Construction went forward even after the crash, saving at least some jobs by employing 3,439 workers during the one year and 45 days it took to build.Īccording to one perhaps apocryphal anecdote, in early October 1929, days before the stock market crash, Raskob pitched the Empire State Building to some of the city’s biggest investors as “a monument to the future,” and an inspiration for the poor in a nation that “reached for the sky with its feet on the ground.” Empire State Building construction workers, 1920s Irving Browning-The New York Historical Society/Getty Images The Empire State Building was the brainchild of John Jakob Raskob, a pioneering American capitalist who became infamous for urging Americans to invest in the stock market two months before the 1929 crash, right around the same time that the Empire State Building plan was announced to the public. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter As possessor of a gold membership card in the bricklayers' union, Alfred Smith performed a thorough job when he laid the cornerstone for the Empire State Building on Fifth avenue and 34th street, New York City, before a crowd of onlookers on Sept. Its opening came during a skyscraper boom in New York City: In the fall of 1929, the 927-foot-tall Manhattan Company Building (now known as 40 Wall Street) beat the 792-foot-tall Woolworth Building to become the world’s tallest building-only to have the 1,046-foot-tall Chrysler Building (temporarily) take the title soon after, thanks to a secretly manufactured 185-ft.-tall spire in the building’s fire shaft that was raised up in 90 minutes. The Empire State Building is an embodiment of the explosion of commercial real estate spurred by the World War I recovery period and booming late 1920s economy, according to Carol Willis, founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum and author of Building the Empire State. The race for the sky High up on the Empire State Building, 1930 Lewis Hine-Alamy That’s bad news for the city’s coffers property taxes are the largest source of revenue for the city, with commercial property taxes leading that category.īut, as office buildings grapple with how to cope after a year of working from home, the Empire State Building’s experience with economic uncertainty may offer a hint of what’s to come: recovery is possible, its story suggests, with a little bit of the faith Roosevelt embraced-and a lot of money. Amid the spread of COVID-19, many of the building’s tenants, like those of other office buildings around the city and world, have closed their offices: The New York Times reports that 14% of offices in midtown Manhattan were vacant as of December 2020. Bettmann Archive/Getty Imagesīut that anniversary comes amid a situation that would have been familiar to those early boosters. At the time, there were 88 stories finished. An aerial photograph of The Empire State Building from October 1930. At 1,250 feet to the 102nd-floor observatory-and another 200 to the top of the broadcast tower-the Empire State Building may no longer be the tallest building in the New York City skyline, but it’s arguably still the most recognizable skyscraper in the world. The Great Depression had already begun a massive new office building could have been an ill-timed waste of money.īut Roosevelt’s words proved prescient, as the building made it through the Depression, through the Second World War and all the way to its 90th birthday this week. ![]() ![]() The future President’s comments came at a moment when not everyone would have had that faith. Smith points out the sights of the city to Governor Roosevelt from an Empire State Building observation floor on May 1, 1931. The new skyscraper, he said, was a symbol of “vision and faith”: vision, because only those who looked to the future could have imagined such a project, and faith, in believing the work would be “fully justified in the days to come.” Former Governor Alfred E. Roosevelt, then Governor of New York, spoke at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for what was then the world’s tallest building, the Empire State Building. On May 1, 1931, an “awestruck” Franklin D.
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