The Empire State Building

The site at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue held the original Waldorf-Astoria hotel, and the men who bought it — John J. Raskob of General Motors, with the former New York governor Alfred E. Smith as the public face — meant to put the tallest building in the world on it and to do it quickly. Ground was broken in March 1930, five months after the stock market crash. The office demand that justified the tower had already evaporated. They built it anyway.

The construction was a feat of scheduling more than of engineering. Steel came from Pittsburgh mills and was riveted into place within days of leaving the furnace, the frame rising more than four stories a week at its fastest, and the whole building was finished in roughly four hundred and ten days from excavation to the opening on the first of May, 1931. About three thousand men worked the site at the peak. Five were killed, a low figure for the period and one the builders advertised.

Then it sat mostly empty. Through the 1930s the tower was nicknamed the Empty State Building, unable to let its floors in a collapsed office market and kept solvent in large part by the dollar admissions of tourists riding to the observation deck. The mast at the top, sold to the public as a mooring for dirigibles, never worked for that and became a radio antenna instead. On a foggy Saturday morning in July 1945 an Army B-25 bomber lost its bearings and struck the seventy-ninth floor, killing fourteen people. Most of the building reopened for business on Monday.

It was the tallest building in the world for forty years, longer than any other has held the title, until the north tower of the World Trade Center passed it in 1970, and it was the tallest in New York again for more than a decade after 2001. Beyond the arithmetic it became the standard image of the skyscraper itself — the thing King Kong climbed, the shape a child draws when asked to draw a city. It was a speculative bet placed in the worst year in American history for such bets, and it eventually paid.