Empire State Building Opens: World's Tallest Tower Rises

Construction workers called it the "Empty State Building." When the 102-story tower opened on May 1, 1931, the Great Depression had hollowed out Manhattan's commercial real estate market so thoroughly that only 23 percent of its office space was rented. The tallest building in the world was, for its first decade, a magnificent monument to terrible timing. The project was conceived as a race. Walter Chrysler was building his art deco tower at Lexington and 42nd, and former General Motors executive John Jakob Raskob wanted something taller. "How high can you make it so that it won't fall down?" Raskob reportedly asked his architect, William Lamb of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon. The answer was 1,250 feet, later extended to 1,454 feet with a mooring mast intended for dirigibles. The construction pace was staggering. Workers demolished the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and erected the steel frame in just 410 days, averaging four and a half floors per week. A workforce of 3,400 men, many of them Mohawk ironworkers from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal, assembled 60,000 tons of steel while working without safety nets. Five workers died during construction. President Herbert Hoover pressed a button in Washington to turn on the building's lights during the opening ceremony, and Al Smith, the building's president and former New York governor, escorted his grandchildren to the 86th-floor observation deck. The mooring mast proved impractical after violent updrafts made airship docking impossible; it was eventually converted into a television broadcast antenna. The building operated at a loss for its first two decades, kept financially afloat largely by revenue from the observation deck. The Empire State Building held the title of world's tallest structure for 41 years, until the World Trade Center surpassed it in 1972.