The Empire State Building

0:29I'm not giving up. cooked up a new$10 bucket of the day just for you. Monday, 10 wings for$10. Tuesday, eight piece fried chicken for$10. Wednesday, eight tenders for$10. Thursday, 10 wings for$10. Friday, 24 nuggets for... Ooh, you guessed it, didn't you? $10. The$10 bucket of the day deal every weekday only at KFC. It's finger licking good. Prices and participation variable supplies is last not available on third-party ordering platforms. Tax Extra. It's the 25th of March, 1933. A typically sunny afternoon in Los Angeles, California. A young boy named Ray Harryhausen stands open-mouthed before Groman's Chinese Theater, a decadent movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard.

1:20As crowds of tourists mill about, he shuffles along open-mouthed at the pagoda-shaped roof and roaring stone lions guarding the theater's entrance. His mother clutches the tickets they have won to be here tonight, and he follows closely behind with his aunt, passing through the swinging golden doors and into a different world. The foyer is filled with a profusion of hyper-realistic fake bushes. In the midst of the scene, framed by the foliage, an enormous gorilla hunkers down. Ray claps a hand to his mouth when, with a hiss of compressed air, the animatronic creature slowly blinks and opens its mouth wide, showing a wicked set of yellowing teeth.

2:09He had no idea that one of the models used in the film would be on display. Ray's mother ushers him past the creature and into the cozy darkness of the cinema. He settles back into the plush velvet seats, eagerly anticipating the start of the film. But when the deep red curtains on either side of the stage slowly open, instead of the projector starting up, footlights flare to light, illuminating a troop of people in African dress on the stage. Some start to sing, while others begin a whirling dance, moving hypnotically around the stage. Suddenly, Ray's mother tugs at his sleeve and points upwards.

2:55Trapezes have been suspended from the ceiling, and as he watches, a pair of dancers take flight, sailing high over the audience's heads and somersaulting in midair. The crowd applauds as the performance comes to an end, and then, at last, the lights dim. In the darkness, Rey can hear his own heart hammering in anticipation as the projector whirs to life. The theme music swells, and the words, Con, the eighth wonder of the world, appear on the enormous screen. Rey can barely breathe through his excitement. Leaning back in his seat, he falls under the film's spell. Ninety minutes later, the story is reaching its climax.

3:47Rey nervously digs his fingers into the soft armrest of his chair as he watches King Kong scaling an enormous skyscraper. He recognizes it as New York City's newest landmark, the Empire State Building. The soaring vertical lines of windows on its facade fly past as the monster climbs, navigating the building's stepped sides to reach the very top, the film's heroin clutched in one mighty paw. Ray can hardly watch as four small planes circle, each trying to get a shot at the ape, balanced precariously on the Empire State Building summit. On the screen, Kong grips onto the metal spire that tops the tower with one hand, swatting at planes with the other.

4:32After all, where could be more fitting for this giant ape's final battle than the top of the world's tallest building?

4:50The Empire State Building is one of the most recognizable structures in the world, an iconic component of the skyline of New York City. Even for those who have never visited, the building is internationally famous thanks to its starring role in a litany of blockbuster films.

5:10Built during the early 1930s, it was completed at the end of a frenetic period of skyscraper construction in New York, which defined the city for much of the 20th century. For decades, it was the tallest building in the world, a much-coveted title among American businessmen and architects in the early decades of the previous century.

5:35So who was behind this impressive feat of architecture and engineering? How did it become an American cultural icon? And what unexpected events have occurred there in its nearly 100-year lifespan? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of the Empire State Building.

6:06New York City lies on the northeastern coast of the United States, where the Hudson River meets the Atlantic Ocean. It is comprised of five boroughs, with Manhattan occupying a central position. Today, the Empire State Building is a defining feature of Midtown, one of Manhattan's main business districts, on the west side of Fifth Avenue. But a century before the skyscraper is constructed, the plot it now occupies is still farmland. Anthony W. Robbins is an expert on New York's history and architecture and the author of New York Art Decker, a guide to Gotham's Jazz Age architecture. It was originally part of a large tract of land owned by the Astor family.

6:50They were originally from Germany, and they got to New York in the very late 18th century, and they made it very big in the fur trade. But they were also very clever about real estate. They bought a farm, which today we call Midtown Manhattan. By the mid-19th century, they had picked a couple of lots on what is now Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Street. They built two houses for two different members of the Astor family, which by then was an extensive family. John Jacob Astor, the family patriarch, is the first multimillionaire in American history. Two of his grandsons, John Jr. and William, build adjoining homes on Fifth Avenue.

7:29At this point, in the middle of the 19th century, it is the city's most fashionable address. New York is expanding, and what was farmland just a couple of decades before is now a millionaire's role. The street is lined with elaborate mansions owned by the cream of high society, including the famed Vanderbilt family. The two Astor houses become the meeting place for the 400, the name given to New York's social elites. The balls thrown by Mrs. Astor, who marries into the third generation of the family, are particularly legendary.

8:09In 1890, her nephew, William Waldorf Astor, decides to tear down his house, turning it instead into a 13-story hotel. The Waldorf, named after the family's ancestral home in Germany, opens its doors in 1893. But Mrs. Astor, still living next door, is horrified. How can she maintain her privacy under such conditions? Her son, the fourth John Jacob Astor, who will later perish aboard the Titanic, convinces her to move, and the house is converted into a Hotel 2, this one named the Astoria. They decided at a certain point, why are we competing with each other? Let's just call it the Waldorf Astoria with a hyphen.

8:53That's why the hyphen is there. And this became the premier hotel for high society in New York. Any vast gala, debutante ball, anything like that, society events happened in the old Waldorf Astoria. The conversion of the Astor houses into the Waldorf Astoria reflects the rapidly changing face of the city. As the area around Fifth Avenue begins to attract hotels, theaters, and restaurants, the millionaires move their private residences further north, away from the noisy commercial center. Though they still deign to venture to the hotel for any number of balls, galas, and grand dinners.

9:30Until the end of the 1800s, the tallest buildings here have tended to be religious. But now New York City's skyline begins to change. New York is famous for its skyline. Maybe one of the most famous things about it. And it's constantly changing. In the 19th century, the skyline was religious. It was church spires and domes. And that was just sort of the understanding of what the skyline was. And it was something of a shock when that started to change. There was a famous church in Brooklyn Heights that lost its spire in the late 19th century. There was a fire. The pastor of the church said, you know what, we're not going to rebuild the spire because now it would just be competing with the marketplace, with the secular world, and we're just not interested in doing that.

10:18Around the end of the 19th century, the tallest buildings in the world are Cologne Cathedral, whose spire reaches 512 feet, and the Washington Monument at 556 feet tall. Though the Eiffel Tower is almost twice the size of these, as a mere iron structure, it is not habitable, and therefore doesn't qualify as the tallest building. But soon, the construction of early skyscrapers gets underway. Skyscrapers were made possible, really, by two technological factors. The invention of the steel cage, which could halt the structure of the building, and the invention of the elevator, the safety elevator.

10:59And once those were in place, it was possible to just go higher and higher and higher. A succession of towers is built in Manhattan, each competing to reach greater and greater heights. First, the Singer Tower goes up as the new headquarters of the sewing machine company. This is followed by buildings named after the companies that fund them. the 612-foot Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower in 1909 and the 792-foot Woolworth building a few years later. This flurry of construction is a uniquely American trend, and it is concentrated in New York. America was feeling its oath, after World War I especially, and let's see what we can do.

11:42It's a very New York thing, but it's also, I think, a very American thing. After 1920, a new fantasy emerges. to build the world's first 1 ,000-foot skyscraper. In part, the dream is driven by the desire for publicity. Newspapers can't get enough of the ever-taller building projects, meaning that, thanks to their breathless reporting, the towers become adverts for whichever company has commissioned them. A case in point is the race in the late 1920s between the Chrysler Building, built by the car company magnate of the same name, and the new Bank of Manhattan Tower. For months, each vie to be taller.

12:25The competitive nature of these two building projects is heightened by the architects who have been drafted in to design them. William Van Allen is commissioned by Chrysler and H. Craig Severance by the Manhattan Bank. Business partners for 13 years, their clashing personalities led them to part ways. Now, the rivalry between the introverted Van Allen and the gregarious severance plays out on the grand stage of the Manhattan skyline. The original Chrysler building was supposed to be 808 feet tall, which was, what, 16 feet taller than the Woolworth building? Perhaps not much. Bank of Manhattan said something like, well, we're going to be 825, well, we're going to be 850, well, we're going to be 875, well, we're going to be 900.

13:07Did I mention these were grown-ups? And we're going to be 925, and that was Chrysler. Walter Chrysler was not going to lose this battle, And so he arranged for this enormous steel spire, cast in five parts, to be brought secretly to the building and welded together in the building. And then as dawn broke over the metropolis, raised with a winch into the sky to the height of 1 ,046 feet, leaving the Bank of Manhattan and everybody else in the dust, and for the first time taller than the Eiffel Tower.

13:37As the Chrysler and Bank of Manhattan Towers are reaching towards the sky, someone else is preparing to enter the race to be the world's tallest building, and they are playing to win.

13:52During the 1928 election season, a man named John Jacob Raskob acts as campaign manager for the Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith. Smith is well-liked and popular, having been, until recently, the New York State Governor. Unfortunately for him, Smith loses the presidency to the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover. Fortunately, Raskob, a self-made millionaire, is in a position to offer him a consolation prize. There's a story that Raskob and Smith met in the men's room of a hotel where there was some Democratic Party event going on. But they met in the men's room, and Smith was saying, I don't know what I'm going to do now.

14:30I lost the presidential race. I'm not the governor. What am I going to do with myself? And supposedly Smith said, well, don't worry, Al, you can't be president of the country, but I'm going to make you president of the world's tallest building.

14:43Raskob immediately gets to work planning a commercial office building in Midtown. In 1929, he co-founds the Empire State Corporation, and Al Smith is appointed as president on a salary of$50 ,000 a year. But it's far from just an act of charity. Raskob has recognized the sterling economic conditions in America right now and fully intends to cash in on this golden age of prosperity. He was a chief executive of General Motors. He may have considered himself a rival of Chrysler's. That might have played into it. But he saw this as a speculative building operation. He was going to make money from it.

15:22In order to do so and fill it with business tenants when it opens, Raskob needs good publicity. and lots of it. Appointing Al Smith, a popular former governor, the largely ceremonial role of company president, is part of the strategy. Another is the choice of location. Raskob acquires the plot on which sits the Waldorf Astoria, the city's most exclusive hotel. The Fifth Avenue address comes with a sheen of prestige, but thanks to changes in the city, it is now also an ideal location for a large office building. It was really not that great a neighborhood anymore. It had become too commercial. The Waldorf built a second, the current Waldorf Astoria, which is on Park Avenue and 50th Street, so a bit north of that site, and sold the property to the Empire State Building interests because it had really become more of an area for office buildings.

16:12And that's why the Empire State Building is where it is.

16:19The building's name is another plank in John Raskob's advertising strategy. The Woolworth and Chrysler buildings had been named after the companies or men who had built them. The Empire State, by contrast, is a nickname for the state of New York itself. It loudly proclaims that this is a building not for one man or one company, but for everyone who lives here. With the name, the site, and the face of the project all in place, the final piece of the puzzle is the height. Rasgob appoints the architecture firm of Shreve, Lamb and Harman Associates to design his building. They understand the link between building height and PR.

17:02Richmond Shreve wrote in a serious architectural journal, not in the popular press, that given the realities of construction, there comes a point, he said, where it doesn't make economic sense to go any higher because you start to lose money basically on your investment. unless the expense is charged to the advertising budget. Height becomes even more of a concern after the secret spy is raised on the Chrysler building in late 1929. Raskob is now more determined than ever that his building will take the title as the tallest. The original height of the building was just going to be about four feet taller than the Chrysler building.

17:42And the actual building, in the sense of where the floors are, where people work, it stops at the level of the first observatory, the 86th floor observatory. It's really an 86 story building. And that was just four feet taller than the Chrysler building, even than the spire of the Chrysler building. Somebody who was in the office and recounted later the conversation said that Raskob was afraid that if it was only four feet taller than the Chrysler building, that Walter Chrysler would pull a trick like putting a flagpole on top of his Chrysler building and take the title back. And that's when they came up with the idea for what was called the dirigible mooring mast, that enormous thing at the top in shiny aluminum.

18:19The main designer, William Lamb, works intensively throughout 1929 on drawing up the plans for this immense 102-story skyscraper, topped with a 200-foot steel and aluminum apparatus to which airships can theoretically moor. These elements will combine to make the Empire State Building approximately 1 ,250 feet tall. over 380 meters. Regulations introduced in 1916 mean that the building must be stepped, making it narrower at the top than the bottom. So a thinner tower is planned, with stepped sides, that will effectively sit on a five-story base that takes up an entire city block. It will blend in at street level until people walking by glance upwards.

19:16I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the Bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. No, stop. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other. FX is the Bear, the final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+. You want to know what quality sounds like? It sounds like a Ford Super Duty towing up to 40 ,000 pounds before the sun comes up. It sounds like a Ford Mustang doing what a Mustang does. Ford, J.D. Power's number one in initial quality among mainstream brands. Ready, set, Ford. When properly equipped, max towing varies based on cargo, vehicle configuration, accessories, and number of passengers.

20:07For J.D. Power 2026 U.S. initial quality study award information, visit jdpower.com slash awards. Awards based on 2026 model year. Newer models may be shown. Nowadays, the design style of the Empire State Building is described as Art Deco, a style characterized by bold geometric shapes, symmetry, and clean lines. Though it's popular throughout the 1920s and 30s, at the time, architects simply used the word modern or modernistic to describe the skyscrapers of New York, with Art Deco as a term only appearing in 1966. Whatever label is used, the Empire State Building belongs to this new style, although it is more minimalist than some of its counterparts.

20:48William Lamb was the chief designer. When I researched the building for the Landmark Preservation Commission's report back in 1980, I discovered that although he was long gone, his widow was still with us. And I asked her all about how the building came to be designed, and she said, well, you know, Bill never brought work home from the office. But I can tell you that he really hated what we now call Art Deco. His idea of architecture was the austere Romanesque of the cathedrals of the south of France. So he was a very conservative designer. The Empire State Building on the outside, we call it Art Deco.

21:21It's from that period, certainly like the Chrysler Building, but it's much more conservatively designed. Before work on the Empire State Building can begin in earnest, the Waldorf Astoria must be torn down. After a farewell ball, the doors of this New York institution close for the last time. A grand auction is held to dispose of its contents, and then, on the 1st of October, 1929, demolition begins. Dynamite cannot be used for fear of harming adjoining buildings, and so it must be laboriously stripped down. There is little concern about the responsible disposal of materials, though, with wood burned in a nearby swamp and granite and bronze simply dumped into the Atlantic Ocean off the New Jersey coast.

22:11Construction is slated to begin by the end of the year, but by now a range of factors throughout 1929, including rising unemployment and a fall in demand for consumer goods, suggest the economy may not be as buoyant as it was. Savvy investors begin to sell off shares in various companies, triggering a domino effect A panicked frenzy of selling accelerates, and on the 24th of October, known now as Black Thursday, the stock market loses 11 % of its value Similar losses continue over the next few days

22:48In the wake of the crash, the world sinks into an economic depression Factories close, industrial output and international trade slow, and unemployment skyrockets. But the Empire State Building is strangely unaffected. Raskob is not heavily invested in the stock market, and he manages to secure a loan for the construction of his building despite the gloomy economic outlook. By the start of 1930, everything is in place to begin.

23:21The first stage is to build the steel structure that will form the skeleton of the building. Construction starts on March the 17th, 1930, and work progresses swiftly, at a rate of four and a half stories a week. The speed of the project is in part thanks to the availability of labor. Following the Wall Street crash, many building projects have been cancelled, and so there are plenty of qualified workers to be had. Men with a variety of construction backgrounds are required to build this colossal skyscraper. These blue-collar workers include a large number of Italian, Irish, and Scandinavian immigrants.

24:00A sizable minority of the iron workers who build the steel structure are Ganoaghe Mohawk, who come from a reservation near Montreal. The names of many of these men do not survive, but a visual record of their work does.

24:27The End September 1930, a perfect early autumn day in New York City. The sky is a bright blue, the sunlight clear and golden. Lewis Hine, a middle-aged man in a dark suit and hat, sits on a wooden platform with a group of workmen enjoying a smoke break. Unlike him, they are dressed in dusty work overalls, but they chat and laugh companionably together in the open air, shielding their cigarettes from the stiff breeze. Because though it is a warm day, these men are a thousand feet in the air, at the top of the nearly complete steel structure of the Empire State Building. Up here, it tends to get windy.

25:12Hein finishes his cigarette and flicks it off the edge of the building. Levering himself to his feet, he grabs the strap of the bulky camera sitting next to him and gets back to work. Having already made his name as a documentary photographer, he has been hired to take pictures of the men who are bringing the Empire State Building into being. Hein watches as one ironworker steps off the edge of the wooden platform and shuffles along a beam onto the outer corner of the steel structure. Sitting down, he begins tightening bolts with a wrench as long as his forearm, his wrinkled face creased in concentrations.