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New York - New York City - The Empire State Building 5th Ave., 33d to 34th St. IRT Lexington Ave. subway (local) to 33d St.; or IRT Broadway-7th Ave. subway to Pennsylvania Station (34th St.); or BMT subway to 34th St.; or 5th Ave. The Empire State Building, 1,250 feet high, is the tallest structure in the world. Seen from a distance it emerges above New York like a great inland lighthouse. The Chrysler Building, second in height, measures 1,046 feet to the tip of the lance; the Woolworth Building, for many years the tallest tower of Manhattan, is only 792 feet. The Eiffel Tower in Paris is 1,0241/2 feet to the top of the flagpole. The great limestone and steel structure has been called a monument to an epoch -- the boom years from 1924 to 1929. The building became, as those who envisioned it promised, an internationally known address. The superb main shaft of the Empire State rises in an almost unbroken line out of the broad five story base that covers approximately two acres adjoining Fifth Avenue. Atop the shaft, at the eighty-sixth floor level, is the 200-foot observation tower -- a sixteen-story glass and metal extension shaped like an inverted test tube buttressed by great flaring corner piers. Though the design of the tower is pleasing in itself, it has been widely criticized for a lack of unity in its relation to the shaft. Its architectural importance far transcends the matter of height alone. The design, for which Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon won the gold medal of the Architectural League in 1931, is essentially modern. The great tower walls are composed almost entirely of standardized machine-made parts. Not only the windows but the cast aluminum panels or "spandrels" under them, even the stone column facings and the steel strips that enclose them, are standardized units. The pattern -- window, spandrel, window, spandrel -- is repeated without a break for 725 feet. Such a wall treatment is the direct opposite in conception of such early skyscraper buildings as the Flatiron, where each story is adorned with a minor horizontal terra-cotta cornice. A peculiarity of the Empire State Building is that the windows, instead of being set back into the wall, appear to be flush so that the effect is one of a continuous wall. By this expedient the architects not only avoided gouging the wall into something resembling an immense waffle iron, they also eliminated the need to trim the stone around the openings, thus,saving much time and money in construction. The color scheme of the building, though losing its remarkable first "blond" tone through weathering, is spectacular in early and late sunlight. The aluminum spandrels and the soft-textured limestone are tinged with gray and lavender, and the silvery sheen of metal on the walls creates an effect of airy lightness. On Fifth Avenue a monumental but somewhat dull entrance, flanked by heavy stone pylons the full height of the five-story base, opens into a long hall, three stories high and lined with Rellante and Rose Famosa marbles. The high silver-leaf ceiling is painted in metallic colors with geometric patterns suggesting stars, sunbursts, and snowflakes. On the wall opposite the Fifth Avenue entrance is a great brass and aluminum plaque depicting the Empire State under a blazing sun. Subsidiary entrances give access to the building from both Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets. The entire building is planned around a central core roughly pyramid- shaped, containing the utilities and the sixty-seven elevators. Though run at a lesser speed, the self-leveling elevators can rise 1,200 feet a minute. Because of its height, nearly one-third of the whole must be devoted to elevators and utilities. In rentable floor space, the Empire State, with 2,158,000 square feet, ranks among the three largest office 'buildings in the United States, the others being the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. The speed with which the Empire State was built set a new mark in construction efficiency. On October 1, 1929, the first truck rolled into the former Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to begin demolition; May 1, 1931, the completed Empire State Building was formally opened by Alfred E. Smith, its president. When construction (by Starrett Brothers and Eken) was in full swing, an average of four and a half stories were erected every week, and at top speed, fourteen and a half stories in ten working days. Because of lack of sidewalk storage space, the supplying of building materials had to be synchronized exactly with construction speed. The land cost sixteen million dollars, the purchase including the magnificent old Waldorf, which had occupied the site some thirty-five years and had itself cost thirteen million dollars. In the first five years of its existence, more than four million visited the building's observatories on the 86th and 102d floors, whence, on clear days, a fifty-mile panorama is visible. The city, with its waterways and suburbs, spreads like a relief map a quarter of a mile below; and directions for identifying the various points are marked on the observation terrace. To the south, near the tip of Manhattan, is the Wall Street district. To the southeast lies Brooklyn, and crossing the East River are the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn bridges, from north to south. In the southwest, the Statue of Liberty is outlined, and beyond it lies Staten Island. To the west are the docks of the Hudson (North) River where ocean liners are berthed; on the other side of the water is the ridge of the Palisades; and beyond, the flatlands of New Jersey. In the northwest the Orange Mountains dim the horizon far beyond the Palisades; in the immediate foreground is Broadway, cutting diagonally through the Garment Center and Times Square, and then swerving west and continuing north to Yonkers. The sheer white wall of the RCA Building of Rockefeller Center dominates the foreground directly north; beyond it lies rectangular Central Park. In the vague distance across the snake-like Harlem River, extends the Bronx. To the northeast, Fifth Avenue cuts straight through the vista that comprises the skyscrapers of the mid-town section: the view moves clockwise from the hotels of Central Park South and the Plaza to the twin towers of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, then to the gold-leafed tower of the New York Central Building. The Chanin, Chrysler, Daily News buildings and the mass of Tudor City mark the Forty-second Street line to the East River. Welfare Island, with its hospitals, lies under Queensboro Bridge to the northeast, and past the river stretches the borough of Queens, the World's Fair Grounds lying near the north shore. Directly east, the most conspicuous landmark is Bellevue Hospital on the west bank of the river. Initiates visit the tower in the late afternoon, dine in the café on the eighty-sixth floor, and stay until the lights of the city come on. Chrysler and Empire State Buildings Art Print Buy at AllPosters.com Empire State Building Poster Buy at AllPosters.com Empire State Building Art Print Buy at AllPosters.com