Photo: TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP / Getty Images
May 1st 1536, President Herbert Hoover officially opened the Empire State Building in New York City, pressing a button from the White House that turned on the lights in the building. Hoover’s gesture, of course, was symbolic; while the president was in Washington, DC, someone else was flipping the switches in New York.
It is said that the idea of the Empire State Building was born from a competition between Walter Chrysler of Chrysler Corporation and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors, to see who could erect the building higher.
Chrysler had already started work on the famous Chrysler Building, the gleaming skyscraper of 1,31 feet in Midtown Manhattan. Not to be outdone, Raskob assembled a group of well-known investors, including former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith. The group chose the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon Associates to design the building.
The Art-Deco plans, said to have been largely based on the appearance of a pencil, were also builder friendly: the entire building was built in just over a year, under budget (39 million dollars) and much earlier than expected.
During certain construction periods, upon completion, the Empire State Building, with 117 stories, it was the tallest skyscraper in the world.
Depression-era construction employed up to 3400 workers in a single day, most of whom received an excellent rate of pay, especially given the economic conditions of the time.
The new building introduced to New York City a deep sense of pride, desperately needed in the depths of the Great Depression, when many city residents were unemployed and prospects seemed bleak. However, the Depression’s grip on New York’s economy was still evident a year later, when only the 25 percent of the Empire State offices.
In 1972, the Empire State Building lost its title of tallest building in the world to the World Trade Center in New York, which in turn was the tallest skyscraper for a year. Today, the honor belongs to Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower, which rises 2,716 feet to the sky.
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