On this day in 1931, President Herbert Hoover officially
dedicates New York City’s Empire State Building, pressing a button from the
White House that turns on the building’s lights. Hoover’s gesture, of course,
was symbolic; while the president remained in Washington, D.C., someone else
flicked the switches in New York.
The idea for the Empire State Building is said to have been
born of a competition between Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation and
John Jakob Raskob of General Motors, to see who could erect the taller
building. Chrysler had already begun work on the famous Chrysler Building, the
gleaming 1,046-foot skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. Not to be bested, 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 based
in large part on the look of a pencil, were also builder-friendly: The entire
building went up in just over a year, under budget (at $40 million) and well
ahead of schedule. During certain periods of building, the frame grew an
astonishing four-and-a-half stories a week.
At the time of its completion, the Empire State Building,
at 102 stories and 1,250 feet high (1,454 feet to the top of the lightning
rod), was the world’s tallest skyscraper. The Depression-era construction
employed as many as 3,400 workers on any single day, most of whom received an
excellent pay rate, especially given the economic conditions of the time. The
new building imbued New York City with a deep sense of pride, desperately
needed in the depths of the Great Depression, when many city residents were
unemployed and prospects looked bleak. The grip of the Depression on New York’s
economy was still evident a year later, however, when only 25 percent of the
Empire State’s offices had been rented.
In 1972, the Empire State Building lost its title as
world’s tallest building to New York’s World Trade Center, which itself was the
tallest skyscraper for but a year. Today the honor belongs to Dubai’s Burj Khalifa
tower, which soars 2,717 feet into the sky.
history.com
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