Quotes from John Tauranac

was not that the building won fame for its style, although the WPA Guide said that it had a "directness of expression evident in few commercial buildings," it's because working with General Motors, Shreve and Lamb got to know John J. Raskob of General Motors, who would later call upon them to design the Empire State Building.

The man primarily responsible for the Empire State Building was not trained as an architect, city planner, or engineer. He was not in the construction business, nor in the real estate business. His only direct dealings in real estate were of a personal nature—a mansion here and an apartment or summer home there—until he made the momentous decision to build the world's tallest building.

Long shadows cast by skyscrapers create another problem. The longest shadow cast by a building is measured at 3 P.M. on the winter solstice, December 21.2 At that time, the shadow is 4.4 times the height of the building on the latitude of New York City. The shadow cast by a building as high as the 1,250-foot-high Empire State Building is longer than a mile.

John J. Raskob was the money man. Born in Lockport, New York, in 1879, when he was twenty-one he found himself working for Pierre S. du Pont as a bookkeeper. Raskob had a quick and agile mind, and soon became du Pont's secretary.

A stock that Raskob liked was General Motors. Hearing in 1913 that GM founder William C. Durant found himself in financial difficulties that forced him to borrow $15 million from banks, Raskob decided that GM was a good buy. He soon became bullish on GM in particular and the automotive business in general, and he induced Pierre du Pont to invest heavily in GM stock.

Du Pont bought the leases on the Waldorf-Astoria from the Boldt estate in 1918 and created the Waldorf-Astoria Realty Corporation to operate the hotel.

Du Pont became a major shareholder, and, after a reorganization, Pierre du Pont became GM chairman, with Raskob his vice president and chairman of the finance committee.

Du Pont had acquired only the rights to the hotel; in 1925 he bought the property from the Astors and promptly replaced some non-revenue-producing spaces with seventeen shops configured so that their entrances fronted on Fifth Avenue or Thirty-fourth Street, their back entrances on Peacock Alley.

The Waldorf's wide corridors and heavily decorated public rooms were démodé. Worse, they used up valuable space without a return. The Waldorf-Astoria found itself an anachronism—it was out of time, out of place, and plumb out of luck.

first marriage performed in the tower was in April 1932, when Doris Averell Welchangs, of Springfield, Massachusetts, married William Holmes, of Weehawken, New Jersey. They chose what they described as "the nearest place to heaven they could find

By the beginning of August, a rumor was flying that Chatham Phenix was not going to develop the site, as originally planned, but had found prospective developers who would. The link between the site and the developers was the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which had made the loan to Brown. As a Met Life board member, Al Smith had been intimate with the details of the loan to Brown and recognized the desirability of the property

Raskob, the son of an Irish mother and a cigar-maker father of Alsatian descent, was a Roman Catholic from a large family, and he would remain a devout Roman Catholic all his life. In 1928 he was a member of the Knights of Malta and a Knight of St. Gregory, and he was generous to the Church. One

Smith was elected governor of New York State.

John J. Raskob was likewise floundering. Although he had enough money to do nothing more than laze about in the Palm Beach sun, he was not happy unless his time was fully occupied.

In September 1929, the Empire State Building Corporation rented space for its executive offices at 200 Madison Avenue. The building, on the west side of Madison

firm of Shreve & Lamb had been retained as the architects of the Empire State on September 9, 1929, by a vote of the board

there was hardly any economic justification for going much higher than the originally planned fifty-five or sixty-five stories on the Empire State site. And Shreve knew that. Raskob, however, wanted something taller still. A proposed building of seventy, even eighty stories would make news and bring his project publicity

The deal fell through, but what emerged was Raskob's desire to outdo Chrysler in his new real estate venture. Raskob wanted a building that would literally and figuratively put Walter Chrysler's building in the shade. But nobody at the time could say with any certainty how high the Chrysler Building would be.

Raskob's only experience in politics had been to register and vote Republican, but Smith asked Raskob to be his campaign manager and to

Four of the directors were there to perform more mundane tasks. Kaufman, Earle, Raskob, and du Pont would supply the requisite start-up funds, but not even those millionaires were willing to put up the cost of the entire undertaking. The issuance of stock was not deemed suitable. They needed a $27.5 million loan. They

Plans for running two elevator cars—a local and an express—in the same shaft were being developed by Otis engineers in 1929.

business of New York in the twenties was real estate. Business was booming, and developers and realtors had every reason for continued optimism. Real estate values, they said, rested on the firm bedrock of population, and New York City—world metropolis, center of finance, industry, and art—had new people locating there all the time. With its limited supply of space and an ever-increasing demand, realtors believed that New York property values would always be rising.

Academic terms did not concern them. American architects never called their style Art Deco at the time

Astor was simply following an old Astor tradition, one that his father, John Jacob Astor, had begun. The Astors seldom bought property that had already been developed. Believing that the population of New York City would grow, and the only way it could grow was northward up Manhattan Island, the Astors liked to buy relatively inexpensive property on the edge of development and let the burgeoning population catch up with