This photo claims to be taken in 1941. Has it been altered or doctored in any way? I don’t necessarily think it has been but it seems strange that it’s almost one lone tall building with no other skyscrapers around.
I guess I just always assumed there was a natural progression of taller and taller buildings til someone said, fuck it, I’m building the tallest one.
I don’t think it has been altered, but the picture in the OP is a bit deceiving since it was taken at a distance with a hill in between. You’re missing about a quarter of the bottom of the building and you are missing all of the surrounding buildings.
The Empire State Building was significantly taller than its neighbors back then.
You can compare it with the pictures on this page:
This part of the article says that the Empire State Building was the tallest structure from 1931 to 1967, when it was passed by the Ostankino Tower in Moscow, which was the tallest structure until 1975, when it was passed by the CN Tower in Toronto, which was the tallest structure until 2007, when it was passed by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai:
It’s not clear what’s a building and what’s just a structure.
Wendell’s statement refers to the present, and the WTC no longer exists. If it had said, “were the only buildings in New York”, it would have been incorrect.
Gotcha, and thanks. I was a kid growing up in Upstate New York and on the news I distinctly remember them saying the WTC is now the tallest building in the world, having surpassed the Empire State Building. But did they say building? Or structure? I don’t recall. So yeah, building, versus structure. And who knows how those are defined.
The Woolworth Building was the tallest building in the world when it was erected in 1913, according to a different entry in Wikipedia. It was in New York City at 233 Broadway
Your “list of tallest buildings” has the Eiffel Tower holding the record at that time, and at 986 feet it exceeded the height of the Woolworth at 792 feet, but there’s that whole argument about “building” vs. “structure”. Myself, I’d class the Eiffel tower along with things like giant antennae as a “structure” and call the Woolworth a “Building”.
Another term that makes “tallest” harder to pin down is “free standing”. So that rules out a lot of antennas, for example. The CN Tower people liked to mention the “free standing” bit.
At the time, most of New York’s skyscrapers were in the Wall St. area at the southern tip of Manhattan or in the newer favored area around Times Square.
The Empire State was at 34th St., not a prime office building spot. It was chosen partly to replace the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and partly because it would stand out from the surrounding lower buildings.
Here’s a shot that gives a better view of the neighborhood. Those “small” towers would make a good downtown in almost any other city in 1931.
There wasn’t any good reason then, or even before the Depression, to build thousand-foot office buildings. They weren’t needed and gave poor returns on their investment. The Depression made it worse. The Empire State was nicknamed the “Empty State Building” because it was mostly empty for a decade. Those other buildings were built at the proper heights for investment. Anything else was purely for showing off.
the Empire State Building was definitely a case of Showing Off. It was originally not intended to have that big spire on the top. But then the Chrysler Building started going up, and would have been taller than the Empire State Building as planned. So they redesigned the top so that they’d be taller.
I like that they originally said that the top would be used as a mooring mast for zeppelins. the mind boggles at trying to not only moor to that tiny fixed point amid the contrary winds and updrafts of midtown Manhattan, but also of people trying to walk down any sort of ramp, no matter how protected, under the same circumstances. One of the things I love about the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is that it actually depicts (using CGI, of course) people “de-zeppelining” from one as it’s moored at the top of the Empire State Building
They later put aerials up there, of course, which was not only a more reasonable use of that real estate, but also added more to the overall height.
When I was a kid I took the bus into New York via the Lincoln Tunnel. Your actual view of the city is blocked by big rocky cliffs until just before you spiral down into the Tunnel, but on your approach the rock suddenly drops away and you are treated to an unobstructed close-up view of Manhattan on the other side of the Hudson, and it’s breathtaking. You could see all the tall buildings down at the Battery, near Wall Street, then a long drought of tall buildings as you moved north through Manhattan, and then suddenly the Empire State Building, the Chrysler, and the other buildings of Midtown. There are more buildings there today than when I was a kid, and the ESB is no longer as much of a standout as it was then, but it still stands tallest among the buildings in Midtown Manhattan.
It’s interesting how the geography of tall buildings in Manhattan reveals the underlying geology of the island. The bedrock in Lower Manhattan and Midtown is closer to the surface and thus more suitable for skyscraper construction. That gap represents an area where the bedrock is deeper.
Without many other tall buildings around it when it was built, you wouldn’t get nearly the amount of updrafts that you would in today’s higher city. Also, while winds aloft are typically higher than at ground level; they were virtually the same at 1000’ earlier today as they were at ground level at the three major commercial airports serving the NY metro area, EWR, JFK, & LGA; all below 10mph.
That view is gone. Hudson Yards not only blocks the view of the ESB but 30 HY has both higher occupied & architectural heights.
