High above you rises the building that became the world's definition of a skyscraper. The Empire State Building rose in just 410 days of construction, a pace so remarkable it still astonishes engineers: at its peak, fourteen floors were completed in ten days. It was finished in 1931, at the depth of the Great Depression, with 102 stories reaching 1,454 feet including the antenna.
It claimed the title of world's tallest building from the Chrysler Building after just forty days, and held it for forty-one years. More than 3,400 workers built it, a workforce that included hundreds of Mohawk ironworkers from the Kahnawake community in Quebec, whose fearlessness on the high steel became legendary. On the 79th floor in 1945, a B-25 Army bomber lost in fog crashed into the building, killing fourteen people, but the structure survived.
King Kong climbed it in the movies. It is lit in different colors for different occasions. Picture the antenna above you; on a clear day the building is visible from 80 miles away.