A newly finished restoration of the Empire State Building gives us the chance to again appreciate the structure’s glittering brilliance
The Empire State Building is an expression of Jazz Age exuberance so familiar we can easily miss it. Be sure to look at it now, though, because the building has never appeared brighter. A bottom-to-top restoration, 15 years in the making, has just wrapped up at the circular observation level on the 102nd floor and returned the building to its original wonder.
And what a wonder it is. An encrustation of obsolete radio equipment and dunnage has been removed from around its spire, or “mooring mast,” and relocated to the single top antenna spike. The sky-high work has revealed the full glistening form of this faceted glass lantern and its four aluminum wings. Cleaned, sealed and repainted, the building now never stops shining, again able to reflect sunlight by day just as it glows from inner illumination by night.
The final, astonishing masterpiece of the Roaring ’20s, the Empire State Building opened in the Depression-plagued 1930s as “the eighth wonder of the world.” Its appeal has always seemed historic, not just of one particular age but one for the ages. Ninety years ago, returning to New York for the first time since the Crash, F. Scott Fitzgerald observed this “last and most magnificent of towers” as rising “from the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx.” From the moment it was first sketched out to its completion just 18 months later, on up to the travails of the present day, Empire State has been there to elevate us out of our street-level depressions.
The term “mooring mast” should suggest the particular magic of Empire State’s design. When a former General Motors executive named John J. Raskob wanted to construct a singular office building at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, he looked to the architect William Lamb to design a tower that would rise with unprecedented speed from this central plot of Manhattan Island. Lamb edited his tower back to the essentials of machine-made form. The design cut every corner but the ones that mattered. An army of actual skywalkers would slot in 600 million pounds of prefabricated steel, limestone, and chrome-nickel panels. Light, strength and lift were everything as the enterprise aimed to become the tallest building in the world.
The office-level floors of Empire State wear these considerations right on their face. The building’s smooth skin has little want of setbacks or shadows. Its minimal articulations balance height and mass in classical proportions with only the most distilled Art Deco details. What matters are the window lines of glistening metal all connecting, all pointing up.
But the tower as originally conceived was only part of what we see today. Lamb’s initial design ended with a flat roof at the 86th-floor observation deck. That was just a few feet taller than the spire of the Chrysler Building completed half a mile away. So Raskob thought his building could use a hat. Al Smith, the former governor of New York and effervescent president of the enterprise, suggested they make it a mooring mast for dirigibles. With a new observation floor right at the top of the mast, the late addition raised the building by an additional 200 feet to its final 1,250-foot designation, securely making it the tallest building in the world, a title it held for 40 years.
The mooring mast “was a proposal akin to a fantasy of Jules Verne, ” writes John Tauranac in his definitive 1995 history of Empire State, since the idea of an airship tying up a mile above Fifth Avenue and safely handling passengers was impractical at best.
No matter. Smith announced he was “building with an eye to the future.” Shreve, Lamb and Harmon set about designing the mast and strengthening the building’s entire steel structure to withstand the forces of its future use for aviation.
What resulted was the iconic form we see today. Empire State comes together not as a streamlined sculpture like the Chrysler Building or a cathedral of commerce like the Woolworth Building but as a monumental set of working parts. Like that wonder of the ancient world, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, Empire State rises as a plinth to support a beacon for all to see. Its 2.8 million square feet of office space continues to attract a range of tenants. Nineteen radio stations and five television stations now broadcast from the antenna spike that was first added in the 1950s. Across the city grid and far beyond, the building remains a light in the clouds and an anchor in the sky.
Just the other day I felt compelled to take a ride to the top. On the way up, a full new floor of exhibits beautifully honors the legacy of the building’s construction and culture. Walking into the open air of the 86th-floor observation deck, the city seems to breathe together. Up in the rarefied aerie of the 102nd floor observatory, new floor-to-ceiling windows reveal the panorama of the possibilities below.
“As I stood there ’twixt earth and sky,” Helen Keller wrote of her own visit in 1932, “I saw a romantic structure wrought by human brains and hands that is to the burning eye of the sun a rival luminary.” Nine decades on, the Empire State Building still lights the imagination as it calls us to safe harbor.
