Empire State Building

The Empire State Building stands on Fifth Avenue between West 33rd and 34th streets in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was designed by the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon and built at great speed, in about 410 days, during the early years of the Great Depression. It opened on 1 May 1931.

The building takes its name from the Empire State, a nickname for New York State. It was the tallest building in the world for almost 40 years, until the North Tower of the World Trade Center overtook it in 1970. Many of its offices stood empty during the Depression, leading to the nickname the Empty State Building.

The tower has 102 floors and rises about 381 metres to the roof and about 443 metres to the tip of its antenna. Its stepped Art Deco form, limestone facade and the marble and gold lobby, with a ceiling mural restored in 2009, are well known. The tower lights at the top change colour for holidays, events and causes.

The open air observatory on the 86th floor, at about 320 metres, wraps around the building and looks out over Central Park, the Hudson and East rivers and Lower Manhattan. The 102nd floor observatory, at about 373 metres, has floor to ceiling windows. A museum on the 2nd floor covers the building's construction and history, including its role in films such as King Kong.

Tickets are sold for timed entry, from $46 for the 86th floor and from $81 for both the 86th and 102nd floors, and online booking is usually recommended. The observatories are open from 10 am to 10 pm. The observatory entrance is at 20 West 34th Street. Late evening is often quieter than sunset, and clear days give the longest views.

The site was previously occupied by the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, which had 1,300 bedrooms and was the largest hotel in the world in its day. The facade is clad in Indiana limestone, which gives the building its pale colour, and setbacks at the 21st, 25th, 30th, 72nd, 81st and 85th floors follow the rules of the 1916 Zoning Resolution. Its steel frame is stiffer than those of the Willis Tower and the John Hancock Center.

The numbers inside are large. The lifts run on about 1,172 miles of cable, and the walls hide roughly 2 million feet of electrical wire. Experimental television broadcasts from the mast began on 22 December 1931.

The coloured lighting at the top has marked seasons and holidays since 12 October 1977. An LED system installed in 2012 raised the choice from nine colours to more than 16 million, and the lighting calendar is published on the building's website, so you can check what colours are planned on the night you visit.