Empire State Building facts and history: 410 days, the race with Chrysler, the airship mast, the 1945 bomber crash, King Kong and the numbers

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets in Manhattan was built between March 1930 and April 1931, in 410 days, and opened on 1 May 1931 as the tallest building in the world, 1,250 feet (381 m) to the top of its mooring mast and 1,454 feet (443 m) with the antenna added in 1950, a record it held for nearly forty years until the World Trade Center in 1970. It was the project of John J. Raskob, the financier of General Motors and the Democratic Party, and Al Smith, the former governor of New York, designed by William Lamb of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon in two weeks from a pencil, and built by 3,400 workers at a rate of four and a half storeys a week in the first year of the Depression, at a cost of 41 million dollars, half what was budgeted, with five deaths. It stood mostly empty for a decade, was hit by a bomber in 1945, was climbed by King Kong in 1933, and takes about four million visitors a year to its two observatories. Below: the site and the men, the design and the race for height, the construction, the mast, the empty years, the crash, the building's life since, the numbers and the stories, with its style in Art Deco architecture and its ancestry in the first skyscraper.

The site and the men

The site was the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, built by the feuding Astor cousins in 1893 and 1897, which had moved uptown to Park Avenue; in 1929 it was bought by a syndicate for 16 million dollars, and the syndicate collapsed in the crash of October, when John Jakob Raskob, who had made General Motors a giant with Pierre du Pont's money and had just run Al Smith's campaign for president, took it over with du Pont and made Smith president of the Empire State Inc. corporation at 50,000 dollars a year. Raskob wanted a building taller than Walter Chrysler's, which was rising on Lexington Avenue and had just beaten the Bank of Manhattan tower at 40 Wall Street; the story is that he took a thick pencil from a drawer, stood it on end, and asked the architect William Lamb, "Bill, how high can you make it so that it won't fall down?" Lamb, of the firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, produced the design in two weeks, based on his own Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem and the Carew Tower in Cincinnati, and the plan went through fifteen versions, from 50 storeys to 85 and, with the mast, 102. Empire State Building.

The race for height

In 1929 three towers were racing: 40 Wall Street, whose architect Craig Severance announced 927 feet and victory; the Chrysler Building, whose architect William Van Alen, Severance's former partner, secretly built a 185-foot spire inside the fire shaft and raised it through the roof in October 1929 to reach 1,046 feet, the first building taller than the Eiffel Tower; and the Empire State, whose 85 storeys at 1,050 feet would beat Chrysler by only four. Raskob, unwilling to be overtaken by a later Chrysler spire, added in December 1929 a 200-foot "mooring mast" for airships, bringing the height to 1,250 feet, with the argument that transatlantic zeppelins would tie up at the top and passengers would come down a gangplank to the 102nd floor; the mast was announced with a straight face and doubled as the observation deck. The building was thus 1,250 feet, 102 storeys, and would be the tallest in the world by 200 feet whatever Chrysler did. The style, in which Lamb set back the tower from a five-storey base with the limestone and granite facade rising in vertical strips of nickel-chrome steel between the windows, was Art Deco at its plainest, "a giant pencil".

410 days

• Demolition. The Waldorf-Astoria came down between October 1929 and March 1930, its debris dumped at sea; excavation began on 22 January 1930 and the first steel columns were set on 17 March 1930, St Patrick's Day.
• The schedule. The builders, Starrett Brothers and Eken, planned the whole job as an assembly line: steel from Pittsburgh's mills arrived at the site 80 hours after leaving the furnace, was hoisted straight from the trucks and riveted in place, with 60,000 tons in all, 210 columns at the base; a narrow-gauge railway on each floor carried bricks and materials; the workers ate at cafeterias on the 24th, 47th and 64th floors so as not to lose time coming down.
• Speed. The steel frame rose at four and a half storeys a week, and in one ten-day stretch in 1930 fourteen and a half; the frame was topped out at the 86th floor on 19 September 1930, 23 weeks after the first column, with a flag; the mast followed by November. The whole exterior, ten million bricks, 200,000 cubic feet of limestone and 6,400 windows, was finished by the end of 1930, and the interior by April 1931, with 3,400 workers at the peak.
• The workers. Ironworkers, many of them Mohawk from Kahnawake near Montreal, who had worked high steel since the 1880s, and immigrants, Irish, Italian, Scandinavian, in the first winter of the Depression; the photographer Lewis Hine documented them for the owners, hanging from a crane basket. Five men died officially, from falls and a blast, against a press estimate of a death a floor that never happened.
• Opening. 1 May 1931, when President Hoover pressed a button in Washington that turned on the lights, and Al Smith cut the ribbon with his grandchildren; the building had taken one year and 45 days from the first steel, and the cost, 40.9 million dollars including the land, was half the 60 million budgeted because Depression prices fell.

The mast and the empty years

The mooring mast never worked: the Navy's airship men said that an airship tied at the nose at 1,250 feet would swing like a pendulum in the updraughts between the skyscrapers and that its ballast, dropped to hold the height, would fall on the streets, and the two attempts in September 1931, a private blimp that held for three minutes and a Goodyear blimp that delivered a bundle of newspapers by rope, ended the idea; the mast became the 102nd-floor observatory and, from 1950, the base of the television antenna. The building opened into a city with no tenants: 23 per cent was let in 1931, and it stayed less than half occupied through the 1930s, earning its keep from the observatories, which took a million dollars a year, more than the rents, while New Yorkers called it the "Empty State Building"; Raskob and du Pont carried it at a loss until it filled after the war and made its first profit in 1950. In 1951 it was sold for 51 million dollars, then the highest price paid for a building.

The 1945 crash and King Kong

On Saturday 28 July 1945, at 9:40 in the morning, in fog, a B-25 Mitchell bomber of the Army Air Forces flying from Bedford, Massachusetts, to Newark, whose pilot Lieutenant William Smith had been told to land at LaGuardia and had chosen to continue, flew into the north face of the building at the 79th floor at 200 miles an hour; the fuselage went into the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council, one engine went through the building and out the south side to land on the roof of a building across 33rd Street, and the other fell down a lift shaft; 14 people died, the three airmen and eleven in the building, and the fire, the only high-rise fire at that height ever controlled, was out in forty minutes. Betty Lou Oliver, a lift operator, survived a fall of 75 floors in a lift whose cables had been cut, a record that stands; the building opened for business on the Monday. In "King Kong" of 1933 the ape climbs the building with Fay Wray and is shot down by biplanes from the mast; the film was made with an 18-inch model of Kong and a model of the building, and the scene has been the building's advertisement for ninety years, re-enacted by a giant inflatable Kong on the mast for the 50th anniversary in 1983, which tore. The building has appeared in about 250 films.

The building since

• 1950–53. A 222-foot television antenna added, bringing the height to 1,454 feet; the tower has broadcast most of New York's stations since, and after 2001 nearly all of them.
• 1964. The first floodlighting of the top for the World's Fair; from 1976 the colours, red white and blue for the bicentennial, and since then a calendar of colours for holidays, causes and teams, since 2012 with LEDs that can show 16 million colours and moving patterns.
• 1970–73. The World Trade Center passed it in height; the Sears Tower in 1974. After 11 September 2001 it was again the tallest in New York until One World Trade Center in 2012.
• 1986. National Historic Landmark; the American Society of Civil Engineers had named it one of the seven wonders of the modern world in 1994.
• 2009–2011. A 550-million-dollar retrofit that replaced all 6,514 windows with insulated glass rebuilt on site, cut energy use by 38 per cent, and rebuilt the observatories, with a new entrance and museum on the second floor opened in 2019.
• Owners. Raskob's estate to 1951; Prudential and Harry Helmsley from 1961, with the Malkin family, who took control in 2002 after a struggle with Leona Helmsley and Donald Trump; since 2013 the Empire State Realty Trust, publicly traded.

The numbers and visiting

• Height. 1,250 feet (381 m) to the top of the mast, 102 floors; 1,454 feet (443 m) to the antenna tip; the tallest building in the world 1931–70, the tallest in New York 2001–12, the seventh tallest in the city today.
• Time. 410 days from the first steel to the opening, 1 year and 45 days; 20 months from demolition to opening.
• Materials. 57,000 tons of steel, 10 million bricks, 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone, 730 tons of aluminium and stainless steel, 6,514 windows, 73 lifts, 1,872 steps to the 103rd floor.
• Weight. 365,000 tons; floor area 2.8 million square feet; about 15,000 people work in it.
• Cost. 40.9 million dollars with the land, 24.7 million for the building; about 500 million today.
• Deaths. Five in construction; fourteen in the 1945 crash; about 30 suicides since 1931, with fences on the decks since 1947.
• Lightning. Struck about 25 times a year; the mast is the city's lightning rod.
• Visiting. The 86th-floor open deck and the 102nd-floor glass deck, by timed ticket, about 4 million visitors a year, open from 9 am to past midnight; the second-floor museum with the models, the Kong hands and the airship story; the annual Run-Up of 1,576 steps to the 86th floor since 1978, with a record of 9 minutes 33 seconds. Sunset and the hour after are the busiest; the first hour and the last are the emptiest.

Versions and theories

• A worker died for every floor. A press guess in 1930; the official count is five, and the builders' safety record was a boast at the time.
• The mast was for airships. Announced as such; built to beat Chrysler; used twice, for minutes, and then never. The gangplank at the 102nd floor was real.
• Lewis Hine's photographs are of the Empire State. Yes, all of them; the famous "Lunch atop a Skyscraper" of 1932 is of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, not this one.
• The bomber crash proved the building could survive a plane. A B-25 weighed 10 tons and carried little fuel; the 767s of 2001 were 20 times heavier and full. The comparison was made in 2001 and does not hold.
• Betty Lou Oliver's fall. Real: the severed cables coiled in the shaft bottom and the air cushioned the car; she was back at work five months later.
• The building sways. About an inch and a half in a 110-mile-an-hour wind, less than most towers; it was built stiff, and the frame is so heavy that it does not move in ordinary weather.
• Raskob's pencil. The story of the pencil stood on end is from Lamb's own account and is probably true; the fifteen versions of the design are in the archive.

Open the sections: buildings by style, ancient temples of the world, all articles.