Empire State Building

The Empire State Building 

The Empire State Building is a 103 story skyscraper located in Manhattan, New York City. the Empire state building is 1,250 feet tall, with the antenna it is 1,454 feet tall.The building was designed from the top down. Excavation of the sight began on January 22 1930 and construction on the building itself started on March 17 Saint Patrick's Day, this was during the time of the Great Depression. The building was named after New York's nickname the Empire State. The Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world from 1931 to 1970. The building was designed by William F. Lamb from the architectural firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon. The project involved 3,400 workers, mostly immigrants from Europe, along with hundreds of Mohawk iron workers, many from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal. According to official accounts, five workers died during the construction. The construction was planed to take 18 months but instead only took 15 months.

The building was officially opened on May 1, 1935 in dramatic fashion, when The United States president Herbert Hoover turned on the building's lights with a push of a button from Washington D.C. Coincidentally the first use of the tower lights atop the Empire State Building, the following year, the purpose was for  signaling the victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt over Hoover in the presidential election of November 1932. The building's opening coincided with the Great Depression in the United States, and as a result much of its office space was initially unrented. The building's vacancy was exacerbated by its poor location on 34th Street, which placed it relatively far from public transportation, as Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station are several blocks away. The lack of renters led New Yorkers to come up with the nickname the Empty State Building.

 In 1945 a plane crashed in to the Empire State Building, the new's report said, " At 9:40 am on Saturday, July 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber, piloted in thick fog by Lieutenant Colonel William Franklin Smith, Jr. crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building, between the 79th and 80th floors, where the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council were located." Over the  years more than thirty people have attempted suicide, most successfully. the first suicide occurred even before its completion, by a worker who had been laid off. The fence around the terrace was put up in 1947 after five people tried to jump during a three week span.

On February 24, 1997, a gunman shot seven people on the observation deck, killing one, then fatally wounded himself. On August 24, 2012 at about 9 am EDT, on the sidewalk at the Fifth Avenue side of the building, a gunman shot and killed a former co-worker from a workplace that had laid him off in 2011. When two police officers confronted the gunman, 58-year-old Jeffrey T. Johnson, he aimed his firearm at them. They responded by firing 16 shots at Johnson, killing him but also wounding nine bystanders, most of whom were hit by fragments, although three took direct hits from stray bullets.