Quotes from John Tauranac

In all likelihood Smith planted the seed of the Empire State Building in the head of Raskob sometime in the spring of 1929. If Raskob was going to build a skyscraper and if he was going to make a go of it, he could do worse than financing some of it himself and finding others to join in the venture, while having his friend Al Smith serve as the front man.

Smith was the ultimate New Yorker, the ideal candidate for the job of president of the building that would become the very icon of the city. The city was in his bones. He could point out every landmark in town and talk affectionately and knowledgeably about the city and its people.

When the announcement of the coming of the Empire State Building was made on August 29, 1929, the front-page headline in The Times the following day hardly reflected excitement at the fact that the world's tallest building was about to be built; it was: SMITH TO HELP BUILD HIGHEST SKYSCRAPER. His

Two of their most famous designs, the Main Branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-second Streets, and the long-demolished New Theater (aka, the Century) on Central Park West between Sixty-second and Sixty-third Streets, were two of the city's greatest manifestations of the Beaux Arts.

Richmond H. Shreve, William F. Lamb, and Arthur Loomis Harmon, who teamed up to design the Empire State Building

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.

Shreve and Lamb both joined the firm of Carrère & Hastings.

With his partner gone, Hastings lost his momentum. In 1920, he retired as an active member of the firm.1 The beneficiaries were Shreve and Lamb.

Their working arrangement was the ideal professional relationship, one with the qualities of yin and yang. Shreve's proclivities were organizational—his was the genius that solved the operational and administrative problems that had the Empire State Building completed in one year. Lamb's proclivities rested more naturally in the design field. Each assumed responsibility in his chosen field, but neither abdicated responsibility in the other.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Born in Chicago, Harmon studied at the Art Institute and graduated in 1901 from Columbia University's School of Architecture

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.

he then ran his own firm from 1913 to 1929, during which time he designed the award-winning Shelton Hotel. Often identified with the Empire State Building, Harmon was sometimes a little embarrassed by the honor. He joined Shreve and Lamb in 1929 when they were already roughing out the building's plans, and

There was, and still is, another Empire State Building in Manhattan, the existence of which, never very widely known in the first place, was eclipsed by the glory of the mighty structure at Thirty-fourth Street. The other Empire State Building, at 640 Broadway on the southeast corner of Bleecker Street, is a far different structure from its uptown namesake.

It became a designated New York City landmark in 1981, the year of the building's golden jubilee; it was listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places in 1982; and, in 1986, the National Parks Service recognized it as a National Historic 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.

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.

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.

Architects Shreve, Lamb & Harmon "endowed it with such clean beauty, such purity of line, such subtle uses of material, that we believe it will be studied by many generations of architects, a hazardous prophecy in these days of change.

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.

The General Motors Building, erected the year before on the trapezoidal block bounded by Broadway and Eighth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets, however, was an important commission for them, one that won them a secure place in architectural history.