New York Trip Diary – Volume 7… Nah, Forget It

I forgot to mention something in my New York Trip Diary, but it’s just a little thing – no need to make an entire volume of it.  I was just going to talk about how much my husband and I enjoyed seeing the Empire State Building.  We didn’t go up into it, but we passed by right next to it while riding a bus, and of course we also saw it looming over the NY skyline since it is once again New York’s tallest building after the collapse of the World Trade Center.  The Empire State Building actually wasn’t quite as tall as I would have thought, but the architecture is what I noticed.  The building has limestone panels on the outside, and it looked much different than the steel skyscrapers (like the Sears Tower and the John Hancock building) I am used to being a native Chicagoan.  The Empire State Building was completed in 1931 after only 410 days of construction.  It was finished during the worst of the Great Depression, and as a result, no one wanted to rent office space for its first few years of existence – leading to its nickname, “The Empty State Building”.  Five people were killed in its construction; including a worker who committed suicide because he was laid off.  In a macabre example of foreshadowing for the city of New York, the Empire State Building was hit by an airplane in 1945.  The crash happened between the 79th and 80th floors and killed 14 people.  One of the plane’s engines shot through the building and out the other side, where it landed a block away on the roof of a building and started a fire.  The Empire State Building’s elevator operator survived a fall of 75 stories inside the elevator and her record for ‘longest survived fall in an elevator’ still exists today.  Here is a picture of the accident:

So anyway, fascinating building with a lot of history.  I just found it really cool to see an old-school skyscraper up close!

And since we were on the subject of the Sears Tower earlier, here is a video of lightning striking it – which I understand happens pretty often.  If only they could harness that energy for human consumption…