Mention one new detail that you learned from the documentary segment that none of your classmates have commented on previously.
18 thoughts on “The Crash and the Empire State Building”
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IDC 1001H
Today, the Empire State Building is a New York City icon. New Yorkers can pick it out immediately from the skyline. Tourists arrive from across the globe to gaze at it in person. However, the Empire State Building did not always have this splendid reputation. Developed by John Jacob Raskob during the depression, it was a building that took many risks. He asked the architects working on the design to make the skyscraper as tall as possible. Additionally, this building was placed uptown, away from major financial centers. To add more wonder to the building, the spire was also capable of mooring zeppelins. The Empire State Building wound up being a commercial failure and an embarrassment to Al Smith, an owner of the building. Due to its strange location, less than thirty percent of office space was rented out. This left 56 of its 102 floors completely vacant. There was a great deal of office space available at the time, so its location made it less desirable. Two attempts were made to dock zeppelins on the mooring mast, but they failed, causing this function to be abandoned. So, while the Empire State Building is now seen as symbol of New York City’s glory, it was once a symbol of failure and excess from the 1920s, the decade that destroyed the economy.
I find it astonishing that the Empire State Building was made with the main motivation being to make the building the tallest in the world. Most businessmen and financiers worry most about their return on investment or risk. The people behind the project, including John J. Raskob, seemed to ignore these conventional ideals. Instead, one sees men who want glory. The goal of the building was to make a monument to human achievement. Research was done to see the maximum height that the building can reach. It was concluded that the building would be made eighty-five stories high. The location of the building was described as “off the beaten path.” The makers of the building ignored the potential pitfalls of the project, and they pushed forward. The empire state building thus became a symbol of New York. It embodied the ideals of New York City including innovation, forward thinking, and resilience.
What I find interesting about the Empire State building is the time and effort it took to construct it. There were studies and research done to determine the maximum height that a building can reach. And from then on forward, that became the ultimate goal. On October 29, 1929 right before the stock market crash, the work began on the Empire State building. The Waldorf was demolished. Even during the crash and rough economic times, Al Smith didn’t hold back on his dream to make the Empire State Building a reality. He announced that a 200-foot story top would be added to the already 85-story building. It raised the length to 1,250 feet in total. It beat its rivalry, the Chrysler building by 202 feet. I am so surprised at the fact that even through the economic turmoil at the time, the construction of the Empire State building did not hesitate.
One thing I learned from the documentary was the vast alienation New York City seemed to have with the rest of the country. During the Roaring 20s, we seem to generalize this time period as prosperous, but this was only present in the cities. In actuality, the rest of the country was dealing with a different reality. A country does revolve around its cities, especially New York, but a great deal of a country’s wealth comes from all parts of the country. It seems almost too ironic that the stock market crashed and could not recover as quickly as economists such as John Raskob had predicted because the rest of the country had already fallen. The rise of unemployment, decrease in automobile sales and revenue at department stores, and the failing farms were all occurring simultaneously during the summer of 1929 as stated in the documentary. Even with all of these warning signs happening as early as 1928, Wall Street seemed too caught up in its success to realize the consequences of its actions. Funny enough it was our own Bernard Baruch who first noticed the upcoming disaster, but it was too late to convince others to withdraw from their winning streak. After watching the documentary, I have learned that although the crash was not deserved, especially with the 15 year aftermath, but could have been prevented or lessened in severity with the right economic decisions if only New Yorkers were less egocentric and more open to the rest of the United States of America.
An interesting new fact I learned from the documentary was that, although the official date of the crash was October 29th, there was a significant dip in the stock market on October 23rd that preceded the big crash and was detrimental. In the documentary it was referred to as the “first wave.” This first wave was a result of a decline in value of Blue-chip stocks that caused many to unload those stocks. In only 2 hours people lost 10 billion dollars in the market. This shocked New York City and left investors in disbelief. They hoped that the government would intervene. Soon, Morgan agreed to spend millions in the market to help it reestablish and it appeared for a bit that it had. Then on a Friday the banks decided to take the money out because it appeared to be fixed. The following Tuesday, Black Tuesday, is the day that most people think about when they hear the market crash, October 29th. This part of the documentary was particularly interesting because it discussed the lesser known first wave.
What I found interesting in the documentary was the fact that when the Empire State Building first opened up, it was not located in convenient/strategic location. It wasn’t in the center of the financial center nor was it around the transportation nucleus of Grand Central Terminal. In fact, it was becoming an increasing embarrassment to the owner with people mocking it as the “the Empty State Building.” This is surprising because in the modern day, we seem to think that the Empire State Building is in fact the epicenter for business corporations with many businesses located near midtown Manhattan. The documentary also says that it may be due to the myriad number of office spaces that were beginning to open up in other more strategic locations throughout the city. The building became more of a monument to the “excesses of the 1920s” instead of the hegemonic business power it was supposed to be. Yet despite all of the disappointment of the tower, it is still known as the “lighthouse of commerce.”
I find it so surprising how such a huge historical event in New York City happened during a time of chaos and gloom. The stock market crash in 1929 led to many people without jobs. According to the documentary, almost all construction stopped. But this was an exception for the construction of the Empire State Building. They were on a budget and had to quickly finish building this skyscraper that they hoped would be the tallest building in New York City. In addition to that, they hoped that they would find some tenants who would want space in this building. But this seems overly optimistic during a time of economic difficulty. I was amazed how even when everything in New York City and basically the country had declined, the Empire State Building continued being constructed. It was as if it was immune to the despair the entire city was experiencing at that time. It was a beautiful symbol of hope and optimism that things would become better and that the economic turmoil would soon be over. Knowing this fact about the Empire State Building makes me appreciate this skyscraper so much more and I can definitely see how this building is a genuine representation of all that New York City has to offer.
An interesting detail from this documentary was how the stock market was rather a false indicator of how the US economy was running. While leading up to the imminent “Black Tuesday”, the stock market was surging higher and higher, eventually peaking in the summer of 1929. The term used in the documentary was “excess speculation, stating the disconnection between the Wall Street Economy to the economy of the US as a whole. The speculative bubble kept blowing up and up until it literally crashed, sending the state of our country into turmoil. While the state of the US stock market seemed to bring great wealth to traders, it was the complete opposite for thus who weren’t a part of New York City’s financial center. In the US, unemployment was steadily rising, automobile sales and department sales revenue had fallen down sharply, farms were also failing in the Southern and Western portion of America. However, even though with all these failings outside of New York City, the stock prices kept rising and rising in a false sense of optimism. The documentary even states that traders were so eager to keep trading that they would camp out in the streets outside the Stock Exchange and even in the tiny graveyards of the nearby Trinity Church, the burial site of Alexander Hamilton. This detail was interesting to me as we visited both of these locations in our class trip and it was nice to see how our outside of the classroom trips pertain to New York City’s history.
I though it was interesting that one if the historians said that the stock market crash on Black Tuesday was not directly a cause of the Great Depression. Instead he referred to it at as the margin between the roaring twenties and the Great Depression that in a folk historical perspective has come to mark the start of the Great Depression. I agree that the financial and economic implications of the crash could not be single handedly faulted as the cause of the great depression. However I do think the impact the crash had on the morale of New Yorkers is what really lead to the great depression. People had lost this attitude of hopefulness and this belief that anyone can become rich in the capitalist and booming economy that New York was during the roarin’ 20s. it especially changed the way people viewed buying on credit or on margin. In the twenties people spent more money than they had all the time because they could. During the Great depression people held on to whatever little money they had. People began to only accept cash as depicted by the image in the documentary of a car for sale with a sign that stated the price was only a hundred dollars but only cash would be accepted because the seller of the car had lost everything in the crash and he needed cash. This is a good example of how people’s views toward money changed following the crash. There for I agree with the historian that financially the crash was not the cause of the Great Depression, but i do believe that emotionally its impact on the people did cause the Great Depression.
I found it interesting that the very first assembly line for manufacturing skyscrapers had been created by the Starrett brothers in building the Empire State Building, but it was unique in comparison to the assembly line used in manufacturing cars and other consumer goods. As stated in the documentary, “there was an almost infinite supply of willing men to work” and in most assembly lines, this was a fact that employers would take advantage of. This was not the case with the Empire State Building, as the workers formed a tightly knit community and when one worker did not show up, the others did not go up to build. The teams “worked together, played together, ate together,” and “there was a great deal of trust involved in handling the 800 degree rivets.” Substituting another capable body to help in the building was not an option for these groups of men, as they had formed bonds with their teams and had learned how to complete their work effectively with one another. Aware and fearful of the fact that each and every one of them was replaceable by the hundreds of unemployed men looking for work, the individual production rates of each of the men climbed and the Empire State Building continued to grow at an alarming rate. The Great Depression helped fuel the growth of the building and created an extremely effective model for the assembly line to be used in skyscraper manufacturing.
Something I found very interesting about the documentary was specifically how long it took the Empire State Building to become profitable. When the tallest building in the world at the time of its completion was finally erected on April 11, 1931 only thirty percent of its available office space was rented out. It took the impressive architectural masterpiece an astonishing twenty years to finally become profitable to its owner, Al Smith. I was just really surprised that a historic building and perhaps the number one icon of New York City would have trouble marketing itself to city. The documentary later describes that sole reason why the Empire State Building was such a large failure in the beginning was solely because of it’s location. The building stood in the middle of town and away from more competitive real estate areas. It was far from the financial district as well as far from the convenience of public transportation like Grand Central. It wasn’t until 1950, when the Empire State Building became a more convenient location for businesses.
While the fact that the Empire State Building was an initial failure was something I did not know, what I found extremely surprising was that the “Empty State Building,” on its first year of operation, made over one million dollars from the visitors to its observation deck. Even more shocking is when you put that figure in perspective and understand that the owners of the Empire State Building made about the same sum of money from the rent of 101 floors bellow the deck. This is testament to the building inconvenient location and the competitiveness of the real estate market, but also testament to the love and pride New York City felt, as well as the world’s fascination for the tallest skyscraper in the world. Perhaps this is not surprising, considering the unobstructed view such a location provides to the visitors, who could now see more of Manhattan in one glance than ever before. As the documentary states, “almost overnight, the Empire State Building became the most romantic and widely recognized symbol of the city.” The juxtaposition in time of the real estate failure and of successful widespread adoration is a rare phenomenon – one I only know to be exemplified by the Empire State Building, which is the fascinating detail I learned in this week’s segment.
One thing I found interesting about the Empire State Building is how it became an icon for New York City, rising amidst some of the toughest times in its history. The building’s construction was indicative of the time period in which it was constructed – a time of despair and uncertainty about the national economy. The same sentiments applied to the Empire State Building. It was initially unprofitable, and on the verge of failing completely. Nevertheless, Al Smith persisted, and almost a decade later, after additional construction had been completed, the building, and the city, had finally turned it around. Both stood taller than ever, as the U.S. entered one of its best time periods in history – the 1950s. I found it very interesting that there was a parallel between the success of the U.S. economy and the Empire State Building. Despite its peculiar beginnings, the Empire State Building rose up, along with the rest of the city, after the Great Depression.
What I found striking was the fact how often there seem to be harbingers, people who see the great tragedy to come but they are almost always ignored. It had almost become a rule in history that those who have the skills and the foresight to see the signs of an incoming disaster are thoroughly laughed at. It seems to me to be an injustice but perhaps it’s just mankind’s tendency towards skepticism and perhaps we’re too wary about those who cry wolf that we neglect to listen to those that actually are looking out for our safety. Remember those that warned against Nazism, remember those that warned of the dangerous web of alliance in Europe in 1914, and we will remember Roger Babson, a man who was wary and tried to warn his generation against their avarice, greed, and against their inevitable crash.
Erected in 1930, the Empire State Building instantly became a New York City landmark that demanded nothing less than utter awe. One particularly interesting detail that I learned from this segment of the documentary is the incredible degree of productivity in which the Empire State Building was constructed. According to the documentary, at the height of its peak, the project employed 3,439 workers. Under the leadership of the Starrett Brothers, these men implemented the principles of assembly line production for the most efficient manufacturing of skyscrapers. The significant increase in workers’ productivity allowed for 22 stories of the structure to be built in 22 days. These measures of productivity would have been quite impressive for any skyscraper built at the time. Yet, to me they are more so impressive due to the fact that the skyscraper was the world’s tallest building and remained so for 40 years to follow. The men behind the creation of this structure continued to push forward to reach new feats despite their uncertainty. One reason for this is the “by any means necessary” attitude that was fostered in the social, political, and economic contexts inflicted by the Great Depression. Seeing that the men working on the Empire State Building performed to record setting standards in spite of economic turmoil made me realize that perseverance has always been a trait that distinguishes New Yorkers.
To the average visitor today, the Empire State Building is a cool thing to see in New York City. For natives today, it is not really acknowledged. However, to the natives of the time, the Empire State Building was a symbol of success, excellence, hope, and pride for the country. The creation of the building itself was a marvelous feat, requiring three times the amount of steel that the Chrysler Building required. The Empire State Building meant more to the country and to the world than just a great addition to the skyline; rather, it was a reason to believe in the United States. Countries from all around the world believed in the innovation and the boom of the United States’ economy because of the fact that the Empire State Building was successfully built. To natives, the Building symbolized an approaching era of continued excellence which would give rise to even greater innovations and additions to the skyline of New York City.
I found it extremely surprising that many people were oblivious to the fact that the stock market was going to crash or that the economy could not prosper for so many years without having a time of downfall. There were many indicators to show that the economy was coming to a halt. Unemployment rates were rising, automobile sales and department store revenues had fallen off their mark, and many other events started to take place. Yet people in New York and especially on Wall Street were walking in to start trading and were booking hotel rooms or camping out to get the best stock prices. It was a normal day for everyone who was ready to prosper. The people who really weren’t oblivious to the fact that the economy was inevitably going to suffer, were those common folk who knew they would suffer the most. They mentioned in the documentary that Bernard Baruch himself used to get his shoes shined by a specific man every morning and it was one morning that his shoeshine boy gave him a stock tip. Baruch was smart enough to pull out his stocks and listen to the shoeshine boy but many weren’t wise enough to do so.
What I found interested was that although the Empire State Building was slated to be an economic failure, it actually gained popularity with visitors from all over the world who came to visit it and became success for reasons other than it was built. In fact, the first year that it opened it made more than 1 million dollars from tourist sales which was the same amount the owner made from rent. The building also became a prominent center for television and radio broadcasting which was in contrast to its original purpose. Whatever expectations the owner had for the ambitious building failed but the opportunities that rose out of those failed expectations gave more recognition and prosperity to the building than the original plans would have. This building reflects the New York spirit. Even though New Yorkers don’t always achieve what they want and they fail, they manage to create success but of their failure like the Empire State Building