Description of the attraction
It is impossible to be in New York and not visit the Empire State Building. The most famous skyscraper in the world has a memorable appearance, an excellent observation deck and a fantastic story.
The 102-storey skyscraper at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street was created by two legendary businessmen - Pierre Samuel Dupont and John Jacob Raskob (headed by DuPont and General Motors). Having bought a plot in Manhattan, they joined the battle for the tallest building in the world. The pace of the design was incredible: the architect William Lam completed the drawings in two weeks. In January 1930, they began to dig a foundation pit, in March - erect structures.
3400 workers, including the Mohawk Indians (they have no fear of heights), erected the building at an amazing speed: four and a half floors a week. In total, construction took fifteen months. Initially, the building was four feet taller than the nearby Chrysler Building - but what if the competitors put up a spire at the last minute and win the race? John Raskob decided that the skyscraper "needed a hat" - a mast was erected on the Empire State Building for mooring airships.
On May 1, 1931, President Hoover, pressing a symbolic button in Washington, officially energized the skyscraper, and it lit up with light. But it was a light in the desert of despair - the Great Depression broke out in the country. The day after the opening of the building 443.2 meters high, a laid-off worker jumped from it, taking suicide.
Until the fifties, the Empire State Building was undergoing trials. There were few tenants, the building was half empty. On July 28, 1945, on a foggy day, a B-25 bomber crashed into a skyscraper, losing its course. Thirteen people died, 19-year-old cleaning lady Betty Lou Oliver collapsed in an elevator from the 75th floor and survived.
Suicides fell in love with the building - so, on May 12, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Evelyn McHale, who had kissed her fiance for the last time a few hours earlier, rushed from the 86th floor. The girl's body crashed into a UN limousine. In the picture taken by a photography student, she seems to be asleep, clutching a pearl necklace in her hand. This photo is one of the most famous images of the 20th century, and was reproduced in his works by Andy Warhol.
The economic boom has revived the building, which houses 85 floors of office space with a total area of more than 200,000 square meters. The mooring mast was not useful for airships: strong winds would not have allowed these giants to moor. In 1952, the mast was replaced with antennas, and almost all FM stations in New York broadcast from here. The interiors of the building are decorated in the Art Deco style, the ceilings in the hall are covered with magnificent paintings depicting the age of machines. In the dark, the skyscraper is illuminated with colored spotlights, and the color combinations correspond to various solemn dates. From the local observation deck, you can see the whole of New York; over the past decades, it has been visited by 110 million people.
The Empire State Building has become an iconic phenomenon of American culture: in the films "King Kong" of 1933 and 2005, a giant ape fights on top of it with airplanes, in the film "The Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow", an airship still sticks to the mooring mast "Hindenburg III", in "Independence Day" the building is destroyed by aliens.
The skyscraper remained the tallest in the world for 42 years, until it was surpassed by the North Tower of the World Trade Center in 1972 (which collapsed on September 11, 2001). Now it is only the twenty-second highest in the world. But the charm of a strict stone "pencil" belonging to an irrevocably bygone era captures everyone who stands with their heads raised at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street.
