Positive Liberty

I’ve been enjoying John Tauranac’s book, The Empire State Building: The Making of A Landmark, which I picked up after my inspiring trip to New York in April. It contains all sorts of delightful tidbits about this great building, like this: “The mail chutes were equipped to retard the speed of letters at the sixty-fifth and twenty-eighth floors so the envelopes and postcards wouldn’t be scorched by the friction of a continuous fall.” (234)

And this: “Another kind of phenomenological experiment was held at the Empire State Building in 1937. Lieutenants Albert J. Hoskinson and Carl. I. Aslaaskson of the U.S. Coast and Geodesic Survey, and Dr. Mauriece Ewing, professor of physics and geophysics at Lehigh University, concluded a series of tests at the Empire State Building to determine how much the force of gravity changes in relation to the height above the surface of the earth. Among other things, they found that a man who weights two hundred pounds at street level weighs only 199.8 at the top of the observation tower.” (246)

And then there’s this:

The frame was erected during the best seasons, and the orchestration of the steelwork was at a brisk, legato tempo. By June it was clear that a record was in the offing. Three and a half stories per week had been the record for a comparably scaled building. Starrett determined to erect the Empire State Building at the rate of a story a day, or five stories a week, a rate they nearly accomplished. Four and a half floors of steelwork were added each week. By June 20, twenty-six stories had been completed. On September 15, 1930, the steel was in place up to the eighty-sixth floor. A few days later, workmen standing 10,50 feet above the sidewalks of New York raised a large Stars and Stripes—the “flag of triumph,” said Times man Poore—to celebrate the topping out of the steelwork a few days before. The workers had placed steel at the record rate of twenty-four hundred tons a week, they had completed their end of the contract in six months—twenty-three days ahead of the appointed date—and raising the flag atop the eighty-fifth floor was as powerful a symbol to them as the raising of the flag over Iwo Jima’s Mount Surabachi would be to a later generation of marines. They had won a major battle, and a score of workers, waved their hats from their slender perch on the roof beams to celebrate. As one newspaper said, ‘You should have heard those workmen cheer.” Two months later, on November 21, workers raised the flag again. They dirigible mooring mast tower was topped out. Fifty three thousand tons of steel had been set in place. Just as builders threw stones higher into the sky during the Gothic period than anybody had ever thought possible, so the builders of the Empire State Building threw steel into the sky not just higher but faster than anybody had ever dreamed possible. (212-13)