Siyi Tu CEE 195 Empire State Building

The Empire State Building is seen as an architectural marvel. It was built during the Great Depression and stands as a regal monument to that time period and the city around it. The Empire State Building started off as a competition between Walter Chrysler, of the Chrysler Corporation, and John Raskob, the creator of General Motors. They both bet against each other to see who could build the tallest building first. In 1929, Mr. Raskob began working on his building with a group of very well known investors. This group included Coleman du Pont, Pierre S. du Pont (president of E.I Du Pont de Nemours), Louis G. Kaufman and Ellis P. Earl (Empire State, Inc). The excavation for the project began on January 22, 1930 and only took one year and 45 days to complete. The building was completed on May 1, 1931, which was significantly ahead of schedule. On May 1st, President Herbert Hoover pressed a button in Washington, D.C. to officially open the building by turning on its lights. The site used to construct the building was formerly the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Raskob then hired Shreve, Lamb & Harmon to be the architects for his new building. It is said that Raskob pulled a pencil out of a draw and held it up to William Lamb and asked, Bill, how high can you make it so that it wont fall down? Lamb soon created a plan for the skyscraper. He designed it so that a certain amount of space in the center, arranged as compactly as possible, contains the vertical circulation, mail chutes, toilets, shafts and corridors. An office space 28 feet deep surrounded this center space. The sizes of the floors decrease as the elevator numbers decrease. At this time, the race between Chrysler and Raskob was getting very heated and competitive and Raskob needed a way to add height to his structure, so he came up with a simple solution of adding a hat to the top of the building after seeing a scale model of it: It needs a hat! Raskob decided that this hat would be used as a docking station for dirigibles. The hat, better known as the dirigible mooring mast, would make the building 1,250 feet tall. After planning out the building, the builders Starrett Bros. & Eken were hired for the job. With such a tight schedule, Starrett Bros. & Eken started planning immediately. They made a schedule for construction to maximize time and efficiency. First the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was torn down and an auction was held for many of the items from the hotel. Then the rest of the hotel was torn down piece by piece. Some of the materials were given away or sold, but the majority of the debris was loaded onto barges and dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. But before the hotel was even completely torn down, excavation for the new building began. Two shifts of three hundred men worked through the clock to dig through the hard rock in order to create a foundation. After the foundation was complete the steel skeleton was built next. Two hundred and ten steel columns made up the vertical frame. Some sections ranged from six to eight stories in height, while twelve columns ran the entire height of the building. Large cranes were used to move the girders up to the higher floors, because steel girders could not be raised more than thirty stories at a time. Riveters worked in teams of four: the heater (passer), the catcher, the bucker-up, and the gunman. The heater placed ten rivets into the forge and then used a pair of tongs to take out a rivet and toss it to the catcher. They would

often have to toss rivets fifty to seventy-five feet. The catcher used an old paint can to catch the hot rivet and used his other hand to remove the rivet from the can with tongs. Then they would knock it against a beam to remove any cinders, and then place the rivet into one of the holes in a beam. The bucker-up would support the rivet while the gunman hit the head of the rivet with a riveting hammer and shoved the rivet into the girder where it would fuse together. An interesting fact is that the last rivet was ceremoniously placed and was made out of solid gold. A railway was built inside the construction site to move materials quickly from one point to the next. A team of people pushed these railway cars, but they moved things very efficiently because they held eight times more than a wheelbarrow. Back in this time period, bricks used for construction were usually dumped in the streets. But Starrett had trucks put the bricks in a chute that led to a hopper. A hopper is a container that tapers at the bottom, which allows for a controlled release of its contents. Then when bricks were needed, they would be dropped out of the hopper into carts, which were hoisted up to the right floor. While the outside of the building was being built, electricians and plumbers began working on the internal features of the building. When things were in full operation on the skyscraper, workers finished fourteen and a half floors in ten working days. To account for the mass amount of people that were going to be in the Empire State Building at a time, architects created seven banks of elevators, with each servicing a portion of the floors. For example, Bank B serviced seventh through the 18th floor and Bank C serviced the 18th through 29th floor. The Otis Elevator Company installed 58 passenger elevators and eight service elevators in the building. The builders installed faster elevators that could travel up to 1,200 feet per minute even though the building code restricted the speed to 700 feet per minute in hopes that the building code would soon be changed. And sure enough, a month after the Empire State Building was opened the elevators were operating at speeds of 1,200 feet per minute. And then on May 1, 1931 the Empire State Building officially opened. It had become the tallest building in the world and would keep its status until the completion of the World Trade Center in 1972. One accident occurred on July 28, 1945 with a bomber plane crash into the Empire State Building. Lt. Colonel William Smith was piloting a US Army bomber through New York City through poor visibility. After hitting dense fog, Smith lowered the bomber to regain visibility and found himself in the middle of Manhattan. Smith managed to dodge several skyscrapers until he was headed for the Empire State Building, which he also attempted to dodge, but it was too late. At 9:49 a.m., the bomber crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building. It created a hole in the building eighteen feet wide and twenty feet high. The plane landed into the offices of the War Relief Serves of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. Fourteen people were killed in the plane crash and twenty-six were injured. The integrity of the Empire State Building was not affected; however, the cost of the damage done was $1 million.