ConstructMyFuture.com | Students - Cool Stuff -- Top Ten Construction Projects: Empire State Building

Empire State Building
New York, New York, United States of America

Towering over the island of Manhattan, with spectacular views of New York City and the neighboring states of New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts as well as New York, the world famous Empire State Building is cemented in both New York and U.S. History. Built during a time when dreams were in short supply, as a result of the Great Depression, the concept for construction of the building was the center of a competition between Walter Chrysler (Chrysler Corp.) and his rival at General Motors, John Jacob Raskob. Their goal: A chase to the sky to see who could build the tallest building.

With original plans calling for a rather stocky 34-story building, the building went through 16 renditions before Raskob's "pencil shape" idea was adopted. Some say that its final height of 102 stories is the preeminent form on the world's most famous skyline.

The first public announcement about the construction of the building said it would be "close to 1,000 feet" - a deliberately misleading statement - made so that others wouldn't try to construct a building just a few feet higher. Raskob took measures to make sure Chrysler wouldn't steal his thunder, adding a dirigible mooring tower 200 feet above the 86th floor, bringing the building to a total height of 1,250 feet. After one embarrassing landing, during which pedestrians several blocks away were drenched with water from a Navy Blimp's water ballast, the mooring mast was ultimately abandoned.

Still amazing for its time, the rate of construction of the Empire State Building was four and one half stories per week. The Building opened five months ahead of time, and ten percent below the anticipated cost of $50 million. Materials used in its construction included 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone and granite, ten million bricks and 730 tons of aluminum and stainless steel.

Along with serving as an office building to thousands, the Empire State Building has served numerous other purposes. It has acted as a laboratory for radio and wave transmission, a platform for the study of hayfever sufferers, the location of the annual Empire State Building Run-Up (stair climb race), to commemorate the U.S. Bicentennial, to welcome Valentine's Day and Christmas, to signal the World Series victories of the Yankees and the Mets and to announce the election of President Franklin Roosevelt.

So, too, has the building seen a number of oddities and unusual circumstances, including the 1945 crashing of an Army/Air Force B-25 cargo plane into the 79th floor of the building in dense fog - killing more than a dozen people.

The Empire has welcomed many of the world's renowned political and entertainment figures, such as, Fidel Castro, Queen Elizabeth, Nikita Krushchev, the King of Siam and others. Even King Kong chose the building as his personal stage in 1933, and again in 1983. But it was flamboyant New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, who uncovered one of the building's most hidden uses. When his administration was under investigation, he thanked the builders for providing "a place, higher, further removed than any in the world, where some public official might like to come and hide."