The Empire State Building

It was actually the tallest building in the world from 1931 to 1971, or about 40 years, which is the longest span to hold the tallest building crown for any modern skyscraper. So Steven, I'm personally really excited to do this episode. You know, my background is in civil engineering. I studied structural engineering for my master's program. So I love buildings and especially skyscrapers are one of the most extreme forms of architecture and engineering.

So this is the time in New York when there's a lot of immigration, a lot of industrialization, the population is exploding, and there's also a building boom going on. I think the state of New York's motto really sums up this time and, and the spirit that drove this era. And the motto is Excelsior, which is Latin forever higher. So it's this time of optimism and pushing the limits. It's also a really business friendly environment at the time.

Calvin Coolidge was the president during most of the twenties, and he has this quote that I think sums up that country's attitude towards business at the time. He says, the man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there worships there. So everyone is driven with this passion to expand, to build more, to make money, and it's really an economic boom time. Like I said, this also extends to architecture.

And Daniel Burnham, a famous Chicago architect, said quote, make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work So you can see how this idea of ambition and economic prosperity is channeled into the buildings that people build also. And the quintessential invention of this era of industrialization and economic boom is the skyscraper.

And so this is a new type of building at the time, and there are basically two reasons people are building skyscrapers One is an economic reason, and then one is a technological reason. So kind of first comes the technological breakthrough that allows for skyscrapers. So before this time, most buildings were built out of masonry walls, so that's like brick or stone.

And the problem with brick and stone is as you go higher, the building's base needs to be much thicker to support the weight above it. So you would have some like four or five story masonry buildings.

The walls on the bottom floor would have to be like six feet thick. This creates a problem because one, you're losing rentable space on the first floor 'cause you have these large walls, but then two, not much light can get in.

So he sees this like spacious and airy wire birdcage that supports the book. And he thinks why have the walls bear all the load of the building when we could use steel beams and girders and columns to form like a lattice form work that's gonna support the building's weight. So he goes on to build this new type of building using at first an iron frame structure. But then he also adds the innovation of using steel because steel's being produced for a lot of the railroads.

And in his book, higher Bascom sums up this idea really well, quote height quickly became a question of will and money rather than engineering. So the skyscraper boom originated in Chicago, but it started quickly spreading to New York. And the first really large skyscraper in New York was the Woolworth Building, which opened in 1913. And this was the tallest building in New York at the time, at 792 feet. So the Woolworth building kicked off a boom of skyscraper construction in Manhattan.

And this continued up until the twenties. During the twenties, the total volume of office space in Manhattan nearly doubled.

And so you have people who can now live on the outskirts in the suburbs of the city and then commute into Manhattan Island for work. So steel frame construction was the technological enabler for skyscraper construction. But the primary driver for these skyscrapers actually being built was economics, first and foremost. And a lot of skyscraper construction started in New York because of the rising land values at the time.

land values ballooned to the point where for a developer to make a plot of land on Manhattan Island economically viable, they had to go up.

But like we said, this is a time of excess and optimism. Economic boom, spirits are high. So that doesn't mean these are strictly practical ventures, and it quickly becomes a race to see who can build the tallest skyscraper. So if height is now only a question of will and money, who will be the one to build the world's tallest?

So Steven, what if I told you that the men primarily responsible for building the tallest building in the world, were not architects, not engineers, not city planners, but instead an unlikely pairing of a businessman and a politician

So he started. as a stenographer, which is basically like someone who writes down dictation. It's not really a job that exists anymore, but it's like a office clerk type job. And that job went pretty well. But he wanted a raise. And so he asked for a raise, but it was denied. And so he decides, I don't wanna do this job anymore. And he writes a letter to Pierre s DuPont of the DuPont Chemical Company, and he asks to be his personal secretary and ask for two and a half times his current salary.

So he makes this big, bold demand to DuPont who might ring a bell because the DuPont Chemical Corporation is one of the most successful industrial chemical companies in American history. And they originally started out manufacturing gunpowder and munitions, but at the time, they were one of the largest companies in the us.

at the DuPont Chemical Company?

So during World War I, DuPont is one of the key suppliers for the US military. They provide all of the munitions to support the army, and they do really well. They make a fortune off of arm sales. So after World War I, DuPont is sitting on this big pool of cash and they're not sure what to do with it. But Rasco has been following the stock market closely and he's picked a stock that he likes. That stock is General Motors.

So this is in the early 1910s when the automobile industry in the US is just starting to take off and Rasco sees that this new company, general Motors could be very successful.

And then with the help of Rasco, DuPont basically stages a coup within General Motors and takes control of the board of directors, forces the founder out, and DuPont and some of his other investors take control of General Motors.

There's the idea that you would sign. Uh, imp a document with your name as capitalist. Yeah. I love it. Our second protagonist, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. And this is Al Smith, who is the politician in our story. So, Al Smith was born in Brooklyn to immigrant Irish Catholic parents, and they were very poor. They basically lived in a tenement, below the Brooklyn Bridge. Smith's father died when he was 13. And similar to Rasco, he had to take over for the family.

So he worked several odd jobs in New York. And then eventually he got in with Tammany Hall, which is, this New York political machine that was known for controlling New York politics during this era. So Al Smith uses his connections with Tammany Hall to get elected to the New York State Assembly and become a state legislator. then he catches his big break when this really tragic event occurs, called the Triangle Shirt, waist Fire.

And this is well known, you probably learned about it in like high school history class, but this was basically an episode at the time in New York where working conditions in factories were really poor. Because there was no fire code at the time. A lot of the exits were locked. There weren't any sprinklers in the building. The staircases were narrow. And so 146 workers ended up dying in this fire. Most of them were immigrant women and young girls. And so it was a huge tragedy at the time.

And Al Smith became the most outspoken critic against these poor labor practices. And so this kick started his career as a political reformer. And he supported labor rights, children's welfare, government transparency. And even though he was in this corrupt Tammany Hall organization, he tried to reform it from within, and especially was a supporter of the average person.

He becomes a really popular political reformer and eventually is elected as governor of New York, where he serves four terms And this really makes him synonymous with New York because he was governor for so long. He was really well respected by the people. He was known as a champion of the average man, and he was one of the most beloved politicians of the time. And so Al Smith is someone who has a really charismatic personality.

He's known for being very compassionate, like we mentioned, his various efforts to reform labor movements and children's welfare. And he did all this in a genuine way. He really cared about the people of New York. He grew up in the slums of New York and made it to one of the most powerful political offices in the state.

And Rasco is more of this ruthless businessman who will take over the General Motors board Whereas Smith is more compassionate and he has this reputation for helping out the average New Yorker. But Rasco and Smith did have a few things in common. Like we said, they both came from humble origins and had to lead their family after their father's death at a young age. And they're also really ambitious. You know, they've been very successful in their respective fields.

One as a businessman, one as a politician. Interestingly too, they were both Irish Catholic. And this is a time in America when there was a lot of discrimination against Irish Catholics. And so they have to stick together. And there's this tight knit Irish Catholic community in New York, and that's when Smith and Rasco first meet each other.

So his whole complaint with prohibition is that he thinks the government is wasting money on enforcement and that they could instead be making money on the taxation of alcohol. So his whole complaint is like, this doesn't make good business sense. And so Smith, he is basically the leader of the Democratic Party at this point, and he gets his party's nomination for president. But the Democrats are the party on the outside trying to get in. The Republicans control the presidency.

And so Smith decides they need to differentiate themselves somehow. And so one way they choose to differentiate themselves in the election is they run on a platform of repealing prohibition.

So in the 1928 presidential election, it is Al Smith for the Democrats against Herbert Hoover for the Republicans. But from the beginning, the election doesn't go well for Al Smith, this is a time when most voters were opposed to having a Catholic president. And Smith is a devout Irish Catholic. He's also anti prohibition when prohibition was not yet really unpopular with the electorate for the country broadly. So this position is a weakness for them.

And then interestingly too, Smith has this really unique, dramatic New York accent. If you listen to like any of the videos from him, he's like the stereotypical New Yorker. And it makes a lot of non-New Yorkers laugh when they hear his voice on the radio for the first time. So Smith ends up losing the race pretty badly. He loses on a landslide, and Herbert Hoover wins And you know, up until this time, his political story has been one of unmatched success.

He was governor for a record four terms, but now he finds himself out of a job. And interestingly, because it was also a year for the gubernatorial election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Was elected as the governor of New York. So Smith can't even go back to his old job. And he finds himself unemployed and he was a ardent anti-corruption crusader. And so he always took a small salary as a politician and he just has a small pension when he retires.

So he also needs money 'cause he has a large family and he doesn't really have a way to support himself after losing the election. Rasco isn't in a much better situation either. So when he joined as chair of the Democratic National Committee, GM forced him to resign from his position on the board because they didn't want to have this political conflict. So Rasco is no longer with General Motors. And then even worse, his 19-year-old son died in a car crash not long after the election.

So both Rasco and Smith find themselves out of a job after this failure to win the presidency. So there's this apocryphal story of what happens next, and not sure if it's true, but it at least captures the idea of what happens next. So as the story goes, there is the celebration because Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won the governorship of New York. So they're at a party celebrating that.

But Al Smith is kind of melancholy, you know, he's happy for his friend who won the governorship, but he didn't win the presidency. So really he's missing out. And he goes to the men's bathroom and he starts complaining to one of his friends saying, I don't have that much money I lost on the presidential bid. I don't know how I'm gonna support my family. And Rasco walks in and says, don't worry Al, I'm gonna build a new skyscraper.

It's gonna be the biggest in the world, and I want you to be the president of the company.

Smith especially, you know, he just has a small pension from being governor, and so he needs to make some money somehow. And at this point, during the economic boom of the 1920s, there's a lot of real estate speculation and there's a lot of money being made in real estate and kind of foreshadowing. There's already a race going on to build the tallest building in the world. And so Smith is excited to join that race and contribute something to the skyline of the city that he loves so much.

Rasco, likewise, doesn't have a definite future, but he's an entrepreneur. He always wants to be building something new, trying something new. And so he thinks, why don't I get involved in real estate? Because he's also excited by the building race going on right now. But interestingly too, in 1928, Rasco, he knows the stock market really well. We talked about how he had that initial idea to buy General Motor stock when it was underpriced.

He's starting to see that the stock market might be over leveraged, that people are buying too much on margin. So he is looking to diversify his investments and that diversification is gonna come in the form of real estate.

Rasco has the money and organizational expertise, but Smith has the fame and public relations expertise. It sounds like these two could make a great team.

He's looking to do something beyond just make money. He wants to do something incredible. And then the other idea is that Smith is the ultimate New Yorker. He has this thick New York accent. He grew up working odd jobs in the city. He's been governor for four terms. The people love him, and so he's gonna be the ideal face for a building that would become the icon of New York City. So now Rasco and Smith have the idea of building the world's tallest building. All they need is a place to build it.

And so developers would just build their buildings straight up from the sidewalk without any setbacks or anything. So that it was just this hulking mass of building to take advantage of every square inch of the site. So that was good from an economic perspective, but it created these canyons in lower Manhattan where the buildings were so tall that they would blot out the sun. And so the government realized they needed to do something to change this.

And they passed these zoning laws in 1916, and it's a bit complicated, but basically they required setbacks for buildings. So a building can rise a certain height above the sidewalk before it needs to kind of take a stair step back. And so you get like these wedding cake style skyscrapers where you have a big block on the bottom, a smaller block on top of that, a smaller block on top of that kind of reaching up to a point.

But there's one key provision that they left in the zoning code, and that was that there is no height limit on 25% of the lot.

So this basically means on 25% of whatever your lot size is, you can go as high in the sky as you want to. So in a lot of cases that 25% is so small that you couldn't make an office out of that. But if you have a massive site, 25% is still a big enough portion of the site to build an office tower.

So it's probably obvious that having a bigger site is better when it comes to construction in New York, but at this point, assembling a full block or larger had become almost impossible because there's such a building boom in Manhattan that it's really hard to assemble enough small sites to build a large, full block structure.

So in a lot of cases when developers are building these skyscrapers, there's this funny game of like intrigue and they're kind of secretive about buying up plots because they want assemble several smaller plots into a larger plot. But as soon as one owner gets wind of your plans, you know they're gonna jack the prices way up. So another important consideration for the site when you're trying to build the world's largest skyscraper is can you get down to Bedrock?

So basically Bedrock is the firm solid rock beneath the soil of a site. And if you're gonna be building a really tall load-bearing building, you need to put the foundations on bedrock. But then the question is, is there solid rock down there and how deep do you have to dig to get to Bedrock? But Manhattan is famous for its strong Manhattan schist, which is this kind of rough textured and really solid bedrock that's not too deep below the surface.

And so this is one of the contributors to why so many size scrappers are built in Manhattan is because you can dig just. A few feet in some examples to get to Bedrock and have a really strong foundation for a tall building.

You know, originally it was the site of a farm back during the Revolutionary War period, but that site was purchased by the Astro family in 1827, and the Asters made their fortune basically as real estate brokers. And their strategy was to buy up all the outskirts of New York City. So back when Manhattan Island wasn't fully populated, they went to kind of the edge and they would buy up all the farm land and just sit on it and wait for the city to expand outwards.

So by the 1850s, the city of New York had expanded out to encompass this site and it was prime real estate. So the Astor families decided to build a set of mansions here And at this point, the Astro family was the epitome of high society. They were one of the richest families in New York. And wherever they settled and wherever they decided to build their mansions became the nexus of high society.

In fact, one of the mansions that they built had this famous ballroom that would host about 400 people and that became the criteria for being part of New York High Society was if you were one of these 400 people who got invited to the Astor's Ballroom parties. So fast forward to the end of the 18 hundreds, the Waldorfs are still living in this neighborhood where they've built up several mansions together. But one of the Astros, William Waldorf Astor, is in this feud with his aunt.

And this is the classic rich family feud over something insignificant. But William Waldorf decides he's going to spite his aunt by developing his mansion, which is next door to hers, into a grand hotel. So he opens the Waldorf Hotel, but then to get back at him, his aunt decides that she's going to open a competing hotel just next door.

So both hotels are threatened by the competition from each other, but they finally come together and they strike an agreement where William Waldorf is going to build the Waldorf Hotel. His aunt is going to build the Astoria Hotel, and then they're going to link them with corridors to create one hotel, the Waldorf Astoria. So this combined Waldorf Astoria opened its doors in 1897, and it immediately becomes one of the most influential hotels in the city of New York.

William Waldorf and the Astoria family built this as a hotel to be worthy of their name. And so it's very opulent, lavish. It has a lot of modernizations that are available, and it's one of the most popular places in the city. but by 1929 when Rasco and Smith are looking for a site for their building. High society had kind of moved on. It had moved further uptown, and the Waldorf Astoria had become a bit outdated and unfashionable.

So eventually the Waldorf Astoria was sold to a developer called the Bethlehem Engineering Corporation, and their plan was to turn it into an office building. They were trying to get real estate financing, but they ended up defaulting. And so the bank took possession of the site.

And this is important to highlight here because it shows that during the speculative time, a risky venture like real estate, whoever the developer is, is extremely leveraged because it's very expensive to buy a large site. I think they paid 15 to $17 million. And so before they've built an office building, they're not collecting any revenues, so they have to be able to float the project basically until they can build the building and realize some profit.

Now, interestingly, that bank, the Bethlehem Engineering was working with was the MetLife Insurance company. And who sits on the board of MetLife Insurance? None other than Al Smith. So he's kind of aware of this deal that's going on, and he sees that it falls through. So Al Smith knows this is a good site, but he needs someone to execute on the deal.

And so what comes to mind is his good friend John Jacob Brasco, who is the organizational genius and has the money to finance a risky endeavor like this. So Rasko comes in and he puts together a syndicate of businessman, including his mentor, DuPont, and they purchased the site for a total of $17 million.

So it's only fitting that the building that Al Smith, the ultimate New Yorker will lead, is going to be the Empire State Building. And then Smith announces that this tallest building in the world will be 1000 feet high and 80 stories tall.

So it's going to be imperative for Smith and Rasco that they develop and build on this site quickly to start becoming profitable as soon as possible. So now Rasco and Smith have selected a site for their project. Now they just need a design to solve the complexities of making the world's tallest building a reality.

So Rasco and Smith have found their site at the location of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but now they need some architects to be able to create a design for this building that they wanna construct. So they need a design that's ideal for the unique project constraints that they face here. There's a lot of forces playing on this project.

And so what's top of mind for Rasco and Smith is they want a design that's practical and economical because they don't plan to just build this building and then sell it. Their plan is to operate it as well. So this is gonna be like a retirement job for Al Smith as the president and Rasco plans to own the building as well.

They worked for him when he was building the General Motors building in downtown, uh, New York So a little bit of background on Shrieve Lamb and Harmon. They have this really ideal delegation of responsibility within their architecture firm. So Richmond Shrieve runs the administrative side of the business, and then William Lamb and Arthur Harmon are focused more on the design side of things.

And they had a lot of experience designing office buildings for commercially minded customers like Rasco and General Motors. And above all their pragmatic, there's this great quote Tarana has in the Empire State Building book. And he says they did not view architecture as exclusively an art, a science, or a business architecture. Was all of these an indivisible whole? They were in short businesslike.

And so Shrieve, Lam and Harmon, they're not known for these elaborate designs and they're not really pushing the edge of new architecture. A lot of their designs kind of look similar to what other people are

building at the time for office buildings. But most importantly to Rasco and Smith, they do have a reputation for being dependable and meeting their deadlines,

The first is what's known as Neoclassical, this is basically a return to the classical tradition of Greece and Rome and Renaissance style buildings. So you might recognize this style in buildings such as the White House, where it kind of looks like a Greek temple. It has tall columns in the front, it's all done in White Stone.

The style, even the vocabulary is really ordinate. You have architectural pieces like plasters and garlands and cornices and just all these elaborate designs to make the building look, beautiful. The other competing architectural movement at this time is something new and kind of on the avant-garde, And that's this movement known as modernism. And this.

Movement comes out of the new scientific advancements, especially in architecture where we talked about the steel frame construction allowed for the walls to carry no load because the structure of the steel carried the load. So now the walls are freed up and they just act as a curtain. So they don't have to be made out of masonry or brick or anything. They can be basically just a sheet of glass if you want.

And so this modernist style is advanced by several European pioneers like Le Buer and Walter Gropius, and they have a focus on utility, straight lines and engineering. And Le is famous for saying a house is a machine for living in. So this is a new architectural style for the machine age focused on practicality.

So art deco was originally developed in France and it began with furniture and kind of decorative arts, but it eventually extended into interior design magazine covers. It even influenced the design of cars and trains, but then also architecture. And so it's characterized by sleek modern designs, less decoration than the bow arts movement. but it does still have some decoration and it really focuses on a celebration of technology and progress.

So it fits the a well, and it uses different materials like stone terracotta, but then some new materials like aluminum and stainless steel that were just now starting to be manufactured. And so probably the most famous example of art deco and architecture is the Chrysler Building, which we will talk about in a bit. But for the Empire State Building, this art deco style is the perfect blend of practicality, but also being flashy enough to grab some attention.

And it really demonstrates this philosophical design idea that an American architect named Louis Sullivan popularized. So there's a great quote from the Empire State Building by Tark, and he says, quote Sullivan thought a tall looking building should be a soaring thing. Its natural upward thrust reflecting the frame of steel upon which the walls are hung to reveal the offices, all of which are about the same size, and perform essentially the same role.

An office building's form should follow its function, which is after all to house offices. So it's this idea that what the building's purpose is should be reflected in its design. And so it doesn't make sense to have an office building that looks like a Greek temple because that's not its function. It makes sense for an office building to look tall and sleek, and it should have a repeating pattern because it's filled with several offices that all do the same thing.

So this influences the art deco design, and especially William Van Allen, who is the architect of the Chrysler Building, And he said, quote, our tall buildings are wholly unlike any buildings of an earlier day to apply to our tall office buildings. The familiar architectural features characteristic of palaces, temples, and churches is not economical or practical, and it is artistically wrong because it is not truthful.

But kind of the legend as the story goes is that RAs gob is meeting with the architects and he holds up a pencil and says, this is what the building should look like. I don't know how true that story is, but it at least gives the initial idea of what the building might look like. Shreve Leman Harmon kick off the design process by doing something that I think we can learn a lot from. And that's immediately pulling together everyone involved in the project to participate in the design process.

Because when you're doing design, especially for like a building, mistakes in the design process are much easier to correct on paper than out on the site when you're actually moving around steel and concrete. So they establish what they call a policy committee for the design and construction of the building. And I think ironically, this is an example of a committee that actually works well because they bring everyone together.

And in this case, they need to have the opinions of a lot of different people because building skyscrapers has become such a specialized process that no one person can keep all the different constraints in their mind. It's very interesting to me how this design evolves because there's a lot of different forces and constraints working on this project.

And the main categories that we'll go through are economics, the laws of physics, the constraints of the site, the unique New York zoning laws, and then most importantly, the deadline for opening day.

And so they were like basically bolted onto the side of the building and there weren't that many elevators, so it didn't really take up much space.

And that's because there's basically this upper limit where eventually adding additional floors, the cost offsets the income you would get from renting them.

And it's mostly driven on how much you think you can rent the office space for and how much you had to pay to acquire the land. So interestingly, one of the architects, Shrieve participated in this study and they calculated that the ideal height for a skyscraper at that time was 63 stories. And that offered the maximum economic return based on the criteria I mentioned.

So he presents this to Rasco and interestingly, and kind of a uncharacteristic decision, Rasco says, no, I wanna do 80 stories so that the building will be 1000 feet tall. That's an important number because at the time that would make it the tallest building in the world.

So to me, this is a really savvy decision on RAs KO's part because he is a capitalist, he is focused on profitability first, but he realizes that making this building profitable is not just about the numbers and might, you know, this spreadsheet or the equivalent of what they had in the day might spit out and say, okay, yeah, 63 stories is optimal.

But RAs club's looking at the bigger picture and he says There's gonna be a tremendous advantage to say that we have the tallest building in the world.

And so this is part of the reason that they lean more towards the art deco style because they're not willing to pay additional cost for, ornamentation to have sculptures and all of this unnecessary design elements. The next major constraint affecting the project is probably what we all think of when we think about trying to build the tallest building in the world. And that's the laws of physics.

And so interestingly, as we had talked about before, this new idea of steel frame design kind of freed the builders from the previous constraints. So like I said, there's this curtain wall that you have a lot of flexibility and it doesn't need to be this thick masonry.

So obviously taller buildings require more elevators, which takes up more and more rentable space,

So that's kind of the limit and where Rasco gets this 80 story idea from, So the third major design constraint the architects are working with is the unique characteristics of this site. This is actually in most ways an advantage for Rasco and Smith because they got this large site of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. So they can use more space for elevators to serve higher floors while still maintaining large rentable spaces. But it's also in the middle of Manhattan.

So there's limited space available, they can only construct within their site. And then you can imagine how difficult it is to transport materials from outside of the city into the city for construction.

So the result of this is the architect's design a building that rises five stories on the entire site, and then it tapers up for several stories with setbacks and cutaways. And then on that 25% of the site, it rises straight up into the air to the final height of 1000 feet. And that brings us to the fifth and most important constraint, the deadline for opening day. So RAs Cobin Smith ambitiously set the opening day as May 1st, 1931. But selecting this date is not an accident.

And in one of the interesting historical traditions that I had no idea existed before I started this research, back in this time period, and I think up until World War ii, May 1st and October 1st were traditionally something known as moving day in New York City. And that's basically this tradition where all the commercial office leases ended on either May 1st or October 1st. And so everybody in New York City moved on one of these days and it was called Moving Day in the City.

And it caused confusion and pandemonium and congestion. 'cause you can imagine every office worker is moving to a new office on the same day. So, kind of crazy and blows my mind that this uh, occurred for so long. But it's super critical for Rasco and Smith because time is money for them. And if they miss this May 1st, 1931 moving day, they have to wait six more months until they can get tenants into their building.

So Rasco and Smith put speed of construction as their absolute number one priority. And this more than anything else, influences the design of the Empire State Building.

So they're gonna have this steel frame structure, but then on the facade they need like the outer skin to cover the building. And originally they're thinking about using bricks, but the contractors come to 'em and say, bricks are really labor intensive. It takes a long time to build a brick wall. And so for a little bit more cost, they can cover the facade in Indiana limestone, which can be attached in large blocks much more quickly than building a brick wall.

Well, all skyscraper designs up until this point had still had a setback because that was traditionally how it was done. And so they just continued what doing what they had always done. But tree Laman Harmon, they come from this perspective of form, follows function, and they say, we don't need to set back the windows, let's just put them flush with the exterior of the wall because it's just this curtain wall hanging on the side.

So they choose to make this change and it offers them this unique benefit because now that the windows are flush with this Indiana limestone, they can use the edges of the windows to cover up the edges of the limestone blocks. So rather than having to finish the limestone blocks and basically like polish it down to a nice smooth edge, they can just keep it rough and cover it up with the windows.

So this saves a ton of time on the manufacturing of the limestone So the result of these design meetings the architects have led is a design that's surprisingly more driven by economics than engineering concerns. And when I started this research, I expected that this story about the world's tallest building would be more driven by the limits of engineering available at the time.

But it's interesting to learn that surprisingly, the architects purposefully chose not to try anything new on the engineering side because that would mean additional time, more risk to the project. So the final design is this wide base on the full area of the site, and it rises up to a point, kind of like a pencil that Rasco first suggested, and it has these different design elements that make it appear to soar up into the sky.

And so it has this simplified limestone exterior wall that we talked about that has several cool features for time savings. And then it has some stainless steel and aluminum ornamentation consistent with the A of style. But it's not excessive and it's not too ostentatious. And this results in a style that tar neck calls big, bold, and beautiful. And interestingly, the Empire State Building Design was immediately popular with critics and the public alike once the building was completed.

the design of the Empire State Building really hit that sweet spot between something new and a little edgy, but not a complete separation with what people were familiar with that put people off.

Whereas the designers of the Empire State Building, they saw beauty as form confirming to the function or the purpose of the building. So to me, this really shows that the designers, the owners, the builders of the Empire State Building. Really valued function and practicality over decoration and ornamentation and these surface level appearances. But at the same time, they still wanted their building to look as one of the architects called it handsome.

They, they wanted to build a building they could be proud of and have some decoration and not just be a modernist box. And so I think Al Smith sums up the importance of the design really well in a quote where he said, if it is true that architecture is a guide to the study of civilization, then the Empire State is an index to our present day civilization.

And then finally there is Art Deco, which is kind of a more stylish version of modernism, and they ultimately decide on Art Deco for the Empire State Building. We talked about the five key design constraints, which were economics, the laws of physics, the site itself, New York zoning laws, and finally, the most important, the opening deadline.

However, Smith and Rasco are not the only ones competing for the Crown of World's tallest building during the building boom of the 1920s. Rasco and Smith were not the only ones trying to build. A super tall skyscraper. There were a lot of developers competing for this honor, and there were two main competitors who had already started this race even before Rasco and Smith got started.

This was Walter Chrysler, the famous automobile manufacturer who was building a building named after himself, the Chrysler Building, and George Olstrom, who was a Wall Street financier leading a syndicate of investors to build 40 Wall Street. So to start off a little bit, let me explain why having the world's tallest building even matters here. And there's basically two main reasons.

The first is economic reasons, which might be a little surprising, but there's enormous media attention from having the world's tallest building. You're gonna attract more tenants, it's gonna help the building rent out faster. You can charge more for rent because of the media attention and the publicity surrounding the building. that's not to say though that reasons of personal vanity did not also figure into the calculations.

So all these men, Olstrom Chrysler, RAs, Goman Smith, they had been personally successful, they had huge egos, and they wanted to build a great monument that would live on after them. Also, some of these competitions were a bit personal as we'll get into when we tell the story of Walter Chrysler. So, Walter Chrysler fell in love with cars at a young age, at an automobile show.

And you gotta remember, this was the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds when the automobile was just starting to take off. And so Chrysler was an engineer by aptitude, and he joined General Motors to streamline their production lines. and he quickly became the president of the Buick Division at General Motors. But then he crossed paths with Rasco when Rasco and DuPont engineered their takeover of gm.

And unfortunately for Chrysler, he didn't get along with Rasco personally, and there were some conflicts over his level of autonomy. He wanted to run Buick as kind of his own domain, but Rasco really wanted to. Consolidate his grip of power on General Motors. And so they had several disagreements and ultimately Chrysler was forced out. So like any upstart entrepreneur Chrysler said, all right, I'll just start my own car company.

And he also named it after himself, which tells you a little bit about his ego. So Chrysler went into business building cars, trying to

compete with General Motors. And his goal was to become one of the big three auto manufacturers in the country. And he dreamed of building a building that would also reflect his company's leap to become one of the most important car companies in the country. And so he decided that he's going to make his building taller than any other building in the world, and most importantly taller than the new General Motors building that Rasco had Shrieve Laman Harmon build in New York.

And so for Chrysler, this drive to have the world's tallest building was personal. He financed the building himself and he was personally involved in the design and construction, making recommendations to the architect and putting up additional money to make the building even taller and ensure that he would have the height crown to help him. Chrysler enlisted the services of architect William Van Allen.

So Van Allen is really interesting because unlike Shrieve Lamb and Harmon who are on the more practical side of architecture, he's more of an artist. And he has what he views as a higher calling to move architecture beyond the outdated neoclassical styles and create something new and unconventional and a uniquely American style of architecture, which is going to be art deco. And so he designs the Chrysler building in this very loud, flashy, true to his own unique style art deco design.

And he also incorporates a lot of car motifs from Chrysler's company. So interestingly, the crown of the Chrysler building is covered in what's called Rosta stainless steel. And this was developed by Chrysler in his company's lab to be a type of steel that gives this distinctive, shiny and silvery appearance. Van Allen also included gargoyles on the building that are in the shape of the Chrysler Hood ornaments. And then part of the brickwork mosaic on the building features images of cars.

So the Chrysler Building was this really unique art deco building that emphasized the importance of industry and technology.

And so he was looking to expand beyond investments into real estate and try to make some money in the skyscraper boom that's going on. He starts secretly buying up land at the site of 40 Wall Street to build a skyscraper that's going to serve the office district of Wall Street.

But Chrysler reaches a point of no return when he starts work on the dome of the Chrysler building. So once the dome starts tapering up, he can't add in any additional floors. So Olstrom and Severance, the architect in what's kind of a sneaky maneuver, decide that after Chrysler has started kind of tapering the dome up, that they revise their design to be at an even taller height of 925 feet, or about 25 feet taller than the Chrysler buildings designs call for.

The Stare at Brothers, and we will get to them in a second, but the Stat Brothers were able to complete 40 Wall Street in record time, especially using this novel idea where they dug the foundations of the new building while the existing building was being demolished. So the Stat Brothers are able to finish 40 Wall Street in about 11 months, which at the time is a record breaking construction pace. And they finish in April of 19 30 40. Wall Street becomes the tallest building in the world.

At the time, it was taller than the existing tallest. The Woolworth building and Olstrom and Severance think that they've won this height race, but the race is not over yet because Chrysler and Van Allen have an ace up their sleeve. So even though he is completed most of the building, there's still scaffolding on the dome. And everyone's kind of wondering, is he done with the building yet? Like it looks like it's completely built, but he hasn't opened yet.

And that's because in Secret Van Allen, the architect has constructed a 125 foot tall stainless steel spire within the dome of the Chrysler Building. And they lift this stainless steel spire up through the crown of the Chrysler building to a height of 1048 feet,

So there are several ways you could measure what is the world's tallest building. So the first would be the architectural height, which is basically the distance to the tip of the spire or any other decorative elements. But to qualify for this, they have to be quote integral to the design. So as you can imagine, this leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but this is basically the definition that Chrysler uses.

And they argue that the tip of the spire on the Chrysler building is integral to the design, and so it qualifies as the architectural height of the building and therefore the tallest in the world. Another argument for how you would measure the tallest building is based on the height of the highest occupied floor. And this is more of a practical approach because it's based on usable space in the building.

The argument against the Chrysler Building spire is that it's not really a practical part of the building, it's just this ornamentation on top. So this is the argument that Ostrom and severance put forward, but it's really not a successful argument in the court of public opinion. The decision is made that the tip of the tallest point is the highest manmade object. And so the crown goes to the Chrysler building.

So Smith and Rasco are watching this dramatic competition play out, and there's a few forces at play here. So Shreve and Lamb were actually consulting architects, helping severance design 40 Wall Street. And they're also a little upset when they believed Chrysler stole the tallest building record with this spire trick. Rasko also doesn't have a great relationship with Chrysler. We talked a little bit earlier about how they did not get along with each other at GM and Chrysler ultimately left.

So it's gotten personal between the designers of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. So after all the dust settles in late 1929, when the design is underway, Rasko decides he wants Shrieve, Lam and Harman to redesign the Empire State to add five more stories, bringing the total height to 1048 feet and making the structure taller than Chrysler's building even with the additional spire. And so they have this new design for an even taller 85 story Empire State Building.

But anyone's who's familiar with the design will notice that something is missing. And Rasco also thinks there's something missing because this new design only brings the height of the Empire State Building to two feet taller than the tip of the Chryslers Spire. And you know, that's not really much room for error.

So one month later, Al Smith calls the press together for another one of his famous preference conferences, and he announces that the Empire State Building will not just be the tallest building in the world by two feet, but that it will rise 202 feet higher to a final height of 1,250 feet. And so taking a page out of Chrysler's notebook, they're also going to add a steel spire to the top of the Empire State Building.

But they've kind of been reviewing the political situation and they've seen the arguments that, hey, this is just a goofy ornament that Chrysler stuck on his building for vanity purposes. There's arguments that it doesn't really make it the tallest building. And so Al Smith and Rasco kind of come up with this. You can tell me Stephen goofy or ingenious idea that not only is this going to be aspire, it's going to be a mooring mast for Dibles.

And so this is kind of a crazy idea, but if you think back to the spirit of the Times Dirigibles or Zeppelins were really becoming popular, the new form of technology, and everybody thought this was the future of transatlantic travel. It's kind of this, this wild stunt that nobody would really take seriously unless it came from Al Smith. So he's kind of spending some of his public capital here and saying like, no, like we're not just gonna put a big ornament on our building to win the race.

It's actually going to be a mooring mast and it's gonna serve a practical purpose. the idea for the mooring mast is quickly approved and added to the design.

But personal rivalries certainly played a role. Chrysler ends up winning the race against 40 Wall Street, uh, with the ingenious Vertex stunt. And then as a result of this competition between Chrysler and Ostrom, Rosco and Smith end up redesigning the Empire State Building. Uh, they add five floors and also this sort of mooring mass to ensure that they win the height crown.

And so in addition to building the tallest building, they almost also need to sell it to the public and have people believe that it is the world's tallest. So now Rasco and Smith only have about 20 months between now and the May 1st moving day deadline. They need to find a builder who can complete this massive one of a kind structure by their tight deadline. But there just so happens to be one builder who had just finished the 40 Wall Street site in record time.

But as we talked about now, buildings are becoming more and more complex. And so trades need to specialize to be able to address the complexities of modern buildings. Because these buildings now have elevators, they have heating systems, they're installing telephone lines. It requires a really complex supply chain to bring all these materials to site. And so it's not something that just an architect and a few trades can manage.

And so for example, on the Empire State Building, there are gonna be 60 plus different trades and specializations all doing unique task to build the building. So this force drove the need for someone to manage all the trades, the schedule, the budget, and to coordinate everyone to accomplish a complex project. And so a new profession was formed in this time period, which was basically the general contractor.

A general contractor is a company who had managed the building trades, the schedule, the material deliveries, but not necessarily actually perform any of the work themselves. You can think of them as kind of just managers of the construction.

And naturally people say, well, can we apply some of these manufacturing techniques to construction? But this doesn't quite work very well, and it's even a struggle still today because automating these complex, non repeatable construction task is not as easy as if you're building a thousand pins in a pin factory.

But there is one idea that does translate really well, and that's implying the industrial management and kind of the efficiency practices and like the theories of management that are being used in the factories.

So again, this is stuff that's obvious to us today, but at the time, you know, it wasn't obvious that, oh, we should develop a system for how we're going to manage attendance on site, or we should systematize how everyone's paid. And that's what these general contractors excel at is because the scale of construction has reached kind of this, this boiling point to where some of it can be systemized and repeated.

They're going to become masters of organization and management for coordinating this large effort.

I, I would be surprised if there was no sort of organizational culture that was built around construction, given that there were at least some major construction projects throughout history.

And so they mobilized a huge force of labor and expertise to build one single landmark and then it all dissipated afterwards. Whereas what's going on now is this is an economic force. So we talked about there's lots of skyscrapers being built right now, lots of large landmark size buildings being constructed, There's an e economic driver for this.

And so it makes sense for there to be a construction industry So one of the premier general contractors of the time, and especially focused on skyscrapers, was a company called Stare at Brothers and Econ. And they were an industry leader because they were at the forefront of developing these new construction management techniques and understanding how you apply these organizational practices to construction. So there were five stat brothers, all who worked in construction in one way or another.

So some of them were architects, some of them were general contractors. They were all involved in construction somehow. And two of the brothers, Paul and William, partnered with Andrew Ekin to form the Stat Brothers and Ekin company in the early twenties. So William Statt is interesting.

He's known as the colonel because he was the head of the government's emergency construction section during World War I. So he was responsible for building up these basically small towns of barracks and military bases for training. So in like 90 days, he would lead an effort to build out this entire town with electricity, plumbing, and you can imagine because it was wartime speed was of the essence.

So he really, cuts his teeth and gains a lot of experience in building at large scale because these were bases that housed thousands of military personnel, but also doing it under very tight timeline constraints. After that, William Statt worked on some of the most important projects of the time.

He was involved in building the Flatiron building in New York, in Union Station in Washington dc And at this point, when he is bidding on construction of the Empire State Building, he's become a master of managing the tactical day-to-day operations of a construction site. So that's what he brings to the team. And then his brother, Paul Statt, started out as a construction superintendent during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

And he also worked on several other important projects in New York City, mostly skyscraper projects. So they had a lot of experience in these. And then during World War I, he built steamships for the government, which interestingly, there's a lot of parallels in design of steamships and skyscrapers. then his skill is he is more of a strategic planner for the company, and then he's also the master negotiator.

So the most important thing to understand about the Stat brothers is they're hardcore about their job. And I imagine this comes from their experience in the military when it was kind of a life or death situation. And you know, they needed to build these either steamships or military bases because the fate of the country could hang in the balance. But they take their job very seriously.

There's this quote I love by Colonel William Statt that goes building skyscrapers is the nearest peacetime equivalent to war. And so for him, he believes that the builder or the team of general contractors can be compared to the general of an army. And he sees construction as this war. And he is the general of an army who is leading the team to build this structure. And because they take their work so seriously, the stats have developed this reputation for finishing projects ahead of schedule.

The Empire State Building is gonna be about 25% taller than 40 Wall Street with the Morey mast included. But the Empire State Building is gonna be much, much larger compared to 40 Wall Street. So to give some perspective, 40 Wall Street was about 845,000 square feet of rentable office space. The Chrysler Building was slightly larger. It had 850,000 square feet of rentable space. The Empire State Building is planned to have 2.1 million square feet of rentable space,

They were really proud that it was potentially going to be the world's tallest building, but unfortunately the Chrysler Building stole that honor with that Spire stunt. And so when the stare hear about the Empire State Building Project, they really wanna win this job. But also, they see this as the culmination of what they've been working towards their entire careers.

And so interestingly, one member on the Empire State Building's, board is actually friends with Paul Stat. And so he wants to give him a little bit of help and he ask him, what order would you like to interview in? And so Paul Stat immediately says, I want to go last. And it's interesting because this is gonna play into his strategy for winning this job. So all the other builders interview and then Paul Stat comes in last as he requested.

Smith starts out by asking him, how much equipment do you have on hand to construct the building? And surprisingly, Paul Stat says None. But then he goes on to explain that this building is unusual and so ordinary construction equipment is gonna be useless. And he lays out his plan to buy all new equipment specific for this job, sell it afterwards, and then he'll give Smith and Rasco a credit for the difference. So Smith is says, okay, makes sense to me.

Next he ask, what portion of the work are you gonna do yourselves? And so a lot of the other builders had bragged about we're gonna do a lot of the work ourselves. We have a lot of in-house experience. We don't need to subcontract too much of it. It but stare at again is a little bit, different here. And he says, we're not gonna self perform any work that can't be subcontracted cheaper and more efficiently. So he says, my goal is to build this as cheaply and efficiently as possible.

If we can't do that in house, we'll find the experts who can do it.

So remember, Rasco and Smith are going to have a contract with the Stat Brothers to build the Empire State Building. And so we wanna make sure that the incentives are aligned for Smith and Rasco to be happy, but then also for the Stat brothers, the contractors to be happy. So what most contractors at the time did, and in a lot of cases still today, is they use what's called a cost plus contract. So basically the owners.

RA Smith are billed for the cost of the labor and materials at whatever market price that is. And then they also pay out a fixed fee for the contractor. So let's say it takes $40 million to build the Empire State Building. The contractor would say, okay, my price is $40 million plus my $1 million fee, and that's set in stone. None of that changes. So this is good for the contractor because it removes risk.

Like if the building ends up taking longer, if material prices go up, if labor is more expensive than they expected, that's all absorbed by the owner. But this is not good for the owner because their cost is kind of uncapped and they have to cover any overages. And it also doesn't incentivized cost and time savings for the contractor. So they don't care if the project takes longer or goes over budget because it's, yeah, they're getting paid no matter what. They're getting paid no matter what.

It's gonna be the owner who's on the hook for these overages. So then the other contract structure, and this is what the stats propose, is the fixed fee contract. And so that's where the builder is paid a fixed fee for the entire project, including cost and profit. So that's basically, they say it's gonna cost us $41 million to build the entire state building, everything included.

And so in this case, the contractor or the builder has to assume the risk for any schedule delays, material increases, labor increases, but any savings they have on that fixed fee the contractor can keep.

So again, the key thing here is the incentives are aligned in this fixed fee contract for the contractors to try to go faster and save money.

And so you have to have a lot of construction experience and in this case, experience building skyscrapers to be able to say, I'm really confident that I can do it for 45 million because if I'm wrong and it costs 50 million, not only am I not getting paid, I'm actually losing money because I still have to pay the $50 million.

This, again, is really important in modern day construction and really any kind of project, but there's several different ways you can manage how the design and construction are sequenced. So kind of the base case or the obvious case is what in the construction industry, we call design bid build. And that means you have a designer complete the entire design for the project, it reaches a hundred percent design, and then you bid it out to a general contractor and then they build it.

And so it's purely sequential activities. What the stats choose to do in this case, and they don't call it this at the time, but it's what's known today as design build or fast tracked construction. And that basically means they're going to start construction before the design is a hundred percent complete.

And so this is gonna be very important for the tight timeline that they have because it's gonna allow them to pull construction in and start earlier than they would otherwise if they had to wait for the entire design to be completed.

And so just to give you an idea of how design and construction are going to be sandwiched right up against each other, the steel design, so like the layout for what sizes steel we need, what length of beams do we need to have, that was completed in a lot of cases less than one month before the orders went to the steel mill to create the steel beams. And then the steel was delivered from the mill to the building site less than one week before it was due for erection.

So to me, this is almost like a pseudo just in time delivery method too, where they basically work backwards from when they need the steel on site and they compress the schedule as much as they can. The second strategy that the stats have for meeting this tight deadline is that they're going to run this general contractor company like a military organization. And this obviously hearkens back to colonel stat's time in the military.

And basically he organizes the general contractor kind of like a general staff. so there's gonna be about 80 plus people working for the stat brothers, managing the overall construction. And that's gonna include the superintendent who is kind of like the field marshal or you know, leading the onsite construction.

You're gonna have job runners, you're gonna have someone managing the construction department, you're gonna have accounting, you're gonna have a department that manages cost material deliveries. They also have an onsite doctor and nurse and this entire admin administration to basically manage the, what's gonna be about 3,400 different people on site at once. And so with about 3,400 workers on site during peak construction, the stats are really managing the logistics of a large army.

And it's funny because there are all these kind of emergent problems when you're working with this many people. It really is like a small army. So payroll, for example, is so large that it has to be delivered by armed guards because they're paying 'em in cash at this time, there's no wire transfer. the meals was a big question because, so you have 3,400 people working in this one building.

If they all have to leave the building, go down the elevators for lunch every day, it's gonna waste a ton of time So the stats actually end up building about five temporary restaurants within the building at floors, at various levels so that the workers don't need to leave site to eat lunch. And the final strategy that the stats have to meet the May 1st deadline is this extreme kind of pathological focus on speed. And they do a few things to optimize the speed of construction.

The first is, as much as possible, they execute the construction as a repeatable process. at this time assembly lines are being used to manufacture automobiles and so they try to take as many learnings as they can to make construction repeatable and flow in this assembly line type process. The next innovation that they have is what they call the four pacemakers. And this is really interesting because this is basically a precursor to critical path project planning.

So managing projects nowadays, you always wanna know what your critical path is, and that's basically what's the longest activity that is driving all the other tasks. This makes a lot of sense from a practical standpoint, because you imagine you have 3,400 people on site doing you know, hundreds of activities. How are you gonna know which one's the most important, which one's gating other projects? And so the stats basically collapse all of these tasks into the four most important.

And those are structural steel, erection, concrete floors, the exterior metal trim and spandrels, and the exterior limestone. So now they only have to manage four different tasks. And they realize that as long as these four pacemakers are on track, everything else on the project is gonna be on track. And then most importantly for the execution side is they're going to optimize down to the T the logistics of transporting materials to site and within the site to avoid work stoppage.

And this goes back to they view construction basically as a material transport problem. And so fundamentally what's going to drive the speed of construction is how can they move many materials to and within the site as optimally as possible. So the STA have a plan for meeting this ambitious May 1st deadline. Now they're going to need to put all of their energy into executing it.

Just to jump ahead a little bit here real quick, the sta I mentioned, they're really passionate and prideful about their job. They end up putting so much passion and effort into the Empire State Building that it probably kills both of them afterwards. one year after the building was finished, Colonel Williams Statt stuffed a stroke and he died at the age of 55. And that was blamed mostly on like job related stress. No

So it seems like a good idea, but we'll have to see how they execute. The stats come up with three main strategy to meet this aggressive May 1st deadline. The strategies are the design built execution method. They also want to run the construction site like a military operation, and they're obsessed with speed.

So it's one thing to give a nice pitch and put together some impressive ideas on strategy to meet this aggressive timeline, but now we're going to see if they can actually make it happen. So we mentioned how important logistics are going to be for completing the Empire State Building on time, and to give you an idea of how the Statt Brothers are gonna view the importance of logistics on this project. I wanna share a quote from Colonel William Statt.

And remember, he's the one who compared constructing a skyscraper to war. the leader must lead and inspire the thousands of men whose united labor results in a mighty structure. He must control his source of supply, and he must see that his supply trains keep pace with his need for them. So you can see here that Colonel Stat's attitude is he's going to war and instead of fighting in the trenches, he's gonna be fighting in Midtown Manhattan and his enemy is gonna be time.

and we know how important in war logistics is, and it's gonna be just the same. For this example, and this actually reminds me of one time I was working on a construction project and this superintendent told me, basically he's like, you'll be surprised how fast the workers can move when they have everything they need.

There's the stereotype of you see a construction site and there's like one guy shoveling dirt and three guys watching, or you like see people standing around a construction site and they're not doing anything. A lot of people assume that, the workers are being lazy or they're just not getting anything done. But really in most cases, they don't have the materials or they're not unblocked to complete their work.

And so the key thing to ensuring progress in the construction site is making sure all the materials are there so that if the workers have a clear road in front of them, they'll just bang out progress if there's nothing stopping them. Again, this is important how the stair at see this problem is it's a material delivery problem. How can they get all the raw materials to site as quickly as possible to keep the workers moving and accomplish this aggressive deadline?

And just to give you an idea of the scale of the materials that the stats need to bring to this site in midtown Manhattan, there's a quote from a newspaper at the time that said, if all the materials which came to the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street for the construction of the Empire State had come in one shipment, a train 57 miles in length would've been needed when the locomotive of such a train would've entered New York, the caboose on the rear end would have come

to a halt in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

And Smith and Rasco are also ruthless about securing these supply lines. So there's an example where one of the marble quarries in France informs them that they're not gonna be able to keep up with the pace of construction because they have commitments to other customers that they have to honor. And so Rasco and Smith don't waste any time they cancel that order and then outright buy a marble quarry in Germany to ensure that there aren't any delivery issues.

And you know, any time that we save and schedule is also money because they have that May 1st deadline and that six months of rents hanging the balance. So of all these material deliveries, the steel was the most important because if erection of the steel structure was delayed by even one day, the other trades are gonna be forced to slow down. So the steel skeleton is the critical path here.

Now, just to give an example of the complex journey that the different raw materials had to take to get to site, I wanna follow the journey of a single steel beam from the raw materials to site where it's eventually added to the structure. So this journey would start with iron mined in Minnesota, loaded onto rail cars, then transferred by barge a thousand miles across the Great Lakes to the steel mills in Pennsylvania and for the Empire State Building.

These steel plants ran 24 hours a day in two 12 hour shifts, and they would take the iron, they would mix it with coke and other ingredients, heat it up to 3,500 degrees, and then purify the ore of the excess carbon before they rolled into the correct structural shape needed for the design of the Empire State Building. The resulting beam was then cooled, rivet holes were punched in it, and then it was placed on a rail car for a 400 mile trip from Pittsburgh to a supply yard in New Jersey.

Once in New Jersey it was marked with a code to identify its place in the complex framework, and then it was barged across the river to Manhattan, then loaded on a truck and transported to site where these derricks, or you can think of them as cranes, would lift the steel beam off the truck and relay it up to the correct floor to be swung into position on the structure.

So once the steel was riveted into place, it had made the journey from the Pittsburgh furnaces to site and sometimes as little as 80 hours. And that's a testament to the efficiency of the supply chain. And the joke with the workers was that the iron was still warm to the touch by the time they were installing it.

An individual who would manage all the details for every piece of a materials journey to site. So you might have a steel expediter and they would go to the iron mines in Minnesota and make sure that the iron deliveries happened on time to the steel mills. And they would go to the steel mill and make sure that the steel deliveries are getting put on the rail cars on schedule. And in some cases they would even ride the trains with the materials to make sure there weren't any delays along the way.

And so to me, this is an example of, you gotta think about the time period, this is before video conferencing or even really phone calls were available. So to make sure that your materials were on track, you couldn't just pick up the phone and ask if that material shipped out. You needed to have someone on site to verify with their eyes that this, the steel beams have left the rail yard or whatever.

But it's also, I think something that can be effective today in terms of, you gotta imagine if you are a supplier and you have a customer and they need their order, but they're just this construction project that's happening way off in New York and you're in Pittsburgh and you don't really talk to them except for over the phone, you're probably not super incentivized to to meet their orders.

But if you have one of them in your factory who's saying like, Hey, my steel beams were supposed to ship out at nine o'clock this morning and now it's 10 o'clock, what's going on? Like you have somebody there like yelling in your face. It's uh, I imagine a forceful means of persuasion. So there's a lot that goes into getting the materials to site but then there's a second half of the supply chain, which is transporting materials once they arrive on site.

And for this, the overall strategy the stats are gonna use is like an assembly line. So the goal here is to minimize the number of times each material is handled. So to do this, they prefabricate materials as much as possible and the goal is to do as little work on site as possible. For example, the Windows Steel Mullin, the stone, these are all standardized like parts in a catalog and they're MA manufactured offsite. In large quantities in an efficient factory and then shipped to site.

So they do something a bit unique here, driven by some of the site constraints of working in Midtown Manhattan. They don't have anywhere to store materials or a lay down yard or anything like that. So they decide that they will unload deliveries inside the building. So the trucks actually drive up inside the building, they unload on the first floor, and then they use cranes to lift the materials up through the elevator shafts to the floor. And so this has a couple of benefits.

The first is they don't block any traffic on site. And then second, all the materials are lifted within the core of the building, so they're not hanging out over the streets and endangering pedestrians or anything like that. And so, as you can imagine, for a building as large as the Empire State Building, there's gonna be a lot of deliveries. And at peak construction. They averaged 500 trucks a day unloading inside the building, which for an eight hour workday is about one truck every minute.

And just to emphasize how important this process was, there's a quote from Ekin who worked with the Stat brothers. He says, we ran trucks the way they run trains in and out of Grand Central. If a truck missed its place in line on Tuesday, it had to wait until Wednesday to get back in. So this is a precise military operation here on how these trucks deliver materials to site because there's no room for error when they're unloading one truck every minute. It's almost like an assembly line.

Depositing materials on the construction site.

And they built a narrow gauge railroad on each floor and they added in these push carts to transport materials from where the cranes dropped them off at to whichever part of the floor where they needed to be included. This worked well on the Empire State Building because we mentioned earlier the site was so large. So on a typical skyscraper at the time, this wouldn't really have made sense 'cause there wasn't much distance from the interior of the building to the edges.

But the Empire State, it was a huge site. So it was a huge efficiency improvement to, rather than workers carrying the materials, the bricks, the stone by hand, from the floor to where it needed to be installed. They had these push carts and this pretty complicated railway system with like switches and, and everything. It was really well thought through. Another really impressive innovation the stats make is how they deliver bricks to site. So I mentioned earlier their whole strategy for.

Optimizing the material deliveries is they want to handle each material as few times as possible. And for the bricks, they really hit it out of the park. you could imagine that the optimal way to deliver a material to site is by handling it only once. Anything beyond that is excess and wasteful.

And so for the bricks, they devise this system where a truck pulls up on the first floor, dumps the bricks into this hopper in the basement floor, and it's automatically lifts the bricks up through the elevator shafts to whichever floor they need them on. Then they're unloaded into the rail carts on this rail system and they are taken to whichever part of the building they're needed at. So the only time a human hand touches a brick is when a builder picks it up to put it into place.

So construction starts with the demolition of the existing Waldorf Astoria Hotel and most of the debris is hauled offsite and they actually dump it in the Atlantic Ocean 'cause they don't have anywhere else to put it.

And they end up hauling about 28,000 truckloads of hotel debris, earth and rock offsite. Once the foundations are in place, they start the critical activity, which is the structural steel erection. the steel is brought to site from trucks. It's lifted off and hoisted to the correct floor where it's riveted into place. The steel erection is the most important of the four pacemakers and the STA achieve some really impressive records.

For the speed of erection here, they average four and a half stories per week. Wow. That's

So we have the electricians putting in the electrical system, the plumbers come through and install all the pipes, the telephone wires are installed, the elevators, everything that you need the building to be dried in or enclosed for.

In some ways they kind of remind me of like the drummer boys from the Civil War when you had these really young, like teenage boys who were in these very dangerous situations. Probably the most specialized trade on site was the iron workers. And I like to think of them as kind of the special forces of construction because they have this really dangerous, really specialized job. Almost takes a certain mindset to do.

They're known as the Sky Boys for walking across these steel beams hundreds of feet in the air with no harness or safety system at all. You've probably seen this famous picture of workers sitting on a steel beam eating lunch hundreds of feet up into the air over New York.

And so that was part of the trade off is it would've been, a lot slower to include the safety harnesses.

There's one of a guy, and he is riding the hook on a crane, and he is wearing nothing but shorts and boots, and he is being lifted up hundreds of feet into the air And then all these other pictures of, you know, workers dangling out on steel beams with the impressive Manhattan skyline in the background. And so they're really romanticized at the time, and they take a lot of pride in their work.

And they were also paid significantly more than other workers on the site because of the risks they did take.

They recorded 2000 deaths out of 15,000 policies in a 20 year period. So that's like a 13% mortality rate for iron workers. Holy smokes. So tragically, five workers ended up losing their lives during the construction of the Empire State Building for the time period. The Empire State Building was actually safer than most other construction sites. They did a lot of improvements to promote safety, like installing protective netting, adding a fire alarm system.

They had a full doctor and nurse on site.

But one thing that was clear to me in a lot of the research, and there's some really good interviews with some of the people who worked on the Empire State that will link in the show notes, but all the workers on this project, they realized that they were building something special and they believed that they were building a monument and they had a special pride in their work.

So there's one quote from an ironworker where he is explaining, you know why he works on these beams, hundreds of feet in the air every day. he says, you get to love it and you can't quit it. Life down on the street's too slow. Who wants to be a pencil pusher after he is worked with steel? It's nice to point to a mining suspension bridge or towering building and say, I helped direct that.

to honor all the workers who were involved in the construction of the Empire State Building in the lobby, even to this day, they installed these bronze medallions to honor each craft. So there's like one for electrical masonry, heating, all the major crafts that participate in the building. And these are in the lobby, right when you walk in as a testament to the work of the men who built it.

just to give you an idea of how quickly this construction occurred, the demolition work took about three months for the Waldorf Astoria. And then from the time they started excavation to opening day was only 13 and a half months. All four pacemakers that the stats were tracking finished early and critically. The steel erection averaged four and a half floors per week and finished several days early. So the building was completed in early April, just in time for the critical May 1st deadline.

Now will, I noticed that this was done in about 13 months, but there wasn't a lot of story here in the actual construction of it. Why?

The stats also executed the construction as much as possible as a repeatable process, like an assembly line. And they had these innovations like the railroad and standardized parts for the windows to help them achieve this goal. And finally, what stands out is the stat's intense focus on logistics.

They prioritized material transportation, both to and around the site to prevent any work, stockage, and they used several different innovations like the Expeditors and their organization of the truck deliveries. So now Smith and Rasco have met their ambitious goal to build the tallest building in the world by the May 1st deadline with the help of the architects, the builders, and the workers on site.

But there was something that happened back in October of 1929 that Smith and Rasco couldn't have predicted on May 1st, 1931, Al Smith finally opens the newly constructed Empire State Building to celebration and fanfare. Smith's public relations machine is an overdrive for opening day to make it a massive event and attract lots of attention. So the press actually refers to the Empire State Building initially as Al Smith's building, just because he has become so associated with its construction.

He was actually on a ship on his way to Italy for vacation.

Al Smith opened the building, get us a lot of attention, ran out the space and let's start making money.

So the construction of the building had been a success, but there's one issue overshadowing the entire project on opening day.

And new construction in New York City had actually dropped 50% from the stock market crash.

There's actually no tenants from the 41st floor and up. So they suspend the elevator service 'cause these floors are just empty.

Rasco and Smith continue to operate the building. It's not a good time to sell, but their intention was always to operate the building. Al Smith remained as president of the Empire State Building Company and he earned a salary of $50,000 a year And he's really responsible for the one highlight of the Empire State Building during this time, which is it's a popular tourist attraction.

So even though the office space is not really rented out, the observatories for the tallest building in the world are still really popular. they average about 2200 visitors a day. And in the first year, gross about $875,000.

But also they couldn't claim the moniker of world's tallest building. So there weren't any observation deck revenues either. So to me, this really hits home RAs CO's idea that even if the economic analysis said that they shouldn't build beyond 63 stories, there was this huge intangible benefit to having the world's tallest building So during this time, Al Smith is still the face of the Empire State Building. He continues to promote it to attract tenants.

He hosts a lot of VIPs like Amelia Earhart, the 1936 Olympic team. And then eventually the Queen of England comes to visit the Empire State Building. But then Smith slowly begins to withdraw from the public eye. He would never again hold political office after the failed presidential bid. And he actually ended up walking away from the Democratic party.

And during this time, the Empire State Building was struggling to meet its mortgage payments because even with the tenants and some of the observation deck revenues, it wasn't enough to pay the money they had financed to construct it. And so on several instances, Rasco paid millions of dollars out of his own pocket to keep the building afloat.

Later in life, Rasco left most of his fortune to a Catholic charity that he founded, and then in his will, he left the building to his children, uh, who eventually went on to sell it after his death.

it's never actually used as a moori mast, and it was turned into the 101st and 102nd floor observatories.

You know, back to the idea that Rasco initially came up with the idea by holding up a pencil. There was a cigarette company that ran an ad with the tagline, camel's tobaccos are soothing to the nerves. And it showed a picture of a window cleaner cleaning the windows on the hundred first story. And really for average Americans, the Empire State Building becomes ubiquitous because it's a big deal In New York, but around the country it's also on the advertising.

When you're, buying your cigarettes or buying your pencils, you're also seeing advertisements for the Empire State Building. Also in 1933, the original King Kong movie comes out, and everyone's probably familiar even today, with this iconic scene of Kong hanging from the mooring mast of the Empire State Building.

And this really submitted the building as the tallest building in the world and the minds of people across the globe And eventually the Empire State Building became more than just the world's tallest building, more than just an office building. It became an icon of New York City and then also a symbol of what America could achieve.

In 1973, it lost the hike crown to the newly completed World Trade Center towers also in New York City.

And it's survived today as a symbol of the practical, optimistic, and heroic spirit of the men who built it.

And the two are both intertwined, but specifically for the budget. There's one kind of caveat I want to add here, and that is a lot of the reason that the project was under budget was because of the depression. So labor was not an issue because many people were out of work. So they were able to hire a lot of people at below estimated salaries. And then also prices had collapsed. As the economy was collapsing, they were able to buy their materials much cheaper.

So I think we talked about how the original budget for construction was about $43 million. That was revised down to $27 million when the depression prices came down. But there was also about $2 million of savings even after they revised it to the $27 million budget. The stats came in at $25 million. So it did come in under budget. Most of that was because of the depression, but some of it was because of time savings during construction too.

And I think there are two key reasons to why the project came in under budget. One was it was designed from the beginning with functionality and economy in mind. And so the entire design of the building, we talked about the art deco with the limited ornamentation, was in service of this goal of being under budget, having a less expensive building. And also I think because it was accomplished so quickly, it was started and completed before it could become bloated.

So I think a lot of times when you see these projects, like some of the government military procurement projects or some like really long construction projects. They become more expensive as they last longer because they just become bloated. Their design changes. The initial assumptions when you started the project are no longer true. And so finishing the project quickly was also in a lot of ways kind of a hedge against increased cost.

So comparing the Empire State Building to a modern day office building is kind of like apples and oranges because today, modern day office buildings have a lot more systems. You know, there's information technology, air conditioning, that the Empire State Building didn't have security systems as a product. If you think about it, it's like an iPhone compared to a flip phone.

But then another reason for buildings taking longer to construct today that I think comes up a lot is the more strict permitting, safety, and just regulations around building construction. And so there's two ways to look at this. You know, on one end you could be really cynical and you could say that it's just a bunch of regulation and red tape that is slowing down construction today.

But then on the other end of the spectrum, you could say that, well, we're getting a lot of benefits from some of the regulation because there are increased safety standards. You know, there's not guys dancing around on steel beams without a harness today. Uh, the quality of life for workers is much higher. You know, there's healthcare and benefits and much better safety equipment,

So we talked a little bit about when they were demoing the wall Astoria, they just dumped the debris in the Atlantic Ocean. Well, you know, today they're not doing that and that's probably a benefit, uh, to society and our environment. So I think in reality it kind of comes down somewhere in the middle where yes, there is a lot of regulations and bloat and red tape, but there are still are some benefits that we get from the regulations.

So there's this tension between the speed of construction and the overall benefit to society and everyone involved. Another takeaway for me from this story, and we talked about it a lot during the construction section, but it's the importance of logistics in any project really. And for me, this is an example of the idea that God is in the details and details matter. a complex project like the Empire State Building is the culmination of millions of small little details and decisions.

And individually they seem insignificant, but when you group them all together, they have a large impact on the overall project. And so we talked about schedule and budget, the fact that the project came in under budget and head of schedule. Was the result of millions of little decisions made at every step of the process. And so I think as project managers, the idea to approach this is that first you need to frame the problem correctly.

And so the STA brothers did this by understanding the problem kind of from a first principles standpoint. And if you remember, their idea was that they viewed the construction as essentially a material transport problem. And then they optimized construction to handle materials as few times as possible. So I think the strategy here is you wanna frame the problem you correctly and then work on optimizing your solution.

And so for the sta, this took the form of their obsession with logistics, where they had the expeditors riding on the train cars to deliver the steel beams to reduce the risk of any time delays. They also perfected the process of moving bricks on site.

And that might seem like a small improvement, but when that's added up with all the other improvements and optimizations they made this all added up to ultimately achieving their goal, But then what sticks out to me also from a project management perspective is once you realize that there's these 10,000 activities that need to be optimized and how you can optimize them, you also need to create a framework to manage all these activities, especially on a complex project.

You can't be tracking every single expeditor moving every single steel beam and each individual brick that's moved on site. And so to me, the genius of the stare was also creating this idea of the four pacemakers, which basically collapses this complex web of decisions and task into just a simple structure of four ideas that they can manage. So they know that, okay, as long as we're meeting these four pacemakers, we're on track.

I think you have to kind of trust, people are gonna go as fast as they can, but if they're sitting there waiting and doing nothing, that's really, really bad. So you really want to optimize that and make sure that everyone is unblocked. So to me, this is one massive logistics problem, and it's absolutely correct to think about it from that perspective

All right, Steven, I have one more leadership lesson that I'm really excited to talk about. And it's this idea that as a leader, you want to have a long-term mindset and you wanna look beyond just the numbers when you're making a decision. So there's a quote from Peter Thiel's zero to one, where he says, if you focus on near term growth above all else, you miss the important question you should be asking. Will this business still be around a decade from now?

Numbers alone won't tell you the answer. And so you could substitute business here with any decision or idea that you're trying to make. And this really sticks out to me when we think about RAs o's decision to build the tallest building in the world. So if you were taking just a short-term approach and you were just looking at the numbers, you would look at that analysis the architects did that said a 63 story skyscraper is the most economically sound to build.

But Rasco knew that there was more to that analysis than just the numbers. And he took this long-term view and correctly realized that having the undisputed, tallest building in the world would offer these priceless intangible advantages. And for me, putting this in Peter Thiel's framework, being the tallest in the world, gave the Empire State building a monopoly on the world's tallest building.

And that was something that differentiated it from other office buildings and allowed its owners to charge a rental premium.

But really he was integral to the story of the Empire State Building and selling the fact that it was the tallest in the world, but then also building the foundations of the modern day legacy. And to me, you can draw a straight line from that idea back to Al Smith and hiring Bell Moscowitz to promote the building and make it a American icon outside of New York City too.

And so really just this idea that it's not enough to accomplish this great engineering feat, you also have to tell a story around it.