Dan Snow's History Hit - Empire State Building

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

When it was completed in 1931, the Empire State Building became the tallest building in the world. While it has long been surpassed, it is still one of the most recognised skyscrapers on the planet, synonymous with the city in which it stands. Its imposing but elegant art deco design is a tribute to the roaring ’20s from which it came. Carol Willis, author of Form Follows Finance: The Empire State Building tells Don how it became a monument to the golden age of the skyscraper.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Joseph Knight. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Greetings all. Welcome to another episode of American History Hit. Actually, I'm pleased to say today marks our 50th episode, which, in the broader business of podcasting, isn't saying all that much. There's How to Feed your feline podcasts with numbers we'll never touch. But it's a real milestone for us. You might be surprised what a strenuous effort this is to make happen. We're a transatlantic pod, producers and editors over there in London and me here in New York, selecting history subjects we hope you'll find compelling, booking guests who tell good stories, all of it quick as a dickens, turning around episodes in about a week and sometimes a matter of days. Results, I must say, have been great. Our audience grows every week, every month.

It's really been astonishing, humbling even. I've said it many times on this podcast, on television, in print. I am not an historian. I can't even pretend. An historian practices a studied craft, researching subject matter and primary source materials, gathering data in dusty archives, understanding context, footnoting. Me, I do none of that. I'm intended to be the eyes and ears of an every man and woman audience. Well, maybe the ears and voice. Anyway, I'm your stand-in, trying to ask the honest questions

you might ask as we attempt to stitch together a general fabric of the complicated events of American history. 50 episodes in, I hope you're benefiting the way I am, building a broader understanding of how the United States of America became the great and formidable nation it is today, with all its cuts and bruises. And I hope I can thank you again in about six months when we finish our 100th episode. Till then, on with today's show. In one of the most thrilling vintage movie scenes ever produced by Hollywood, King Kong flails at army planes, attacking him relentlessly from all sides. Clutched in his massive fist, the blonde damsel, played by Fay Wray,

struggles in distress, screaming in terror. There's no need to tell you where they are. You've pictured it already. A supersized gorilla climbing a building, which at the time of Kong's 1933 release had only stood for two years. But it was already synonymous with New York City as the tallest tower in the world, the Empire State Building. Today, the Empire State remains the defining structure of the most iconic skyline of them all, an imposing yet elegant Art Deco tribute to the Roaring Twenties when it was conceived. From concrete facades at street level to its 200-foot antenna, the Empire State still awakens the world's attention at the center of the city that never sleeps. Hi, everybody. Welcome to American History Hit. I'm your host, Don Wildman.

The Chrysler Building, the Flatiron, the Woolworth Tower, CityCorp, AT&T, the Hearst Building, Rockefeller Center, the list goes on and on. New York City, Manhattan, is the premier showcase of skyscrapers, that urban cacophony of towering spires that create the most iconic skyline in the world. It's what you see from Jersey driving up the Turnpike or coming in from Brooklyn over the bridge, an island of lofty purchase, of breathless elevation, of insane amounts of square footage and office space. And all of it anchored, as was clearly intended, by the Empire State Building right smack in the center. The Empire State's no longer the tallest structure in New York or certainly the world, but those towers elsewhere, the Burj Khalifa, Kuala Lumpur, the One World Trade Center, owe their extreme existences to that granddaddy of them all, the Empire State.

And there it still stands, stalwart, solitary, on a half-city block in the midst of Midtown. The story of the Empire State Building is in so many ways the story of 20th century New York and America, engineering a reach for the sky in more ways than architectural. Skyscrapers were the boldest demonstration of our economic progress and civic will, the perpendicular promise of ever-increasing popularity. And even in bad times, through war and financial distress, those buildings remained symbols of American determination. If the building stood tall, so could we. The Empire State Building, in all its girth and gravitas, is a story unto itself,

and we're so fortunate today to have the director of the Skyscraper Museum in New York City and author of Form Follows Finance, A History of the Skyscraper, as well as editor of Building the Empire State. Carol Willis, welcome to American History Hit. I'm so glad you could join us. Thanks so much, Don. I'm really delighted to be with you and to talk about my favorite skyscraper. Well, if you're a New Yorker, you have to love skyscrapers, that's for sure. And it's nice to discuss something historical.

I'm speaking of the Empire State Building that every single listener anywhere, to some degree or another, knows about, even if they haven't stood on top of it themselves. But that was a whole idea to make a world-class statement. But I have to ask you, of what? What was the intention really behind the skyscraper? Well, the skyscraper is a building type that began back in the last quarter of the 19th century when cities began to expand, especially the great American cities of New York and Chicago. Those two capitals of construction were competitors in one sense, but New York was so much larger as a physical place, as a center for business and activity. Chicago was the connector to the rest of the world through New York.

Chicago brought together the materials and the people and concentrated the hinterland, as it were, of the Midwest, as the great historian William Cronin talks about nature's metropolis, the name of Chicago, connecting it to the continent of America. But New York was the physical connector to the rest of the world, and it to the continent of America. But New York was the physical connector to the rest of the world, and especially to Europe, especially to all the economies, the telegraph lines that connected the markets in London to the finance around Wall Street. And so that concentration of business and the consolidation of business, as well as the expansion by railroads and all of

these other forms of industrialization, including the fabrication of steel, first for railroads and then for skyscrapers, really makes the industrialization and urbanization process coalesce in cities and grow and burgeon. And from the late 1880s, 1890s, when you see the first skyscrapers, especially in the financial district in New York. So the value of land, the prominence of place, the concentration of business around that point, especially in the financial district, meant that the value of land created the need for more space and piling floor upon floor became the strategy for concentrating business in the financial districts of New York. Tell me if I'm wrong. I have a very simple notion about how the

skyscraper came to pass. The development, the advent of steel production in the United States and in the world, for that matter, allowed for a new idea of a building. You could build from within instead of without. Is that a fair way of saying it? In the past, you had to build an exterior support structure. Suddenly, this framework allows buildings to go higher. Right. Well, steel skeleton construction is just that. It's an armature of steel that bears the weight of the building, which is really the volume of the building down into the ground and supports an open area of space that is a commodity for business to fill up with all of its various activities. And that efficiency of structure is something that steel allows. The whole history of architecture before that,

from the pyramids to the 1880s masonry buildings that were the first tall buildings in New York City and also Chicago. But in New York, we had skyscrapers of about 10 or 11 stories. In 1874, the Tribune building, the newspaper building, the Western Union building, a kind of telecommunications company, were prominent on the landscape. They were taller than the church steeples and the four and five story buildings that represented the other important invention that allowed for skyscrapers, the elevator, to pioneer the profits that are available in the skies, something above four or five stories, which is the height that the human leg will take you without tiring. So, you know, these technologies come together, the fabrication of steel at such a quantity of economies of scale that it makes

sense to incorporate in the building process. So there's not really an invention of the skyscraper. There's a demand for buildings that can concentrate people in space in valuable locations, and technology answers the question of how to do that. that can concentrate people in space in valuable locations. And technology answers the question of how to do that. It's a fascinating chicken and the egg. You mentioned earlier one aspect, one factor that has a lot to do with this is the density of cities and how to create that density is always the way to increase tax revenues in a city. That had a lot to do with it, didn't it?

They suddenly had a way of piling a lot more people on top of each other. Yes, for sure. And the most extreme example of that is around Wall Street in New York, which was the concentration of investment bankers who represented the club of industrialists who were creating the country, the J.P. Morgans with his low-rise building on the corner of Wall Street called The Corner, which is just across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. So that concentration of capital was what everybody needed to be close to. And the communications, which were high technology for the day, but incredibly primitive by our standards, telegraphs and stock tickers, those things really required proximity. Even telephones ran on lines, on copper lines,

literally from one building to another. So they went under the streets and into the buildings. The proximity of being able to do business with each other, either directly or with telegram boys who would deliver information directly to your office, you know, all of that communications technology was the thing that, even as today, puts companies at the forefront of their sectors. I miss the pneumatic tubes. People are incredibly inventive. Thomas Edison provided electric light to Wall Street back in the 1880s for the first time.

So all of these technologies come together in order to make business more efficient. And with skyscrapers, likewise, speed and efficiency is really key to being able to make money in the business of building. So let's focus on the Empire State. What was on this site beforehand? What was there before it came along? The site in New York of the Empire State Building, which is on Fifth Avenue, the key north-south avenue that really marks the middle of the island, and the prominent cross street of 34th Street. So all of our New York streets going east and west are close together. They're 200 feet to a block. And the avenues, which today are the main part of the north-south flow of traffic,

they're the quick way to get places because they're quite wide. That grid structures New York around a kind of both physical and conceptual framework. So a building is on the corner of 5th and 34th. That, going back to the origins of the island, was farmland and some of the less desirable farmland because from the beginnings of the island, most of the traffic was by water and along the water's edge. That then became very industrialized through the 19th century. So storage and railroads and all of that happened on the edge. And the center became more valuable.

That was then increased by mass transit as well, whether it was surface transit or after 1904, the beginnings of the subways. So location really mattered. So the history of New York kind of recapitulates from land to property to real estate. And there was private mansions from the last quarter of the 19th century, famously of the Astors, who owned an enormous amount of real estate in Manhattan Island from their ancestor, John Jacob Astor. They turned their private homes into sites for high-rise and multi-unit exploitation with hotels. So transition from residence to hotel, temporary

residence. Two hotels were created in 1893 and 1897 on the full block from 33rd to 34th. First, the Waldorf and then the Astoria to become the famous Waldorf Astoria, one of the largest hotels in the world, one of the most posh and prestigious. In 1928, the Waldorf Astoria, with its great Victorian pile of architecture, was a little musty. It represented an age of the past. Prohibition was in place. And the city that had grown around that great hotel was putting pressure for higher and best use, which in New York at this time was principally office buildings. So the site was a key large site that would provide the opportunity for a really magnificent large building of a scale that was unprecedented. large building of a scale that was unprecedented. And that became eventually the Empire State Building, though the Empire State that we know was not the first phase of that project, which was initiated by a different speculative developer who failed to find financing for his first expensive project and his first idea. And that was then bought by bankers and John Jacob Raskob, Pierre Dupont, who created a

consortium of businessmen who would erect this great speculative skyscraper. They had to be aware of the fact that this was dead center of New York City. I mean, southern part of Midtown. But nonetheless, when you look at the island of Manhattan, I mean, it's not exactly there, but it sort of marks the center, certainly, of the most developed part of the island. How did that come to pass? That has always been a mystery to me. How do you put the biggest, most famous spire right smack in the right place? Was it just coincidence that that happened or had that been decades in the planning? place to us now if you want to see a skyscraper stand alone as a magnificent silhouette and to

kind of hold the center of the skyline. Yes, that for me is the thing that I love about the Empire State. It seems and hopefully will remain as unchallenged by immediate neighbors. But when you think about the skyscrapers as a building type and as a business proposition, you realize how unusual this is and understand that the cluster of buildings, including the Chrysler Building around Grand Central Station, that were built in this great art deco efflorescence of construction from about 1925 to the stock market crash in the beginning of the Depression in 1929 through really 31. So in a period of only about five or six years, there was a huge surge of skyscraper construction. And those buildings are all concentrated in two places, around Grand

Central Terminal and in Lower Manhattan in the Financial District. Because the three principles of real estate investment, people joke but know is ultimately simply true. The three principles are location, location, and location. So that proximity to transit and where you can bring people together and where it advantages the buildings, but also the commuters who want to take a single subway to their office in the morning, who want to make their commute as efficient as possible, or with the bankers who need to be close to their clients around the stock exchange and the bank. So it makes perfect sense the skyscrapers cluster together.

And that then poses the Achilles heel of the Empire State Building, but also its glory, is that it stands apart from all of the other skyscrapers. And why is that? Because Fifth Avenue doesn't have a subway there. The Empire State Building is sort of equidistant between Grand Central and Penn Station, the two great consolidating transit centers, but especially for long distance with Penn Station and Grand Central, and suburban commuters, and then all of the train lines, the subway lines that serve those areas. But it's still 10 blocks away, a little more than 10 blocks away from Grand Central. It's two major avenues, which are a longer walk. So Fifth Avenue and 34th Street location is really a disadvantage in terms of the convenience of commuting. The original Empire State Building design was actually meant to be smaller than it ended up being. It had been originally designed to about 50 stories. Is that right? a site in order to convince a banker to give you money. This was something which was extraordinarily

common if you read the newspapers and the magazines of the 1920s. There would often be fantastic, ambitious, romantic skyscraper projects that appeared in renderings in the magazines and would say some spectacular headline about their world's tallest building or 100-story building, something to grab your attention. That project may have been no more than a drawing and a promissory letter of intent. And then you looked for investors. You could put down what was called earnest money, which was no more than 10% of what you needed in order to budget a building. And if the first budget for the Empire State Building was about $40 million, you would need then only $4 million in order to start the project. And mortgage bond

companies would come in if they thought they could see a profit and invest in the larger project. So this mechanism really explains the boom of the late 1920s. So many buildings being built at the same time because so few people had real skin in the game in terms of risking their fortunes. fortunes. Sometimes these flights of fancy didn't work so well and they collapsed quicker than others did. And that was the case with the first scheme for the Empire State Building with a developer named Floyd Brown, who hired the same architects who did design the later Empire State, Shreve and Lamb, who were then joined by Arthur Loomis Harmon after 1929 to design the Empire State Building. But they came up with what was the kind of building that you would have seen over in the west side in the Garment District that had been populating all of those blocks just north of Penn Station from the 1920s on, when a zoning law in New York had forced the Garment District away from Fifth Avenue,

where loft buildings were filling in just along the cross streets of the avenues, over to consolidate them over on the west side. And there you had from the 1920s to 30s, the creation of block after block of what are really best thought of as skyscraper factories. They were places of production as well as showrooms for the fashion industry. So some of the towers on 7th Avenue, which is a name for the fashion district of New York, 7th Avenue, were taller skyscrapers of 30 stories, maybe even up to 40 stories, that had showrooms in the bottom section and, well, other kinds of fashion-related industries. And then on the side streets, the sewers would operate at their sewing machines in these

ziggurats, you know, zigzag setback forms that pyramid as they go up. So they had plenty of good light around to illuminate the workplace. And those buildings are called lofts. And so the first design by Shreve and Lamford, the tower that had similar massing, as architects would say, to the Empire State Building, but without a tall tower, was called a mixed-use building with loft purposes. So for light manufacturing. I hear in your voice that same excitement. I can imagine us at a cocktail party up there on Central Park West, you know, talking about the buildings. That's what New Yorkers do. It's so much the language of that city and everyone's versed in it. Everybody knows how these buildings came about. I arrived in New York and sometime in the 70s and the city core building had just gone up. And my God, what a controversy. You know, it suddenly is crazy thing with its slanted roof was just going to destroy the whole nobility of the skyline. That's what New Yorkers know about. They discuss it like form follows function, which is so much the way New York works. You know, you have these districts which are created in necessity for what they do,

but then the buildings are structured as such and you end up with an area. How much were they intending that the Empire State Building would anchor all of this by being the tallest? Was that the intent eventually? The builders of the project for the Empire State Building were industrialists. They had many associations with other powerful companies, and they imagined that their building could really attract through, in some cases, business relationships, some of the largest companies in America. That was one of the reasons why the building had a business plan that seemed to make sense to them at the scale that they were creating a building. And so everyone knows the Empire State Building for its height as the tallest building in New York, reigned for 40 years until the World

Trade Center took over. And we can talk about the differences between a post-war building like the Citicorp Center that you mentioned and the era of construction of the Empire State Building, which is kind of the end of this long evolution where buildings are really connected much more to nature by natural light and by windows that open and closed rather than in the post-war period, an air-conditioned enclosed space, which is climatized with larger planes of glass so that the interior, even if it heats up by the sun, can still be climate controlled. They're illuminated by fluorescent light rather than principally by daylight. So there are a lot of differences

between these eras of construction. But with the Empire State Building and its height, we think of as the controlling feature, not just of that building, but of a competition about commercial buildings. What's the tallest building? And to me, as an architectural historian, and as especially a specialist in skyscrapers, that makes no sense. Well, it makes a lot of sense. I understand it's human nature to be fascinated by records and by aspirations and whatever might be other kind of irrational impulses that create a competition to make the world's

biggest buildings. But the Empire State Building was one of the largest buildings. It was tall, but it was big in every dimension. And if you compare it to the contemporary Chrysler Building or 40 Wall Street, which are the ones that are usually discussed in the storyline, the narrative of the race into the skies to become the tallest building and the publicity that surrounds that. If you compare the Empire State Building in its volume or its area of office space, it's more than twice the size. Both of those buildings together, Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street, don't have as much space as the single Empire State Building. So when you asked me about the aspirations of the people who are going to build

the building or the challenges of construction. All of these factors come together in this kind of formula that try to explain our different dimensions of time, of space, of area, of cycles of business. All of these things inform the design and construction of these buildings. If I could read a short paragraph that comes back to the Empire State Building about this, it's a summary that was in Fortune magazine in 1930. So reporting on the nearly completed Empire State Building. And we can go back and kind of pick apart the various aspects of the architect's

challenge, the builder's challenge. But here are the pick apart the various aspects of the architect's challenge, the builder's challenge. But here are the dimensions of the problem of building the empire state. The writer says, these various elements fix the perimeter of an oddly shaped geometric solid bounded on one side by 83,860 square feet of land, on the other by $35 million, 1,860 square feet of land, on the other by $35 million, on the other by the law of diminishing returns, on another by the laws of physics and the characteristics of structural steel, and on another by the conical exigencies of the zoning ordinances, and still another by May 1, 1931. So you see, those are not arithmetic formulas of how you make a building. They have to do with the dimension of time. Time is money. How do you complete the Empire State Building in, depending on how you want to count it, 11 months or 18 months? How do you design it backwards from

May 1st on a certain date? How do you make three-dimensional about two acres of a rectangular plot on Fifth Avenue, given the constraints of a zoning law in New York that says buildings must step back and that a tower can occupy no more than a quarter of a site above any plot of land? All of these dimensions of business and time and urbanism come together. And so there are all of these different pressures on the formula where the problem solving is a kind of Rubik's Cube where not everything is a square. Not everything is a cube. There are other kinds of factors. I'll be right back with more from Carol after this short break.

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Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It's a massive construction, obviously, a 55-foot deep foundation to be poured.

I mean, all working within an already dense part of the city. How innovative was the construction for this time? Do they have to develop new techniques for this? The Empire State Building was an incredibly innovative construction project in terms of construction management. At the same time, it was a culmination of 40 years worth of learning about steel skeleton constructions, about refining systems of building, of materials being made more and more efficient, of regularizing, systematizing the building parts themselves. It's really the genius of construction management that allowed the Empire State Building to go forward quickly. And the fact that the technologies were already known, but they could come together at a new scale in this building.

So that the Empire State Building being built within the 11 months of construction is the same amount of time it took to build the Chrysler building, which as I insisted before, is only half the building in terms of the amount of steel, the amount of area, of rentable area that's created. So the builders, two Sterrett brothers, Paul and William, and a colleague, Andrew J. Eakin, who had spent 30 and 40 years in the building industry already. They had grown up with and through the industry, first in Chicago with the George A. Fuller Company. And so this profession of construction management was something that was perfected from the 1890s forward. It was competitive because there were other companies, but not more than a 10 or a dozen companies that really had the expertise in order to bring skyscrapers together in terms of the various kinds of engineers and materials manufacturers. So it was a special expertise, but the service that they sold, delivering a building for a price to the owners, simplified for the owners the problem of construction. If we think by contrast,

the Woolworth building and the client, F.W. Woolworth, micromanaged his project. He interfered at every opportunity. The building was over budget. There were problems in the building with the elevatoring that weren't very efficient, that gave it a bad reputation, or it didn't function practically that well for the upper stories. So there were lots of things that whereas knowledge accrued over time that really made a difference in making the building a machine, you know, a modern machine for business. And Sterrett Brothers and Eakin figured out how to take the fat out of every single element of the construction process. So the materials were delivered by truck into the body of the building, the scale of this nearly two acre site. The trucks would drive in from the busy city streets where they couldn't idle outside of 34th Street. The scheduling of the trucks,

the Empire State Building peak of construction, which was in about the summer of 1930, brought materials into the site, 500 trucks a day in an eight or 10 hour day. That's almost one truck every minute would drive into the body of the building, dump its bricks out, or offload its limestone. That would go into a hoist. A hoist would take the materials, will either leave them in the basement until they needed to be staged on a particular floor with a particular number of bricks. And those bricks would be taken up in the still evolving elevator shafts that would later carry the tenants of the building or the tourists to the top, that construction site is all organized within the building confines so that the staging

area for this materials warehouse that would then be delivered to the site at a place in front of a window by a narrow gauge railroad that could carry heavy materials to exactly where they would be needed at a certain window. So all of these things were really like running trains into Grand Central, everything according to schedule. And they managed to do it. They built this thing in 410 days, one year, 45 days, which is astonishing. I mean, if that happened today, it's extraordinary. It is. And they were extremely proud, which is astonishing. I mean, if that happened today, it's extraordinary. It is. And they were extremely proud, which was one reason they recorded every aspect of their work in this document that the Skyscraper Museum published. In fact, similarly, we gave the title Building the Empire State. It was a carbon copy typescript on gridded paper that summarized the

number of workers on the site, every aspect of the construction management, how the men were paid. All of that was a brilliant display of professionalism. But we really have to even go back earlier in their participation, Stair's participation in the project, because it was really they that insisted that every one of the professions of engineering and the manufacturers of the materials participate in the design process. So when we use the number 11 months to construct the building, what I think is a so much more impressive demonstration of the efficiency of this project is that it was 18 months from the first inkling of this building, which is even before the architects were hired. letter with a typescript page with two columns, a letter that went to a lending banker who was going to invest in the building, and described two alternative buildings. The one that we talked about before, the 55-story building and an 80-story building. And on a series of lines where

the cost of materials and the cost of the land and the steel and a kind of breakdown of about 20 lines or so of individual costs, then measured against the anticipated rents from the amount of space that would be constructed for a 55-story building. And then likewise, just numbers for an 80-story building. And the return on the investment of an 80 story building was marginally better, about 2% better from like 10% to 12%. And that number then was described in the letter to the banker saying, and we conclude that a building of 34 million cubic feet and 80 stories would be the most profitable investment. That was before any architect was hired. It was before they owned the Waldorf Astoria site, but they hadn't demolished

the building. So in September, they hire the architects. They begin then to demolish the Waldorf Astoria. The architects work from September through November in order to come up with a scheme that places the massing of the building that we know and which is quite different than a common contemporary solution to creating a skyscraper in a dense district like the Chrysler Building and around Grand Central. They come up with this scheme, which is unprecedented because the site is so large, And they begin to order the steel. And when the Waldorf Astoria is demolished, they dig down into the earth some 50 or 70 feet. They then begin to erect the steel in April of 1930.

And the construction site just chugs ahead so that by the time they reach the shaft of the tower design, they can construct the building at the rate of a story a day. So all of those things would not have been possible if the strategy of teamwork, of problem solving, of making the design of the building the solving of the problem, not an architectural expression of ego or even of beauty necessarily, because it really is driven by these factors, these multiple factors that I talked about that are brought to bear on this design problem. We all know the famous photographs of Lewis Hine, so many of those iconic pictures of men eating lunch, suspended iron beams and so forth. But you sent us a whole slew of pictures about the construction process, which really just took my breath away.

I mean, it's an amazing thing to see the scope of this. It's an incredible thing to witness. I have to ask about the Mohawk ironworkers. These guys are equally legendary. Why were they so important to this process? a Native American tribe that lived in New York is well known for having a portion of their members work on what's called high steel, whether bridges or skyscrapers. But in fact... I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

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The consistent from the 1920s on, maybe even before that, is only a proportion of the steel workers that are Native Americans. The other nationalities that are particularly represented are Finns and Danes. And if we ascribe certain kind of characteristic tendencies to tribes or nationalities, the idea of not being afraid of heights is usually the thing that's described for the ironworkers who are Native Americans. But Finns and Danes were fishermen and they did riggings on tall masts. So whether it's lack of fear of heights, or whether it's the interconnection of the kind of hoists and riggings that were necessary in order to bring the materials high, those are the kinds of cultural imprints over generations that are just a part of knowledge from a father to son. So we like to find convenient answers for questions that sound fascinating and make good stories. And there are so many of those connected with all aspects of skyscraper construction, they kind of run away

from you. Instead, I like to emphasize the aspects of business that shape these buildings. And when you think about it, the buildings are businesses. The dimension that is most important for the owners of the buildings and the designers of buildings is the number of square feet inside of the buildings that they can rent for profit. All of these things make perfect sense when you think about them in the context of business. The Empire State is officially open on May 1st, 1931, as far as the books go, right smack in the middle of the Great Depression. How did that affect things? Well, badly, but not just the Empire State Building, all of the buildings that had been

part of the great boom of construction in 1928, 29, and 30. We have to remember that the stock market that crashed in October of 1929 was a real start for the slip in the economy, but it wasn't necessarily an earthquake of confidence in business projects. The slide of the Depression in 1931 and 1932 into the depths in 1932 and 1933 of unemployment and a nationwide Great Depression, a worldwide Great Depression, is something that comes a little after. So by 1931 May, it was clear that the economy was in terrible trouble and many people were losing their jobs. But it's important to focus on when the building was started and in the context in which all of these other buildings were started in the boom of the 20s, just before the stock market crashed. And to understand that these projects have a momentum of their own, so you don't stop a skyscraper mid-construction. You go to the finish and you hope that you can compete through rent deals or whatever

it is. But there was way too much space, too many people acting independently, too big a bubble into the creation of space when after 1929, businesses would begin to contract rather than to expand and take more space. But you asked about May 1st, 1931, and that's an interesting story that seems so illogical to us today. But you remember in that multidimensional problem of the design of the Empire State Building, the delivery of the building by May 1st, 1931 was in the program of the building. The architects were told and the builders agreed that the building must be delivered by May 1st.

And that's because in New York, going back centuries, something called Moving Day was May 1st. And that's because in New York, going back centuries, something called moving day was May 1st. It's also, you know, a May day. That was something that came along later. But the idea that commercial leases and residential leases as well were signed once a year on May 1st, there was an absolute deadline to be able to move. Well, people move their houses and their furniture all on the same day. Makes no sense, but that's what they did. And so having a deadline of May 1st meant that if you missed it or if you looked like you were going to miss it, you lost the ability to capitalize on that wave

when everybody needed to sign their commercial leases. The Empire State Building is a tableau unto itself. In the end, we are staring at the same building that they stared at almost 100 years ago. I mean, this is extraordinary that this building is coming up on its century anniversary, and it looks great. The setbacks, the Art Deco style of it has remained timeless, which is a really amazing thing to me. Also an excellent staircase for a gorilla. There's two experiences of the Empire State Building, the humbling feeling at the base and then the glorified feeling at the top, which is an amazing journey to take through

an elevator. Well, I agree that the building looks spectacular today and such an important part of the future of the skyscraper because the building has been extraordinarily well maintained. It's a New York City landmark, both in its exterior and in its lobby, which has been gloriously restored to its original Art Deco luster. And it accommodates an enormous amount of tourists, more than 3 million a year, in an incredibly efficient way that would have made Starrett Brothers and Econ proud. It's now, I would say, the premier place to see the city of New York. And yesterday, in anticipation of this talk, I used my VIP pass to go to the top of the

Empire State Building and to visit the whole sequence of the experience where on the second floor, they take you through some of the experience of going back in time to stand on the floor with the construction workers and to ascend through the construction elevator. But when you get up there to the 86th floor, the view of the city is so unparalleled. It is that splendid isolation of the tower that allows you to see, as the phrase was in the day, visibility infinity. You see the, especially at night, as the fog cleared in New York after a bad winter day, you just see endlessly the stretch of the lights and you experience the horizon in a way. So the verticality of the Empire State Building and the continuity of the horizon that you see all around you is a really unparalleled

view. And I have to say that they have modernized, retrofitted, made even more spectacular the very top floor, the 102nd floor, which formerly had only kind of I spy band of windows where you looked out, which is now floor to ceiling windows. And they are the sheer power of the building of the city of New York you experience. And that's why it's my favorite skyscraper. Thank you so much, Carol, for taking us through this. There's so much more to talk about. Boy, it's almost a smugness about being a New Yorker. I just love that building.

I love staring at it. I walk by it all the time. Carol Willis, author of Form Follows Finance, the nuts and bolts really of the making of a skyscraper, as well as and also editor of Building the Empire State. Two must reads if you want to understand the reality of the New York skyscrapers or skyscrapers anywhere. I also invite folks to visit the museum you're involved with. You're the director of the Skyscraper Museum in downtown Manhattan, a must-see for any tourist visiting the city. Thank you very much for joining us at American History Hit. I hope to talk to you again. Oh, it was a complete delight. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it.

Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound. you