CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mightiest peak of New York’s mighty skyline, tallest of all tall buildings stands Empire State . . . It stands, a marvel for the sight of men, a challenge to their awe . . . It is done.
—Empire State: A History
On September 9, Al Smith wielded a silver trowel to cement the 4,500-pound cornerstone of the Empire State. As usual, photographers surrounded him, and journalists scribbled down every word he said. It was an underwhelming task given his speech on the history of New York was forty-nine words long: “Eighty years ago, a very short time when one stops to think, this land was part of a farm. More recently it was the site of one of the great hotels of the world; and soon it will be the location of the tallest structure ever built by man.”
Half the crowd of five thousand that Smith addressed was workers. He told them that a copper box had been placed inside the granite cornerstone to commemorate the day’s importance and to inform future generations about the skyscraper and the decade in which it was built. Contained within the box were coins and bills in every denomination from one hundred dollars down to one cent; a history of the Empire State, Inc.; photographs of the architects, builders, and officers of the company; and an edition of the New York Times. During Smith’s speech, the workers goodheartedly jeered him for the way he held the trowel. One asked if the Eighteenth Amendment was included in the copper box.
Smith assured him, “So that there will be no mistake or misunderstanding about it, I declare, and firmly, that I have a right to use this trowel as a member of the union. My dues are all paid and I have my card in my office at 200 Madison Avenue.”
Throughout the ceremony Raskob stood next to Smith. Above him the steelwork was a few days away from being secured at the height where his office would be located. Perhaps Raskob said something, but if so, the press didn’t think it was worth reporting. What the press did find interesting, and had earlier reported, was that within “the black skeleton of a new mammoth of stone and steel, one-fifth higher than anything ever built . . . the honor of occupying the highest office in the world will fall to Democratic National Chairman John J. Raskob, who is a director of the Empire State, Inc. He has leased the entire eighty-fifth floor of the building, beyond which there will be no rentable office space.” Raskob didn’t need to court the press or have his name emblazoned on the skyscraper’s side to know he was the one responsible for its rise. Having the highest private office in the world, decorated in a rich Georgian style, was apparently reward enough. Looking down on Chrysler’s office would be a part of this reward.
Ten days later, the steelworkers set the last steel for the eighty-fifth floor at 1,048 feet in the air, overcoming Chrysler’s victory after a short ten months—and by a margin of two feet. The men on the Empire State unfurled the American flag over the tens of thousands of tons of steel. The New York Times described it as a “flag of triumph.” “You should have heard those workmen cheer,” noted another journalist there to see the workers wave their hats at the crowds below. As always, Smith was on hand to mark the occasion, announcing the construction was almost two months ahead of schedule and that the building’s grand opening was slated for May 1, 1931.
Photographs of the flag raising and the workers at the building’s crown splashed across broadsheets in newspapers from Bayonne, New Jersey, to Huntsville, Alabama, to San Francisco to Honolulu to London and Paris and Johannesburg. The headlines read “A New Monarch” and “New Tower Dwarfs Once Mighty Spires.” A comparison of the tallest structures in the world showed the Empire State towering above the Eiffel Tower and diminutive illustrations of the Chrysler, Woolworth, and Metropolitan Tower crowns. Steelworkers like Neil Doherty and Carl Russell were heralded as having “nerves of steel” and many of their photographs were framed with the Chrysler Building in the distance, looking altogether much shorter. The six men who died during the construction—laborers Giuseppi Tedeschi and L. DeDominicki, steelworker Reuben Brown and carpenters Sigus Andreasen, Frank Sullivan, and A. Carlson—were regarded as “unsung heroes of peace,” their names recorded by the builders with the same respect as those who fought in the Great War. When the largest dirigible in the world, the Los Angeles, flew beside the Empire State in October, papers ran the photograph beside the banner “A King and a Queen Meet.” No description of the building was understated.
On November 18, the last beams for the mooring mast arrived at the site. The mast was supposed to have been erected in October, but the structural engineers delayed the schedule. They had to decide what bracing and wind-load resistance was needed for the airship dock and for the gangplank that would transport passengers into the ship, a quarter-mile high. The weather also proved difficult. Some days the wind blew so hard that the men could barely stand, and other days rain and fog reduced visibility to the point that the top of the steel disappeared from sight. Nonetheless, in the fourteen days since they had begun, they had set the forty-seven-foot, four-story base; completed the one-hundred-five-foot, five-story main shaft; and riveted into place all but the last beams of the fifty-three-foot-high, thirty-two-foot-diameter conical top. In total, the mast was built of six hundred tons of steel, enough to resist a one-hundred-thousand-pound horizontal pull.
Through winds and a constant drizzle, the derrick swung the steel toward the bolter-up who straddled a column and used a hoist cable to hold his balance. The engineer pulled his levers to bring the beam into the exact position in the web of steel, and temporary bolts were stuck in to secure the connection. In three days, Smith would arrive for a ceremony, shoot the last rivet (made of gold) on the one-hundred-and-second story, and watch as the men unfurled a flag; but today, without fanfare or recognition, the steelworkers set the tallest steel in the world. The public celebrations were not to be theirs. They went home with their grade pay as reward.
Al Smith stood next to his two grandchildren, Mary and Arthur, in front of a red-white-and-blue silk ribbon stretched across the Fifth Avenue entrance of the “House that Al Built,” as some called the Empire State. Stone eagles were perched atop the two columns to either side of the thirty-foot-high portal. Ready to get the show moving, the children kicked their feet against the sidewalk, then danced back and forth in front of their grandfather. Fighting for his attention as well was a large crowd who pressed forward, eager to get a smile or simply a glance from the Happy Warrior. Al Smith was dressed for the occasion, wearing a morning coat, bowtie, striped pants, and his ever-present black derby, and flashbulbs popped from the line of photographers around him. Policemen supported by state militia and some private detectives watched over the crowd, ensuring that only the invitees could enter, plus a few journalists.
A ticket to the May 1, 1931, opening of the Empire State was the most difficult invitation to get in town. The event made the openings of the Chrysler Building and Manhattan Company Building look insignificant at best. The board had sent out two hundred engraved invitations. Two days later, everyone had accepted, some of whom pleaded to allow their wives or close friends to attend. This was the event in the city. Raskob sent a note to Walter Chrysler, offering a personal tour of the skyscraper, but Chrysler refused the olive branch, not willing to make himself available to reporters’ questions about what he thought of the Empire State or its mooring mast. Instead, he sent a diplomatic telegram to Smith that read “My congratulations and best wishes on your achievement and the greatest possible success for the Empire State Building.” He reserved further comments, at least publicly, but the defeat must have been debilitating, particularly at the hands of GM’s Raskob, who had outfoxed, outspent, and outdistanced him. It would be several years before the two would even attempt to interact with each other. Although the rumors that he removed his handmade tools from the Chrysler Building’s observation floor because it was no longer tallest turned out to be false, it was telling that in his autobiography he devoted only two pages to his involvement in the skyscraper. He would relegate one of his most remarkable legacies to little more than a footnote—“It belongs to the kids,” he later said. “I haven’t got a nickel in it.” As for Van Alen, his name didn’t even appear in the book. His efforts were anonymously referred to as having been performed by “the architect.”
At 11:15 on the cool, slightly overcast Friday morning, Smith leaned down to Arthur and Mary and said, “All right kids, go to it.” With scissors awkward in their hands, with thousands bottlenecked in the streets around them, with the city and nation eager to unveil this great monument, his grandchildren had trouble bringing the scissors’ edge to ribbon. They slashed but didn’t cut it. Smith moved to their side and snapped the ribbon apart with his hands. After the police pushed wide the doors, the two children tiptoed through the entrance. Halfway across the dark corridor, having marshaled courage with every step, they finally rushed forward into the expansive lobby, their eyes wide as half dollars.
In Washington, D.C., the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, excused himself from a Cabinet meeting, much as Wilson had eighteen years before for the opening of the Woolworth Building. He waited at his desk until the clock struck 11:30 and then pressed a golden telegraph key wired to the Empire State, and the lights brightened throughout the skyscraper. The illumination revealed the large mural opposite the Fifth Avenue entrance. On the dark marble wall the Empire State was outlined in strips of stainless steel set over a map of the northeast United States and bordering Canada. Rays of light shot from the mooring mast, as if it was the sun, and spread across the map. On the ceiling the architects had designed an array of stars and circles with gold and platinum leaf. Compared to the Chrysler Building, the Empire State’s lobby was an exercise in restraint, but it was no less powerful to the guests.
“Come on everybody!” Al Smith waved his derby. “Follow me and we’ll go around to the elevators that will take us up to the eighty-sixth floor, the observatory deck, and when we get there I’ll show you the hills of Westchester, the Narrows, and Newark, anything you like. Come on, let’s go!”
On the eighty-sixth story tables and chairs were spread across the observation floor for a celebratory lunch. Only the mooring mast towered above them, its skeleton structure clothed in stainless steel and flanked by narrow wings at its base (in a sense, the modern version of flying buttresses). “I’d like you to remember you are eating higher up in the air than any human being has ever eaten,” Smith said, waving a sandwich. “There may have been loftier meals on mountain tops or in airplanes but not in buildings. This is the world’s record.” The guests admired the vista more than the food. Many had never traveled by airplane and the view inspired awe.
“There’s Central Park, no bigger than a football gridiron,” said one. Arthur Brisbane, the owner of the first Park Avenue apartment tower commented that from this height his building “looked like a chicken coop.” An elderly lady feared the “rarefied air.” To the north were the low canyons of the Great White Way and then Central Park, its pathways and stretches of water seen in a way that its designer Frederick Law Olmsted never could have imagined. To the northeast, the Chrysler Building and the other Forty-second Street skyscrapers looked Lilliputian compared to the girth of the Empire State under their feet. Directly east, Brooklyn’s shoreline of smokestacks and grain elevators appeared like toy models of industry. To the south, the guests peered down at the Statue of Liberty, the Woolworth Building, and the 40 Wall Street tower. Tugs moved across the bay and around Staten Island, looking no greater than water spiders. To the northwest was the new Hudson River bridge (later named the George Washington Bridge), an engineering marvel in its own right, but from this altitude its steel cables looked no wider than strings.
At noon, with sirens wailing from his motorcade, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Smith’s successor as Governor of New York, arrived by black limousine at the Thirty-fourth Street entrance. He made it in time for the end of lunch and a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” played by a full orchestra. Once the last note struck, Smith stood to read a telegram from Hoover, congratulating him on the completion of the skyscraper and assuring that it would “long remain one of the outstanding glories of a great city.”
Absent from the opening was the man who had ensured the Empire State’s rise: John Jakob Raskob. Happy to enjoy the pride of his accomplishment in solitude, Raskob was aboard the steamer Augusta heading to Italy. Smith briefly mentioned that he had sent a telegram offering his gratitude to the workmen and all involved in the construction. Smith never said what the telegram’s exact words were. Perhaps Raskob made mention of his son William or their friend James Riordan, or of what he and Smith could have done if they had won the 1928 election. It must have been too personal to reveal to the guests and media, so instead Smith launched into a speech about how the Empire State “stands today as the greatest monument to ingenuity, to skill, to brain power, to muscle power, the tallest thing in the world today produced by the hand of man.” He thanked the newspapers, magazines, radio, and moving pictures for helping spread the universal interest in the skyscraper. He thanked the Starrett brothers and Andrew Eken. He thanked the architects, sadly informing his guests that Lamb, too, had set sail for Europe but had also sent a telegram that read: “One day out and I can still see the building.” To avoid the ceremonial backslapping, Lamb had booked a ticket on the Ile de France to leave that morning. While Smith regaled his guests with the Empire State’s greatness, the architect stood on the ship’s deck with his wife and poured two martinis from a cocktail shaker. Three miles from the coast and free from the Prohibition laws, they raised their glasses and Lamb said, “Isn’t this marvelous? Here we are and we don’t have to go to the party and listen to all those speeches.”
Throughout the afternoon many speeches were made. Smith stirred his guests with the vision of the Empire State standing in the skyline for many generations to come. Roosevelt talked of the tremendous service the owners, architects, and builders had rendered and of losing his “sense of proportion” after seeing New York from such a vantage point. He concluded by echoing a sentiment that Raskob held: “This building is needed not only by the city, it is needed by the whole nation.” Mayor Walker joked that Smith had the skyscraper built so that “there might be a place higher, further removed than any other in the world, where some public official might like to come and hide.” Once the laughter quieted down, “Jimmy”—as Smith introduced him—spoke of transcendence and vision and the determination to build such a structure as the Empire State. Shreve followed, giving credit to Lamb for his stunning design and then offering a list of facts and figures about the building. Most notably, he discussed how the skyscraper weighed 600 million pounds, but the pressure on any square inch of the foundation was “as light as that sometimes exerted upon a French heel” on the sidewalk because of the load distribution about the forest of columns. Paul Starrett stood to tell how the Empire State rose over a land once populated with tepees and the cabins of early settlers, of how great progress and great change had brought about this triumph.
Smith concluded the ceremony by sending a return telegram to Hoover “from the highest telegraph station in the world.” Later that day, he hosted a “sky party” with comedians, entertainers, and the broadcast of an original score for a march entitled “The Empire State.” In the many grand speeches, the mooring mast was not mentioned, likely because attempts to negotiate an airship amidst Manhattan’s crosswinds proved too difficult. The mooring mast had made for great news though—Josef Israels commenting that it was his most successful publicity stunt ever—and it provided 200 feet in “World’s Tallest” insurance (or 2151⁄2 feet if one included the staff on which the wind-recording instruments were placed). Nor did they mention that the building was only twenty-three percent rented, half the number they would have wanted at that point. Raskob had defied the odds by following through to completion on the Empire State, but now he faced a struggle to make his skyscraper pay.
What the Empire State lacked in tenants, it made up for in the number of sightseers who rushed to take the elevators to the eighty-sixth- and one-hundred-and-second-story observation posts. In its first month, the building welcomed eighty-four thousand visitors, who each paid one dollar to stand atop what some considered the eighth wonder of the world. Newspaper editors ran headlines like “Highest Structure in the World Is Opened” and “Empire State Building Tops Chrysler Building by Over 200 Feet.” A newspaper in Bohl, Idaho, asked, “What more can man do?” A writer in Kansas City, Missouri, remarked, “Not the Tower of Babel, the Pyramids of Egypt, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa can compare.” Photographs showed the upper reaches of the tower lost in the clouds. Smith informed the press that a chamber at the mooring mast’s top could be fitted with 200-ampere lights and parabolic reflectors to create the tallest lighthouse ever erected. “Nowhere in the world,” he said, “will there be a mariner’s beacon at all comparable to the Empire State Building’s far-reaching pencils of gold.”
Of all the editorials published after the building’s completion, the Lewistown-Democrat News of Montana made the most insightful comment of all: “One wonders where the daring of American architecture and engineering will end. This latest realization of what, a few years ago, would have been held as a most fantastic dream, would seem to mark the limit of height; but so it was thought when each of its preceding skyscrapers was finishing.” Several days later reports spread that for the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, a 1,600-foot skyscraper—more than 350 feet taller than Empire State—was being planned.