What it was like to build the Empire State Building.

Lunch break with Central Park in the background.  No nets here.

Perfect opportunity for Teo to claim it was staged like the moon landing.

SheWrites wrote:Perfect opportunity for Teo to claim it was staged like the moon landing.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Albert Einstein

Alll it takes is one unexpected gust of wind.  And at that height,  wind is always there.  And then they become like the 9/11 jumpers.

You couldn't put enough tranquilizers and booze in me to ever get me to do what they did.

There have been more than 30 suicide attempts at the Empire State Building. The first occurred while the building was still under construction when a worker who was laid off  threw himself down an open elevator shaft. However, one of the most famous incidents took place on May 1, 1947, when 23-year-old Evelyn McHale leapt to her death from the 86th floor observation deck. The beautiful young woman was wearing pearls and white gloves, and landed on the roof of a United Nations limousine parked outside of the building. With legs elegantly crossing at the ankles, her body lay morbidly lifeless but majestically intact as the car’s metal folded around her like sheets framing her head and arms. Present on the scene was photography student Robert Wiles who took a photo of McHale just a few minutes after her death. This photo later ran in the May 12, 1947 edition of Life magazine. Her death was given the title as “the most beautiful suicide,” and the imagery was used by visual artist Andy Warhol in his print series, Suicide (Fallen Body).
On account of unanticipated conditions and poor planing, there have been two cases where jumpers survived by failing to fall more than one floor. The first was Elvita Adams who on December 2, 1972 jumped from the 86th floor only to be interrupted by a gust of wind that blew her body back onto the 85th floor, leaving her alive with a mere broken hip. The second was on April 25, 2013 when 33-year old Nathanial Simone jumped from the 86th floor observation deck fortunately landing shortly after on an 85th floor ledge.

And they didn't just sit there but were moving massive heavy steel I beams strung on cables into position and driving rivets to connect them..

How many men died building the Empire State Building..

Five, according to the official records: one was hit by a truck, one fell down an elevator shaft, one was hit by a hoist, one was in a blast area, and one fell off of some scaffolding. Not bad since at peak building times there might be about 3400 guys working at a time.

I watched for a year the building of a skyscraper as part of the Northwestern Hospital complex, and people wore harnesses, and were tethered.  OSHA would NEVER allow that type of construction at the Empire State building today.

I had to buy something called compliance in a can when I use the all terrain Lull which can extend 42 feet from the machine. I was told if I did not have a tether on the person in the lift cage, Osha could fine up to 25k per incident. A friend had an employee tragically fall from a ladder while changing mercury lights in his plant and he was fined closer to 50k for violations where a worker is up in the air.

https://www.northernsafety.com/Product/21757/Protecta-Compliance-in-a-Can-Full-Body-Fall-Protection-Harness-Shock-Absorbing-Lanyard

On July 28, 1945, Lt. Colonel William Smith crashed a U.S. Army B-25 bomber into the north side of the Empire State Building’s 79th floor. The city was cloaked in a dense fog on the morning of the crash, and the Lt. Colonel, who was on his way to Newark to pick up his commanding officer, somehow ended up over LaGuardia asking for a weather report. Although he was encouraged to land, Smith still requested military permission to continue to Newark. The last transmission from the LaGuardia tower to the plane was a foreboding warning: “From where I’m sitting, I can’t see the top of the Empire State Building.”

You sent me on an internet walkabout of people that survived crazy falls Bob... lol.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19996_5-insane-falls-you-wont-believe-people-survived.html

Bob wrote:Lunch break with Central Park in the background.  No nets here.

I've seen this photo before and have always wondered if it really is a bottle of booze the worker on the far right is holding. Say it isn't so!

ZVUGKTUBM wrote:You would never catch me sitting on a beam like that. I'm scared shitless of heights, unless I am flying in an aircraft; then I am okay.

The summer of 1971, when I was 19 I worked as a roustabout at an ARCO natural gas processing plant replacing asbestos insulation (with no respiratory protection, of course). We would climb all over the place and walk along elevated pipelines and the like. It took half the summer to learn how to get used to it.

I'm much the same way although I wasn't always that way. I've done many parachute jumps and many skydiving jumps. Love flying except for the delays now at airports. Now, less than 500 miles or so and I'll rent a car and drive. A business associate and friend once took me up in one of his Russian Mig Fighter jet. Closest I ever came to needing a barf bag...but there wasn't one. We went way out over the Gulf where he and his buddy in his other jet, played dog fight games. I was a wobbly when we got back on earth which they both found funny. He had a hanger here at the Tallahassee Airport. He and his friend had both been Navy fighter pilots. Might have been the greatest thrill of my life.

It took twelve years to complete the Freedom Tower.

1929: John Jakob Raskob (former General Motors executive), Coleman du Pont, Pierre S. du Pont, Louis G. Kaufman and Ellis P. Earle, form Empire State, Inc. and name Alfred E. Smith, former Governor of New York to head the corporation.

1930: On March 17, construction of the Empire State Building begins. Under the direction of architects Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Associates, the framework rises 4 ½ stories per week.

1931: On May 1, President Hoover presses a button in Washington, D.C. officially opening and turning on the Empire State Building’s lights.

1933: The movie King Kong is released in New York City on March 2.

1945: A B-25 Bomber crashes into the 79th floor of ESB during heavy fog on a Saturday morning. The building’s construction limits the spread of fire and despite a 20-foot gash, the Empire State Building is open for business-as-usual on Monday.

Skyscraper buffs like me love the Empire State Building.  But there's another skyscraper we love even more.  In 2005, New York's Skyscraper Museum asked one hundred architects, builders, critics, engineers and historians to choose their 10 favorite New York towers.  The Chrysler Building came in first place with 90% of people ranking it #1.

Here's an interesting fact about it...

The idea to become the tallest building in the world came out of Walter P. Chrysler's hubris.  It was, in his mind, a huge monument to himself.  The project was financed out of his own pocket, ensuring that his sons would get ownership.  He was to have an office suite and apartment with a exquisite dining room at the top and asked his builders to make sure his toilet was the highest in Manhattan, so that he could look down and as an observer put it, "shit on Henry Ford and the rest of the world."

By the way,  those gargoyles you see sticking off the building were modeled after the Plymouth hood ornament at the time.