The Empire State Building is a 102-story Art Deco skyscraper in New York City, New York at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. Its name is derived from the nickname for the state of New York. It stood as the world’s tallest building for more than forty years, from its completion in 1931 until the construction of the World Trade Center North Tower topped out on December 23, 1970.
The Empire State Building has been named by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. The building and its street floor interior are designated landmarks of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, and confirmed by the New York City Board of Estimate. It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1986. In 2007, it was ranked number one on the List of America’s Favorite Architecture according to the AIA. The building is owned by Harold Helmsley’s company and managed by its management/leasing division Helmsley-Spear.
The Empire State Building rises to 1,250 feet (381.0 m) at the 102nd floor, and including the 203 foot pinnacle its full height reaches 1,453 feet and 8 9/16th inches (443 m). The building has 85 stories of commercial and office space (2,158,000 sq ft/200,000 m) and an indoor and outdoor observation deck on the 86th floor. The remaining 16 stories represent the art deco tower, which is capped by a 102nd floor observatory. Atop the tower is the 203 foot pinnacle, much of which is covered by broadcast antennas, with a lightning rod at the very top. The Empire State Building is the first building to have more than 100 floors. It also has over 100 bathrooms (lavatories).
The Empire State Building has 6,500 windows and 73 elevators. There are 1,860 steps from street level to the 102nd floor. It has a total floor area of approximately 2,768,591 square feet (257,000 m). The base of the Empire State Building is about 2 acres (0.8 ha). The building houses 1,000 businesses, and has its own zip code. As of 2007, approximately 20,000 employees work in the building each day, making the Empire State Building the second largest single office complex in America, after the Pentagon. The building was completed in one year and 45 days. Its original sixty-four elevators are located in a central core. Today, the Empire State Building has 73 elevators in all, including service elevators. It takes less than one minute by elevator to get to the 86th floor, where an observation deck is located. The building has 70 miles (113 km) of pipe and 2,500,000 feet (760,000 m) of electrical wire.[20] The building is heated by low pressure steam. Despite its height, the building only requires between two and three pounds per square inch (0.14 to 0.21 kg. per cm²) of steam pressure for heating. The building weighs approximately 370,000 short tons (336,000 M/T). The Empire State Building cost $40,948,900 to build.
Unlike most of today’s high-rise buildings, the Empire State Building features a classic façade. The modernistic stainless steel canopies of the entrances on 33rd and 34th Streets lead to two story-high corridors around the elevator core, crossed by stainless steel and glass-enclosed bridges at the second floor level. The elevator core contains 67 elevators.
The lobby is three stories high and features an aluminum relief of the skyscraper without the antenna, which was not added to the spire until 1952. The north corridor contains eight illuminated panels, created by Roy Sparkia and Renée Nemorov in 1963, depicting the building as the Eighth Wonder of the World, alongside the traditional seven.
Long-term forecasting of the life cycle of the structure was implemented at the design phase to ensure that the building’s future intended uses were not restricted by the requirements of previous generations. This is particularly evident in the over-design of the building’s electrical system.
