Empire State Building Quotes

“Following this formula, John Jacob Astor, who arrived in America the classic penniless immigrant in 1792, rose to become the “landlord of New York” and the richest man in America by the time he died in 1848.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“A force of two hundred cleaners—160 women, and forty men—reported to Brown. There were cleaners on duty twenty-four hours a day, but the bulk of the janitorial work was done after normal business hours. All the floors were cleaned at least once a day.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The day-to-day running of the Empire State Building fell to the building’s manager, Chapin L. Brown, who operated as if he were the mayor of a small town. Brown supervised about 350 service employees (full tenancy would have called for one thousand), including fire and sanitation departments and a police force, as well as elevator operators and mechanics, engineers, plumbers and pipe fitters, electricians, painters, cabinetmakers, a house smith, and a staff for the general welfare of the workers, which included a nurse.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Time and time again the mast has been struck by flashes with a potential of 10 million volts, only to be dissipated by the intricate steel structure into the ground.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The first major lightning bolts to hit the building were reported in August 1931. One particularly fierce bolt that was accompanied by “detonations” produced a great flash of fire seen as far as a mile away.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The maintenance was worth every penny. When Woolworth built his tower he would have been content if it had only paid for itself in advertising, but the observatory fooled him. Visitors paying 50 cents apiece to view the metropolitan panorama from the top contributed over $125,000 a year for seventeen years. The Woolworth Building attracted over five hundred visitors a day, the Statue of Liberty attracted more than a thousand, but the Empire State observatories outshone them all. The Empire State Building quickly became the sight-seeing goal of New York’s millions of visitors. It was to New York what the Eiffel Tower was to Paris.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“After the ribbon-cutting ceremony, at precisely eleven-thirty, the lights suddenly went on throughout the entire building, and Smith used an occasional silver key to open the doors. The magic act with the lights did not yet qualify as a tradition but at least had a precedent. In 1913, Frank W. Woolworth had inveigled President Woodrow Wilson into pressing a button from the White House that would turn on the Woolworth Building’s lights, and Smith had President Herbert Hoover do the same. On the stroke of the half hour, Hoover took a break from a cabinet meeting to flick the switch in Washington.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Opening day, May 1, 1931, was a cool day with a slight haze, but the chill and less-than-ideal visibility did little to restrain Al Smith’s exuberance for the consecration of the house.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The building, scheduled to open May 1, 1931, could have opened in April. To commemorate the completion of the building, about sixty subcontractors tendered a dinner on April 16 “to celebrate the completion of an enduring monument, a towering milestone on the road of human progress.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“As the building climbed, cafeterias were built to keep up with the height, until there were finally five floors with cafeterias—the third, ninth, twenty-fourth, forty-seventh, and sixty-fourth.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The caption: 42 MEN KILLED CONSTRUCTING THE NEW EMPIRE STATE BUILDING…“THE BUILDING WAS COMPLETED ON TIME.” Starrett responded by going public with the figures: With an average of six hundred men employed in the demolition of the Waldorf-Astoria and with five thousand men employed on the construction of the building, five workers were killed. One worker was hit by a truck as he was sawing a plank; the second ran into a blast area; the third stepped off a scaffold; the fourth fell down an elevator shaft; and the fifth was struck by a hoist. In”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“A few days later, workmen standing 1,050 feet above the sidewalks of New York raised a large Stars and Stripes—the “flag of triumph,” said Times man Poore—to celebrate the topping out of the steelwork a few days before. The workers had placed steel at the record rate of twenty-four hundred tons a week, they had completed their end of the contract in six months—twenty-three days ahead of the appointed date—and raising the flag atop the eighty-fifth floor was as powerful a symbol to them as the raising of the flag over Iwo Jima’s Mount Surabachi would be to a later generation of marines. They had won a major battle, and a score of workers waved their hats from their slender perch on the roof beams to celebrate. As one newspaper said, “You should have heard those workmen cheer.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The logistics and assembly of the parts, as directed by Eken, were a testament to the way Starrett Bros. & Eken got things done. The components that made up the building came from factories, foundries, and quarries from far and wide—the limestone from Indiana, steel girders from Pittsburgh, cement and mortar from upper New York State, marble from Italy, France, and England, wood from northern and Pacific Coast forests, hardware from New England. Hundreds of other things from equally distant points of manufacture or origin were delivered to the building site and assembled into one great structure, each fitting into its proper place as detailed in the architect’s plans.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Engineers could be fairly certain that when they scratched Midtown Manhattan’s surface they would encounter an igneous rock called Manhattan schist, the rock whose strength made for Manhattan’s greatness.6 The Empire State Building was lucky. They hit a solid stratum of rock at thirty-eight feet, and kept digging until they were at the forty-foot mark. By the first week in March 1930, an astonishing 28,529 truckloads of earth, rock, steel, and debris had been carted away.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The steel frame and great thick walls proved so staunchly built that before the Waldorf-Astoria was finally razed and the last broken fragments of its wall had been removed, $900,000 had been spent.3 Demolition was a risky business, not only for the workers but for passing pedestrians as well, and insurance on a job like the Waldorf-Astoria accounted for about 35 percent of the total cost.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Buildings built in the previous thirty years were built of firmer stuff and had become more difficult to demolish, and the cost of reconditioning salvage had risen.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Before Starrett Bros. & Eken could start work on what would be the world’s tallest building, they had to tear down what had been the city’s largest hotel, and everyone agreed it would be no easy task.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The scheme had hardly been given the careful forethought the reporter and his friend assumed, and the dirigible mooring mast would be the folly of follies, perhaps the looniest building scheme since the Tower of Babel. Nobody knew with any degree of certainty whether it would work, and when Smith returned from Washington, where he had discussed the feasibility of the mooring mast with the secretary of the navy and the military’s leading dirigible expert, Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, chief of the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, Smith should have had an inkling that it would not.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The primary purpose of the platform, however, was not so much to wow visitors with the view but to serve as the boarding area for the anticipated dirigible passengers.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The decision to use stone instead of bricks for the façade of the Empire State Building seemed eminently sensible. Facing a building in brick was relatively slow and inefficient, and it was becoming increasingly more expensive. If limestone was used for the entire building, said Paul Starrett, it would add immeasurably to its beauty, and he did not think it would be much more expensive. Raskob asked Starrett how much more he thought it would cost to use limestone all the way up. Starrett had the figures at the ready. Raskob thought the difference in cost was reasonable enough, and moved that limestone be used for the”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Less than two weeks after the selection of the architects had been made, the directors awarded the building contract to Starrett Bros. & Eken.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“When asked how long they thought the Empire State job would take to build, Paul Starrett said that they could tear down the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and finish the new building in eighteen months. He also said that their fee for all this would be insignificant compared with the amount of money the corporation would save by having the construction completed in such a short time.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“In 1929 the firm received their largest project to date, the one that might have won the day for them on the Empire State project—they built the Bank of Manhattan Building at 40 Wall Street, which was pitted against Chrysler in the race for the world’s tallest. The foundations were started in May 1928, before the site was entirely cleared; less than a year later, the bank moved in. The seventy-story, 927-foot-high building was completed in eleven months.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“During World War I, Paul Starrett formed Starrett & Goss, which built steamships for the government. By the time Starrett Bros. & Eken was formed in 1922, Paul had already built Macy’s to the designs of De Lemos & Cordes; Pennsylvania Station and the Main Post Office to the designs of McKim, Mead & White; and Warren & Wetmore’s Biltmore Hotel, where the meeting with the Empire State’s directors would decide their fate.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“They needed contractors whose reputations were unsullied, builders who were honest and could get the job done as promised. The directors asked five builders to appear before them in Smith’s office in the Biltmore Hotel to discuss the job and to make proposals.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“There is a clarity of design that contributes mightily to the building’s satisfaction. The harmony of design, with all the elements balanced in true classical form, is sheer elegance. At every stage horizontally and vertically there is a beginning, middle, and end, an introduction to the theme, a development of the theme, a recapitulation of the theme.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The basic plan of the building was reached in four weeks.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The core of the building would be used to house the requisite utilities; the rentable office space, assured of light, would surround the core.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The idea that finally turned the tide for the architects, the notion that made everything fall in place, was to set the elevators in a central core, which would allow the Empire State Building to provide rentable space that was well lit. From that point forward, they were home free—the solutions were at hand.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“In September 1929, just as the architects were getting down to work on this unprecedented building program, management set a date that seemed unrealistically early—May 1, 1931. That date gave the architects a year and nine months in which to design the building and to oversee its construction.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark