Most people who ride the elevator up the Empire State Building are thinking about the view. Fair enough, the building pulls in more than 2.5 million visitors a year for exactly that. But the lobby they just crossed to get there is one of the best-preserved Art Deco interiors in the country, and almost nobody looks up long enough to notice it.
The ceiling above the main lobby is covered in a celestial mural: stars, sunbursts and gears rendered in 23-karat gold leaf. An artist named Leif Neandross painted the original in 1931, part of a wave of Machine Age design that treated a lobby ceiling as seriously as a cathedral’s.
The gold ceiling (almost) nobody notices
Neandross’s work didn’t survive the building’s first few decades intact. During a modernization push in the early 1960s, crews installed a fluorescent acrylic ceiling directly over the mural, and the gold sunbursts disappeared behind plastic panels for the next forty-odd years.
Restoration work began in 2007, led by the historic-preservation firm EverGreene. Rather than stripping the ceiling back to the original, painters worked from historical photographs and surviving fragments to recreate the design on canvas, then installed it a few inches below the existing surface.
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By EverGreene’s own count, the job used more than 115,000 sheets of aluminum leaf across upward of 15,000 square feet of new mural. The building’s own materials put the labor at 20,000 working hours, a figure that measures the job differently but points at the same scale of work.
The lobby atrium is landmarked separately from the tower above it, and the wider effort, which the building calls the Empire State ReBuilding, has gone well beyond the ceiling: more than 12,000 feet of historic glasswork recreated, and damaged marble replaced piece by piece rather than swapped for something easier to source.
The Art Deco details built into the building itself
Walk back outside, and the same Art Deco language continues across the building. Designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the exterior combines 730 tons of aluminum and stainless steel with 10 million bricks and massive amounts of Indiana limestone and granite, all arranged to make the tower’s 102 floors feel like one continuous vertical sweep.
Inside, the 73 Otis elevators continue the geometric design on their metal doors, while 6,514 windows punctuate the tower. The details eventually lead your eye to the famous spire, which rises 200 feet above the observation decks and lights up in different colors throughout the year. The entire building was completed in just over a year.
If you head up to the observation deck, your ticket also includes the second-floor exhibits and an audio guide covering the building’s history. But the most surprising detail is back in the lobby: Neandross’s original 1931 mural was never removed. It remains hidden just a few inches behind the recreation visitors see today.