Prussian-born George Boldt emigrated to the United States in 1864 at the age of 13. Beginning as a kitchen worker in New York City, Boldt worked his way up to managing the dining room of The Philadelphia Club, hired by his future father-in-law. Located at 13th & Walnut in downtown Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Club was the most exclusive club in the city, counting Owen Wister (writer of The Virginian and considered "The Father of Western Fiction"), several members of the Du Pont family as well as members of the Biddle family. Nicholas Biddle is most notable as the president of the Second Bank of the United States who picked, and lost, a fight with Andrew Jackson in his second term in office. Legend has it (which is History Code for saying "I read this somewhere") General George Meade wasn't admitted to the Philadelphia Club until after he had won at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Boldt opened his own hotel in 1881, Philadelphia's Bellevue Hotel, on the northeast corner of Broad & Walnut Streets. And in a very Robber Barony move he soon bought his main competition, the Stratford, on the southeast corner. The Gilded Age was dotted with various Robber Barons from whom he acquired this strategy, and hooboy he catered to those self-same Robber Barons, charging exorbitant prices for the best rooms, and soon he became rich himself. Boldt would go on to merge the two hotels, becoming the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel - Philadelphia's largest hotel - that would eventually evolve into the Hyatt at the Bellevue.
In short, George Boldt was the perfect man to make a triumphant return to New York. Convinced to manage the Waldorf, Boldt mediated an agreement between William Waldorf Astor and John Jacob Astor IV to merge the two hotels under his management as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he popularized Thousand Island dressing.
Boldt died of a heart attack in late 1916 and the Waldorf-Astoria's lease was bought by Thomas Coleman Du Pont in 1918. Du Pont was the President of what we now know as...Dupont, and would go on to serve two terms as a senator from Delaware, resigning in 1928 as a result of "health problems" and also being implicated in Warren G. Harding's Teapot Dome Scandal. The Teapot Dome Scandal is worthy of a separate deep dive but, tl;dr: Harding's Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall would be the first cabinet member to be indicted over bribery charges related to government-owned, oil-laden land at Teapot Dome, Wyoming.
By the time Du Pont resigned, New York's elites were already moving north of 34th Street. The Waldorf-Astoria was sold for between $14-$16 million to the Bethlehem Engineering Company in 1928 and was shuttered in early 1929 with the promise of a newer, more elegant Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue. The Bethlehem Engineering Company's president, Floyd de L. Brown paid 10% of the $1 million down payment needed to begin construction on the new office building on the site of the former Waldorf-Astoria...and then never paid the remaining $900,000. The land was resold to a consortium of wealthy investors that included Coleman du Pont and his cousin Pierre S. du Pont.
The consortium - known as Empire State, Incorporated - also included John Jakob Raskob, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1928 to 1932 and the campaign manager of New York Governor Alfred E. Smith's 1932 presidential run against Franklin D. Roosevelt. Raskob sold his stock in GM (The Dupont corporation had been extensively invested in General Motors) after a political disagreement with the Very Republican Alfred P. Sloan (who may be familiar to listeners like you), thus providing the money to buy the land at 20 West 34th Street. Raskob had formed the American Liberty League, an organization of wealthy elites opposed to FDR's New Deal that heaped burning coals on the heads of themselves and their families after FDR won the most lop-sided presidential election in history in 1936.
Nevertheless, tasked with building a new skyscraper on the site of the Waldorf-Astoria, Raskob hired architect William F. Lamb. Lamb had studied at the Columbia University College of Architecture and in Paris at the Atelier Deglane, graduating sixth in his class despite barely knowing French from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Lamb, who had one leg after a motorcycle accident in Europe, formed the architectural firm Shreve and Lamb with Richmond Shreve, which later became Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon in 1929 after Arthur Loomis Harmon joined - mainly as a result of his connections with Raskob.
Of course it was a competition. The current or, in Raskob's case, former GM-adjacent investors were heavily interested in outdoing Chrysler, whose Chrysler Building at 42nd Street & Lexington was dedicated in September 1928 as the tallest building in the world. Raskob called Lamb and (allegedly) stood one of his favorite jumbo pencils on its end and asked Lamb, "How high can you make it so that it won't fall down?"
Lamb used the pencil as his inspiration, designing the new structure from the tower down, which gave the proposed building a pencil shape. Lamb's 16th revision to the original design became the go-to for what would become the Empire State Building. Lamb, Shreve and Harmon had 18 months to build it, facing complications such as size, funding, and New York City's zoning requirements. Because Raskob was tight with former Governor Smith, height restrictions were placed on nearby construction, so that the Empire State Building would have unobstructed views of the city, featuring an observation deck on the 86th floor...15 floors higher than the Chrysler Building. Construction was set to begin in late 1929, after Raskob had secured the funding. Oh, and then the economy collapsed.
Raskob refused to cancel the project in the wake of the worst financial disaster in American history, citing already-made progress on the building. Raskob had gotten out of the stock market in 1928, and Governor Smith had no stock investments, so both were financially secure. In December 1929, Raskob was able to get a $27.5 million loan from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (now MetLife), one of whose directors was none other than Governor Smith himself.
Despite the Great Depression's complete lack of demand for new office space, construction sped ahead, eventually being completed 45 days ahead of schedule on May 1, 1931 and $20 million under its $60 million budget. The Chrysler Building was the tallest building in the world for precisely eleven months. E.B. White would write that the Empire State Building "reached the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the Depression."
Thanks to said Depression, the two million square feet of office space was going severely underutilized (75% of the building was vacant), causing the public to refer to it as the "Empty State Building." Still, they kept every light on to project the image of bustling industry. Jack Brod started Empire Diamond and Gold Buying Service on the 7th floor in 1931, a business that remained in the Empire State Building until Brod's death in 2008.
World War II brought the economy back to life - the Empire State Building would be 98% occupied - World War II also almost brought the end of the Empire State Building itself.
On Saturday, July 28, 1945 Lt. Col. William Franklin Smith, Jr of Watertown, Massachusetts was the pilot of a B-25 Mitchell bomber plane. An experienced pilot, the 1942 West Point graduate had flown over 40 missions in Europe and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. This was a ferry trip for Lt. Col. Smith, carrying a passenger from Bedford Army Field (now Hanscomb Air Force Base) outside of Boston to LaGuardia Metropolitan Airport, a flight that would ordinarily take about an hour. There were two pilots, and one passenger on board.
However, as Lt. Col Smith approached New York City, air traffic control, citing heavy fog, instructed the plane to carry on to Newark Metropolitan Airport (now Newark International Airport). This put the flight path directly over Manhattan. The fog was so thick that the Empire State Building wasn't visible and around 9:40am Lt. Col. Smith lowered his speed and altitude in an effort to navigate the poor visibility.
The Chrysler Building appeared as if from nowhere. Lt. Col. Smith swerved to avoid hitting the building, but in doing so put the plane directly in the path of the Empire State Building, less than a mile away. Lt. Col. Smith's B-25 Mitchell slammed into the north side of the Empire State Building on the 79th floor. The plane's fuel exploded, sending flames as far down as the 75th floor. Someone on the 56th floor said it felt like the building was collapsing. One of the engines shot through the Empire State Building before coming to rest in a penthouse across the street. It took two days to find Lt. Col. Smith's body, as it had fallen down an elevator shaft.
It was 20-year old elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver's last official day working at the Empire State Building. She was on the 80th floor when the plane hit, knocking her completely out of the elevator and breaking her back, pelvis, and neck to go along with the severe burns she had due to the plane's impact and explosion. However, when first responders arrived, she was going to survive. They placed her on an elevator to the ground floor so she could be transported to the hospital.
But the elevator cables had been weakened on the 38th floor by the plane's entry into the elevator shaft . As soon as Oliver was loaded onto the elevator, the cables snapped, hurtling her 80 floors to the bottom of the Empire State Building. And yet she survived for three reasons: the emergency auto-brake had kinda sorta engaged, the 1000 feet of elevator cable had spooled at the bottom of the elevator shaft, creating a sort of spring. Add to that and the rapid compression of air cushioned her fall, earning her place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the Longest Fall Survived In An Elevator.
A surprisingly-alive Betty Lou Oliver
The same cannot be said for the two other people in the plane, who died on impact, or for the 11 people working for the War Relief Services of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, who were working directly on the floor into which the plane crashed. Since the crash occurred on a Saturday morning, the death toll - 14 - was far lower than it certainly could have been had it happened 48 hours later...which is when the Empire State Building re-opened for business, working around the 18' x 20' hole in the north side of the building.
Firefighters had extinguished the blaze within 40 minutes, making it the biggest fire ever brought under control at such a height (maybe a bigger one has happened in the last 78 years...I don't know.) The crash helped spur the passage of the Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946. This compensates people who "suffered personal injury, death, or property loss or damage caused by the negligent or wrongful act or omission of an employee of the federal government," allowing people to sue the government for the crash. The Civil Aeronautics Administration also enacted restrictions in which planes can under no circumstance fly below 2500 feet in New York City.
The story captivated the attention of the nation...for approximately nine days, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. After the 78th floor had been cleared of debris, Armand Hammer - yes, that Armand Hammer, "Lenin's Chosen Capitalist" and the chairman of Occidental Petroleum - bought the floor, refurbished it, and made it the headquarters of his United Distillers of America.
The Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world for 40 years, from its opening in 1931 until 1 World Trade Center opened in 1971. While the Sears Tower in Chicago took the World Trade Center's spot in 1973, on September 11, 2001 the Empire State Building regained its former designation as the tallest building in New York City.
There is one more side story. Empire State Building chief architect William Lamb was concerned about people's ability to commit suicide from his building, and devised safety measures to try to prevent them from happening, but it wasn't enough on one May morning. On April 30, 1947 - just shy of two years after the plane crash - a 23-year old bookkeeper named Evelyn McHale took a train from New York to Easton, Pennsylvania to visit her fiance, a World War II veteran and college student named Barry Rhodes to celebrate his 24th birthday. Evelyn's mother allegedly suffered from undiagnosed depression, which was a contributing factor in her parents' divorce. The next morning she went back to Penn Station on the 7am train. They were to be married the following month.
Evelyn McHale went to the Empire State Building's observatory. Security guards were within ten feet of her at approximately 10:40am on May 1 when she jumped, clearing all of the safety devices Lamb had installed in the blueprints, and landed 86 stories below (1,050 feet), on top of a United Nations limousine. Police found a note which she left in her pocketbook on the Empire State Building's observation deck. It read:
I don't want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family - don't have any service for me or remembrance for me. My fiance asked me to marry him in June. I don't think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother's tendencies.
Photography student and part-time cab driver Robert C. Wiles was across the street when he heard Evelyn hit the car. Of course at this point nobody had read her note or her wish to not be seen. Four minutes later he took one of the most iconic photographs in history, published as the "Picture of the Week" in the May 12, 1947 issue of Life Magazine.
