Ground broke on March 17, 1930.
Just 410 days later, on May 1, 1931, President Hoover pressed a button in Washington and the lights came on for the first time, on a building with 102 floors and 1,250 feet of height, per the building’s own National Historic Landmark record, a schedule that nobody in New York has come close to matching for speed since.
That’s the short answer to when the Empire State Building was built.
The longer, far more interesting answer involves a bitter rivalry, a secretly built spire, and an airship that couldn’t actually dock where everyone said it could.
It was built this fast because it was losing a race
The Empire State Building went up in a hurry because it had to.
Walter Chrysler was already racing skyward on 42nd Street, a rival syndicate was throwing up 40 Wall Street downtown, and everyone wanted the same bragging right: tallest building in the world.
That rivalry is also why the Chrysler Building still has the strangest, most dramatic silhouette in Midtown, and the Empire State Building’s origin story doesn’t make full sense without it.
In 1929, three towers were rising at once, and two of the architects involved genuinely despised each other.
William Van Alen was designing the Chrysler Building.
H. Craig Severance, his former business partner turned rival after a bitter split, was designing 40 Wall Street. Severance kept quietly revising his height, eventually landing at 927 feet, confident he’d clinched the title. What he didn’t know was that Van Alen had spent months secretly assembling a 185-foot, 27-ton steel spire inside the Chrysler Building’s own crown, built in four hidden sections, a scheme documented in detail by Urban Archive’s account of the “race to the top.”
On October 23, 1929, his team raised it through the roof in about 90 minutes, pushing the Chrysler Building to 1,046 feet and stealing the title weeks before Severance’s crew even finished topping out. By the time Severance found out, there was nothing left to do about it.
That’s the exact moment the Empire State Building entered the race. Financier John Jakob Raskob, backed by General Motors money and former New York governor Al Smith, brought in architecture firm Shreve, Lamb & Harmon and told them to build something 204 feet taller than Chrysler’s tower. To play it safe, they added a 200-foot mast on top, publicly framed as a mooring station for airships. The building’s own federal landmark record is fairly blunt that the mast was, in large part, a clever way of winning on height without technically lying about it.
A dirigible actually did try to dock there in September 1931, holding on for three minutes in 40 mph winds before being driven off. A Navy airship and the Goodyear blimp Columbia each tried later that year and came away without properly docking either, with the Columbia eventually settling for lowering newspapers down to the street on a rope instead.
Four and a half floors a week, with nowhere to store anything
The team behind the build, Starrett Bros. and Eken, faced one brutal logistical constraint: a Fifth Avenue construction site with zero room to store 57,000 tons of steel. So they simply never stored it.
Steel beams left Pennsylvania mills, crossed to the New Jersey waterfront, came over by barge, and got trucked to 34th Street two floors’ worth at a time, moving straight from the truck bed to the derrick to the riveter with almost no lag in between. Crews even laid a narrow-gauge railway inside the site just to shuttle material to the elevators, plus more track on the upper floors to spread everything out once it arrived.
The frame climbed at an average of four and a half stories a week. In July 1930 alone, the crew put up 22 stories in 22 working days. At the project’s peak, on August 14, 1930, 3,439 men worked the site simultaneously, Irish and Italian immigrant laborers working alongside Mohawk ironworkers from Kahnawake, whose tradition of high-steel work traced back to the 1880s. The final structure swallowed ten million bricks and more steel than the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street combined.
Remarkably, the whole project came in at $40.9 million against a $50 million budget, a rare feat made possible almost entirely because construction happened during the depths of the Great Depression, when labor and materials were unusually cheap.
It opened to an empty building and a nickname nobody wanted
Here’s the twist most people don’t know: when the Empire State Building opened, almost nobody moved in.
Roughly three-quarters of the building sat vacant for years, New Yorkers started calling it the “Empty State Building,” and management resorted to switching on lights in unoccupied floors at night just so it looked full from the street. According to the building’s own official history, the tower didn’t turn a real profit until the early 1950s, nearly two decades after opening day.
What actually kept the lights on in the meantime was the view.
Admission to the observatory cost a dollar in the middle of the Depression, and by 1938, the deck alone was pulling in roughly a million dollars a year while entire floors of office space sat dark below it. The observation deck effectively saved the building financially long before the office space ever did, and in a strange twist of history, that’s still true today. The building now pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and a meaningful share of that still comes from visitors heading straight to the top rather than the offices in between.
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Seeing it for yourself
Nearly a century later, that same observation deck is still the main event.
The 86th floor offers an open-air, 360-degree promenade, while the fully renovated 102nd floor observatory adds floor-to-ceiling glass views from even higher up, the same mast originally built to court airships now doubling as one of the best vantage points in the city.
If you’re planning a visit, tickets to the Empire State Building’s observation decks start around $50 for general admission, with upgraded options available for both the 86th and 102nd floor decks and skip-the-line access for anyone who’d rather spend more time looking at the view than waiting in line for it.