Transcripts For CSPAN3 Building The Empire State Building 20150314

And this building went up on its site. Whether the Empire State Bank had an office in it, i dont know. Whether they sponsored it, i dont know. But it was called the Empire State Building. Now, today, it was originally an office, a loft building. Today, it is an apartment house. It does have sort of update relationship to the Empire State Building. If you think about superlatives, the architects of these buildings of this building was and they were influenced by the columbian exposition in chicago. Their two most famous buildings were on 6th avenue. They designed the Cooper Department store which was the Worlds Largest Department Store. It was in 1896. They also designed the Department Store on 34th street of Herald Square, macys. They sort of belong in the same league with sugarland and harlem. It was them who designed this building and obviously, this is the real Empire State Building. Its massing is so satisfying. Despite the fact that it is an enormous building. It is 1250 feet high. You would include the height of your antenna, but that there is something that is so satisfying about the Empire State Building. It has almost the human form to it. It has a lot of it has a logical beginning, middle, and end. It is a classical sonata form. Part of what is so satisfying is the upward lift of the building. You have the feeling that it is practically a rocket waiting to be launched. You can walk down 5th avenue between 34th and 35th and not be aware that you are passing by what had been, for what . 30 years or so . The worlds tallest building. In part because of the set back nature of the tower. And i will talk more about that. I always compare skyscrapers with the human frame. Your skin is doing nothing to support you. You are supported by a skeleton of loan with muscle and cartledge of dollars with muscle and cartledge holding it all together. The same with the skyscraper. It is not supported by its skin. It is supported by its skeleton, only in the case of a skyscraper, it is a skeleton of steel. In the mid19th century structure started going up that were protoskyscrapers. This was the fire watchtower. Imagine if you put bricks around this structure. You would have a building, wouldnt you . And the bricks wouldnt have to be doing anything to support the floors. When you look at the construction of the very top of the Empire State Building, you will notice a great similarity between it and that fire watchtower in myers park. Now, if you had not put brick around that cast iron frame and put glass around it, you would have gotten the crystal palace. This is not the original. The original was in london. But this was the ideal. A glass framed building and here we are in the 1850s on 6th avenue with the crystal palace. If you had taken the same notion and put some cast iron cladding with huge windows, you would have gotten the building down on broadway and broome street. The facade of this building is doing nothing to support the structure of the building. It is just hanging there basically or sitting there. The advantage of castiron buildings where the great advantages of windows which allowed Natural Light to enter workspaces and sewing spaces. Im sorry, i keep pressing buttons here. A radical breakthrough was in this building on Cooper Square and this is the cooper union. I am not touching this, folks, believe me. Maybe i will do it manually and forget this. Peter cooper installed what in essence were railroad rails to support this building. And they are shaped like this. What happens when you elongate the lower bulb. You get this. A steel ibeam and this is what make skyscraper structure possible. Now, when you talk about the walls of skyscrapers, they are not doing anything to support the building, and here is manifestation of that. This is the Flat Iron Building at 23rd street. You can see above the second floor there is no wall. If there were no wall there and this is a loadbearing building it would fall down, wouldnt it . There are certain prerequisites to skyscrapers you have to have. You have to have water. Well we got water in 1842 in the reservoir opened. You have to have a flushing system reservoir, so here we have a favor improved registered ornamental flush down w. C. Made by mr. Crapper. it is also convenient to have electricity. And we started getting electricity in the early 1880s. There was a byproduct of electricity, steam. All of those buildings on park avenue are built over Railroad Tracks. There are no basements. There is no place to put boilers , so how do they keep the buildings . From con ed steam, byproduct of electricity. I am back here to the crystal palace. I wanted to look at that tall structure on the left of it. That is called the laughing tower or the laughing observatory, as this image calls it. The tower was people would go to the top and look out and marvel at the city at their feet. You can expect them to climb more than 30 stories how did they get there . An elevator. They installed a safety elevator and the first building to house one in the city, this. The building on broome and berlin broadway. Buildings started growing taller and taller. This was the Equitable Life insurance building at 120 broadway. This was the first building where rents where higher the higher you had your office. And he gave rise to the phrase high livers. The interior was made of wrought iron beams for strength and castiron columns for good compression. Still those gas lighting kerosene lamps, candles, etc. But in the early 20th century what do you think happened to the building . It burned down. Equitable life probably rings a bell with you almost like a phoenix that went up with this building. My machine has gone berserk, i apologize. Stop it. [laughter] boy, that is you have got to know oh, we have somebody who is understanding this. He is coming to my aid. You dont have that plugged in . John tauranac i am plugged it because it was berserk and now it has gone back to being berserk. Tech is this where you are . John tauranac thats where i am. Thank you. Is it going to work now . This is todays Equitable Life insurance building. It went up in 1915 and it rose up 42 stories without a setback. It passed the shower seven acres. I am a city kid and i dont know what an acre means, but i have looked it up in the dictionary and i am told that an acre is basically 200 feet i 200 feet. Well, one block from 78 to 79 is 200 feet. So you can imagine that at this building cast a shadow that was the equivalent of two full blocks, that is a lot of shadow. Of course, people in the building were getting light, so it is a two edged sword. People in the shadow are in the shadow of this building and then the shadow of this building came the first sony law, not in the city, but the country. By virtue of the zoning law, we got some regulation regarding the height of buildings. Nobody wanted a house meant to say, thou shalt have nothing taller than seven stories. Already in 1960, the city was a city of towers. And what the planners and real estate lobby and architects agreed was that we wanted to have towers. We wanted to have skyscrapers in new york. What we didnt want was more buildings like this. So they said in essence, we will have certain zones where you can build a building with a multiple of the streets. And you were in a one and a half time zone you can build a building 150 feet high or 15 stories. Straight up as a right no problem. However, if you want to go higher, you have to start back and if you dry if you drop an imaginary hypotenuse of the right title, and when that hypothesis the building, you need a setback. And you can go up to more and when the hypotenuse hits it again, another setback. So you start getting setbacks. Until late 19teens, queue started making drawings to show the logical progression of setbacks. This is the protosetback. If you adhere to that horizontal being drawn this is what buildings would look like and the planners said, you can build on 25 of the land and take a tower as high as you can technologically go. Of course, they knew there were inhibiting factors. The goat on the better banks think of elevator banks. So, if you are going to build a tower that is too tall, though bulk of the lower floors will be occupied right elevator banks. What is the point of building a building when you cant rent the space . So, that was the basic inhibiting factor. Hugh ferris took it to the next plateau, reasonable, showing literal setbacks. Still with a freestanding tower but one that is slightly regulated coming down to scale. And he said, this is probably the ideal. This is the way of block front building should look. Well on 34th and 35th, beginning in the 1850s, we had this building, which was the home of mr. And mrs. William master. It was a brown stone mansion. It overlooked the garden on the south side. There were a few windows and the garden. Mrs. Williams astor became to know as the mrs. Astor in part because of this room of her art gallery. And had the capacity of 400. The brother of william, John Jacob Astor the third, built a house this has gone completely built a house just south on 33rd street. No windows at all overlooking the garden. This view by the way is the funeral of ulysses s. Grant. But John Jacob Astor died in 1890. His son William Waldorf astor inherited the house and he did not want anything to do with american society, and he decided to tear it down. He put up a hotel on the site. And what win up was the waldorf. And the entrance was off 33rd street. It was up a few steps. Now, if anybody remembers his or her his or her martin what is the word for baggage . So, here we have people having to carry their luggage or have the doorman carry it up a few steps to get to the level of the lobby. Another odd thing about this hotel is that it is built right on the lot line 100 feet from 33rd street and there were no windows. How do you think mrs. Astor felt about this hotel . She hated it. Through her garden in the shade and it created neighbors whom she did not know and they came and went at all hours of the day. She decided that she was going to move. She went to 56th street. If you look at this land map you will see that the Waldorf Hotel has a number to its right on the bottom. 45. 4. And on 34th street you will see the number 50. Those numbers represent the feet above sea level. So there is about a 4. 5 foot rise from 33rd to 34th. Does that give you a hint as to why the waldorf had a flight of stairs leading up leading up to the lobby level . Because the goal, always and this is one of the secrets [laughter] now that i want to go somewhere, i cant. The secret was they were going to build another half of the hotel. Actually, more than half breed this is the famous waldorf astoria which had 1000 rooms and was the Largest Hotel in the world. It has it had 750 and there probably werent that many in the whole of the lorry side in the 20th century. The waldorf was a dealey situated was ideally situated on Madison Square garden. This is down on Madison Square garden Herald Square was the center of the theaters. The metropolitan opera was on 38 and broadway. Basically, to 50 nine st was residential and people would go to the waldorf for lunch dinner, and so on. However, despite the fact peacock alley, by the 1920s, hotels such as the waldorf were considered old. Interior decorators such as Dorothy Draper or dusting of the victorian cobwebs and we had, in 1920s, prohibition. The waldorf was not a speakeasy and it was not selling booze under the table. Now, anyone who knows anything about the Hotel Business knows that hotels are dependent on receipts from the restaurants. And the restaurants were suffering terribly in prohibition. By the 19teens, the theater district had moved to times square. So the waldorf was finding itself in anachronism. In every sense of the word. It was out of time, it was out of place, and it was fun out of luck. And along came a man named floyd brown who was a colombian trained architect and he had become a developer. He wanted to tear down the waldorf astoria and put up the waldorf Astoria Office building. It was going to be a mix of firstclass office space and deeper space. Which would not be firstclass. It would be more like a warehouse. So with the swipe of one pen he got 200 feet on 5th avenue. He went to metropolitan Life Insurance company for a loan and he got 25 million. More money then metlife had ever given anybody for a development before. And he went to shreve and harmon who were young architects. Lamb had gone to cornell, she forgot to columbia shreve had got to columbia but the career was killed in 1911 and by that time hastings was retired and took over the firm. They designed this building for floyd brown and when you look at the massey of this building look at the drawing by hugh ferriss. It is if shreve and lamb lifted it verbatim. Floyd brown was on the cutting edge of this in many ways. One of the things he thought the building should have would be an underground garage. Well, the zoning law from the 1916 said there could be no near garages on a block unless there had already been a garage. There had never been a garage on 34th street between fifth and sixth. So despite the drawing by stephen beastie and his incredible crosssections, which shows an underground parking area, there never was one. Another thing that floyd brown imagined was a ramp for truck delivery. It was never installed, but if you go into 50th street to rockefeller center, you will see what floyd brown had imagined. Now, floyd brown discover the 25 million was not enough for his project. So he went back to metropolitan life and they said sorry, we are not going to give you any more money. Now, at the time, there was this man governor offered in the smith. Alfred e. Smith. He had been born in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and his father died when he was about in the sixth grade. Smith became the bread winner of the family. He became a newsie and went to work at the fish market and started working for errands for the local society. He was smart and he wound up in albany as a representative. He then became the governor of the state. In 1911, smith was a strictly tavern a guy, which meant he was not a reformer. In 1911, we had something burned in his mind and he started working with people, such as senator robert widener, the father of our former mayor. Frances perkins, who went on to be the secretary of labor under franklin roosevelt. And bill moscow its moscowit z and he wound up hiring him to be his right hand woman in albany. In 1928, the democrats selected him as his standard as their standardbearer. If i do not pick my finger smith derby on it. What do you think happened in 1928 . Well, smith did not win. Herbert hoover one. There were three strikes against smith. One was that he was an antiprohibitionist. He was a wet at the time when republicans had convinced the electorate that it was a noble and good thing. They managed to squash the idea of gangsters and bootlegging and practically every adult was a lawbreaker in one form or another. In fact, my father was in the Hotel Business and he would make gin. One day he was asked to make some for client and my father was delivering it and delivering it in a baby carriage with my sister sitting on top of the bottles. Who came along . Al smith. He leaned in the baby carriage with his cigar clenched firmly in his teeth and said, whats the matter, baby . Belly it . And my father thought it was hilarious. Belly ache . And my father thought it was hilarious to read smith lost on the proficient level and he was also a Roman Catholic at a time when the american electorate was convinced if we had a catholic in the white house, that the pope of rome would be dictating foreign and domestic policy. He also probably had the worst new york accent that anybody had ever heard west of the hudson river. He didnt even carry new york state, curiously. In 1929, he found himself unemployed. The only job he had was a metropolitan life and he was serving on the board, so he knew about the failed endeavor on 5th avenue and 34th street. The democrats had enlisted this man as the chairman of the National Democratic party. John j rask of rascob. He had a large family, family dead, young. He went to work ultimately as the secretary. He became a spring gallias to dupont. When people would talk about what school they had gone to and they dropped a lot of build initials like m. I. T. Or uva, smith would say, i went to the fish market. Raskob he was the same way, only a little more genteel. During world war i, dupont was making money hand over fist with armaments. He convinced him to invest heavily in general motors. Dupont ended up holding so much stock that he wound up being the president of general motors, and he appointed John J Raskob to as the chief Financial Operator to general motors. If you own general motors, you can thank raskob. He saw the handwriting on the wall and got out of the stock market. He took his profits and put them in his pocket. The democrats were convinced that with raskob fundraising he was one of those on the other side of the aisle they were convinced that big money would come flowing into the coffers with the democratic party. It did not happen. It did not stop raskob from enjoying himself as the chairman. He thought it was unseemly that he be the chairman of the National Democratic party and still be affiliated with general motors. Im not too paranoid, but i wonder if he had been chairman of the republican party. I dont know. Anyway, somehow he and smith talked about what they were going to do. Raskob had a pot load of money. They were lounging about at the estate of raskob in palm beach probably where the idea came to start a real estate venture. Smith knew about the failed real estate venture. Interestingly, he knew the work of shreve and lamb. They had designed this building. His between broadway and 8th avenue from 57th street to 58 th street, because 1775 broadway was built by general motors. This was the gm building before the one went up on fifth avenue and 59th. He knew the work of shreve and lamb. He thought was pretty good. Smith and raskob liked the plan. They determine that they were in over their heads. They designed a tall building. They had never done that before. So they asked Arthur Loomis harmon, who had designed a hotel to become a partner. This is the first major hotel to be designed as a result of the 1916 zoning law. It is now the w new york. Arthur loomis harmon was a single, solo practitioner. By the 1920s, it said the same, that he had mastery over the requisite elements. Things are changing, whereas architecture had been a collaboration of architect painter, and salter. Goal to sculptor. By the early 20th century, it was becoming a collaboration of the architect, engineer, and plumber. So harmon joined the firm, and this was the preliminary plan as they sold the next iteration. This was september 1929. The massing was familiar, but what is more refined. You remember the original plan had been to be a combination of lot building and firstclass office. This was truly firstclass office, which meant that no office with deeper than 28 feet. This is 1929 we are talking about. Yes, they had electricity, but not the way we have lighting today. There was no airconditioning, so they had to have euphemistically fenestration windows that open and closed. You begin to see that this is becoming more and more of a skyscraper and less and less in 1929, this was the race of the titans. This was the prototype design for what came to be called the Chrysler Building on 42nd street and lexington. It was designed by william van allen. It would not be this design and its ultimate manifestation, as i am sure you know. Van allen had had a partner named h craig severance. While he was designing what was to become the third Chrysler Building, severance was designing 40 wall street, the bank of manhattan building. They were really in a race with each other. At 900 feet, chrysler said we are stopping. The bank of the manhattan said we have got them. We will top the building out at 925 feet, 71 stories, and we will be the worlds tallest building. Chrysler said that we will keep right on building. They announced that their building would be probably taller than 1000 feet. Well, at about this time they got a plan for an 80 story Empire State Building. They wanted something as tall as they can get. 80 stories, they were told by the Otis Elevator company, was the limit. Why . The cables would collapse under their own weight. They said, ok, 80 stories it will be. 1000 feet. Now, if chrysler stops at 950 or so, we will be taller than they will be. We will probably have an enclosed observatory. We will have an open sky observatory with a 360 degree view of the city. It was a miraculous plan. But, just as chrysler had fooled the bank of manhattan, so he fooled raskomb and smith. They kept on building. They sneaked the distinguishing spire a top the Chrysler Building, which took it to 1046 feet. Well, as far as raskomb was concerned, chrysler was a pipsqueak. He had only been in business for five years. He was not going to let chrysler best him. They went to the architects do you remember hugh ferriss original elevation with everything at an angle . You see this great lines . They couldnt do it. They said we are going to have a setback 90 feedback from the sixth floor from fifth avenue so that the tower can basically rise unencumbered. They said we will give up that much rentable space. That is it. We will have a better building for it. It will be more ventable. Why . Everything will be part of a tower. Do you see the very top of this building . Its an additional five stories. They took the building up to the 86th floor. Remember what otis had said about the elevators question mark to this day, when you go to the 86th floor observatory, you go to the 80th floor and you transfer to a local elevator which takes you up to the 86th floor. And this is the ultimate design, or penultimate design for the Empire State Building you can see the simplicity of it. It takes on almost a human form, doesnt it . It has a spirit. Here are floor plans. The ground floor plan was to be all retail, and the core of the building would be the elevators. And Janitorial Services and things of that nature. Which meant that all the offices and all the retail space was on the outside of the building. Very sensible. And when you started climbing up, he would have floor plans from the sixth to the 20th floor. Count how many corner offices there are in this design. If you had the corners coming to a right angle, you would have four corner offices, right . Well, you dont. You have three times that as a result of his plan. And the higher you go, the smaller the floor footage, but you still have lots of corner offices, and they are more rentable or you can get more money for them. Now the roofline, does that look familiar to you . Any other building . [inaudible] no, you are warm. Its also designed here is 505th on 32nd street. 42nd street. Look at the roofline on that building. Instead of having terracotta finials there, if you have stainless steel, you have the Empire State Building right . , i talked about the penultimate design, raskomb or smith said to the other, look, somebody can do the rest of the thousand feet , what we did in an original plan. 1050 feet. How can we make this building taller . And there was a publisher named moses king in the early 20th century who put out some of the best guidebooks to cities, and he was kings dream of new york, dirigibles casting off the roof tops of buildings to foreign lands. I dont know if smith or raskomb ever saw this, but they certainly had the idea. Hence was born the building scheme. Looniest since the tower of babel. They said, lets put a dirigible mass on top of the building that will be 200 feet high, which will be taller than any building. It will be on top of building that is already 1050 feet high. You can have the pilot of the dirigible drop a line over, go grab it, hook it in, we will wince down the winding line, the dirigible will be more at its be mored atored at its bow, and the gang plank would be dropped and people will have to walk from 1050 feet out onto a deck and you can see where they are going. Thats where king kong put down faye ray. You can see that there were plans for observation platforms and enclosed observation levels and begin lights beacon lights. The faa already said that you have to turn them off because you are blinding pilots in the vicinity. But they went ahead and built this. Smith would go to washington and talk to the navy department. He never got the blessing of anybody to actually have a dirigible tie up there. Think about it. These things are powered they are kept afloat by hydrogen or helium. There is diesel fuel to power the engines, and theres water that serves as ballast. We all know what happened to the hindenburg in new jersey. It blew up. These things were 1000 feet long. Imagine if one of them had been tied up to the top of the Empire State Building and blew up. It would have caused a conflagration that would have made the fire of 1835 look like a Boy Scout Camp fire. They went ahead and designed and built this thing, wings are on it as symbolic of flight, but they never ever had a dirigible tied up to it. On the 102nd floor, you see the flight of stairs leading up . That went up to the area where they had an open platform. Thats where you would climb up to gain access to the dirigible or climb down from it. And this view shows an elevator cab. If you think the elevator cabs at the Chrysler Building are terrific, they werent half bad at the Empire State Building but they were all changed in the 1950s. Down on the 80th floor, where the customs inspection area had planned to go when raskomb and smith realized they were going there were not going to be any dirigibles, they put what was called tea room. Well, this tea room had a brass rail. You know what smith wanted to do with it. The dirigible mooring mast, as a loony idea as it was, did give the building the grandest crown that any building wore. There is no doubt about it. Before they can build this building, they had to tear down the waldorf, and the company that was hired to be a Demolition Company was the stuart brothers. They had built 40 wal. Record time. In world war i, he was charged with designing and building temporary housing for the military. He built housing for the equivalent of philadelphia. The whole towns were built. His firm was undoubtedly the reigning experts in the field. This view shows a sidewalk around the sidewalk level of the hotel, raised level, thats called a sidewalk. Its there to protect pedestrians from falling objects. Something that they did was dig holes in the floor of the waldorf and put chutes there. Theyd pour things into the chutes. They would fill up the dump truck and drive off. They discovered that tearing down was more difficult than they imagined. It was a steelframed building very wellbuilt. It took them longer and cost them more, but they persevered. Here we have the sidewalk on fifth avenue for the new Empire State Building. You can see on the corner of 33rd street a blank space, this would hold an ad for the coming of the building. This photograph is from march 15, 1930. The dropdead date for the opening of the building was may 1, 1931. The reason is that new york had a peculiar custom. Leases were expired at the end of april and new leases were signed on may 1. It happens again in the fall. If you did not have your building opened by may 1, you would not get new tenants. So smith and raskomb said to the architect and contractors that you guys have to build this building in a hurry. Here we are. This is march 15. Whats interesting about this photograph is that basically all those buildings between fifth and sixth look exactly the same today. They started building the building on march 17, st. Patricks day, and by april 21 you can see that the building was starting to go up and it would be 210 vertical columns, some of them going from the sub basement all the way up to the 102nd floor. Do you notice that there is an opening on 33rd street big enough for a truck to drive through . Do you remember what they did in the waldorfastoria . They had trucks drive right into the first floor of the empires state building, dump trucks, chutes, the dump trucks would drop their brick or whatever down the chute onto railroad carts, and they did not use wheelbarrows. They had railroad carts, and on every floor there were Railroad Tracks installed, so you load up your small cart, pushed by hand, but still its one of the efficiencies of the Empire State Building. This view shows the ad on the corner of 33rd and fifth for the coming of the building. Now they started putting up this building in jig time. Do remember the photograph of the flatiron building . He marveled at the rate at which the building went up. They put up the Empire State Building at the rate of 4. 5 stories a week. This photograph taken july 21 you can see the steel framing. There is a 10story lag between the time they get the framing up and you start having the face put on. When you have the facing put on and the windows in place, then you can start putting down the floors, putting up walls, having the painters come, putting the building together. Engineers today say that you probably use 30 less still than steel than they used in those days because of the improvements in the product. They started putting up this building. The story was that they were putting it up so quickly that the steel was still hot from the furnaces in pittsburgh. This woman, bill moskowitz, who was his right hand in albany started a Public Relations firm, and she thought it would be marvelous to record the work and give credit to the workers, and she had known a photographer in the early 20th century, lewis hine, who was essentially a muckraker. That is why she knew him. She had been a reformer herself. He went through the south photographing child labor. She thought he was just a man to record the work on the Empire State Building. Here is one of his photographs. The construction of the building was compared to henry fords moving Assembly Line, only he said, sometimes we thought of it , he said, only the Assembly Line at ford did the moving. The Empire State Building stayed in place. Here you see riveters standing on a plank. It was a poorly built operation, but the Safety Record was incredible. There was a cynical belief that for every floor that went up there was a death among the construction workers. There were five deaths, one of them had a worker look down an elevator shaft to see if it was coming. It was. Another had a truck that backed up and ran him over. One of the reasons there were so few fatalities is that the Empire State Building had a fulltime nurse and a first aid station, with a doctor on call an ambulance parked on 33rd street at all times. If there was an injury, it was treated immediately, and if you require been taken to a being taken to a hospital the patient was taken to a hospital. When you look at these photographs, you understand the artistry of the man. There is a building in the lower lefthand corner that was metropolitan life, only the worlds tallest building in 1909. Here are the final pieces of steel going into the upper structure, the dirigible mooring mast. The irony of the workers is that here they were throwing steel and stone and glass higher and faster into the sky than anybody had ever thrown it before. When work on this building ended, there was only one Major Construction job in new york and that was rockefeller center. The odds are whether they would land up in the unemployment line and then probably the bread line because what happened in 1929 . The building that was planned in the boom of the 1920s, opened in the bust of the 1930s. It was memorialized in stamps. Here we are back at the wonderful diorama of the Empire State Building at the museum. I want you to notice some things in the center bottom, you see that what could be a ladder or a support for a a skit, or Something Like that. You see the ironworker just cavalierly walking along a steel beam . You see men riveting and the bottom righthand corner. You see one man standing on a girder as a gets lowered into as it gets lowered into place. I assumed that the Background Research for this was simply the photographs of lewis hine. It was Dwight Franklin who made the dioramas. He was a very scholarly man. He went for history to early valentine manuals to the economography of manhattan island. But what could he do with the Empire State Building . There was nothing for him to refer to. It turns out the museum has photographs he took. Now, here we have the man riding a beam and attaching it. We have another worker cavalierly walking along an iron beam. Here we have workers putting together a post. These were all taken by Dwight Franklin. He went up and shot these photographs and they are now in the collection of the museum. One of the dioramas that he did do was the blizzard of 1888. This is the way the city couldve looked yesterday. Here is an elevation showing 5th avenue entrance. You notice the rise from 33rd to 44th . I bet when you walk along the street, you are never aware of it. The day before the photo was taken, the mooring mast worked without a stage. Workmen were already using the words empire state over the fifth avenue entrance. You notice the blur coming out of the building on the left . That is a Truck Driving out of the building, having made a delivery and now back to pick up another load. Now, the design of the building is elemental. The original plan was to have a facade of brick, but the architects said brick is very expensive. You have to have a brick layer and you have to use firstclass brick. We encourage that the building be clad in stone which can be prefabricated, cut offsite and delivered ready to be slept on slapped on to the building. They did not advocate marble because it was too soft. We all know what has happened to the fifth avenue public library. They did not advocate granite because it was too hard. What is just right, limestone. In the best limestone in the United States comes from bedford, indiana. They contracted for bedford, indiana limestone. They said it could be cut so that only the facing has to be finished. The flanks dont have to worry about and the back you dont have to worry about. Ill explain why. In the meantime, look at the detailing on the lower floors. Its almost egyptian like, isnt it . In the 1920s, art deco architecture was influenced by the archaeological digs in central and south america, the mayan culture, the aztec culture, king tuts tomb. I call this egyptoid setback architecture. One of the glories of the Empire State Building the color of the , window frames. How many buildings do you know with red window frames . I know only one other building 100th and fourth on riverside drive. It gives the building one more note of distinction. The scallop motif is carried out for the entire height of the building. Those vertical elements give the building its thrust, its rise. I was talking about the advantage of only having to cut the limestone on one side. What the architects advocated was that that there be a certain pattern to the construction of the building. You see those stainless steel vertical risers . They are slept over the joints so you dont see the corners of the limestone. The spandrels, it spans the building from the top of the window to the ultimate of the window above. To the bottom of the window above. The spandrels are made of prefabricated aluminum simply slapped into place. The window frames cover up other areas, such as the bottom and tops of spandrels, and these windows are flush with the building, which is a hallmark of modernism. They did not do it because they were modernists. They did it because it was economic, cheap. They also avoided the waffle iron look, which they didnt want. The architects were modernists not in that they believe so much in what bauhaus was preaching, they were trained at the beaux art. If the beaux art preached anything, it was that more is not enough. They liked decoration. They thought it was important. They slapped decoration on willynilly. Only, it is very subtly done. Stainless steel mullions have to end somewhere. Fanlike motifs. Other places, art deco, athenian capstone. Here is a spandrel. The Art Deco Movement loved geometry and used rectangles squares, and triangles to abandon. Heres the fifth avenue lobby. The ceiling was designed by the rambosh studios, marble clad walls in the lobby. If youre looking west, you see an image of the Empire State Building. It is as if it is a deity. Here is the entrance to a flight of stairs. It looks as if you could be on the normandy, doesnt it . This is a mezzanine level with motifs in the ceilings. Outside we have these awnings. Notice the horizontal banding . Very similar. Im beginning to get the cut sign here. So i will race through this. I just want you to see the influence of the Empire State Building. Here is the mcgrawhill holding building, which went up the same year, 1931. Heres radio city music call hall a couple years later. Heres the rainbow room and nbc studios. There is opening day. There is al smith with his grandchildren on the 86th floor. Al smith is pointing to the landmarks to Franklin Delano roosevelt, who took over the governorship from smith. Why do you think the building is called the Empire State Building . Every tallest building heretofore had a corporate name attached to it. Metropolitan life, singer, will olworth, chrysler, bank of manhattan. Smith assumed that the democrats would fill the building with state offices, but smith and roosevelt never really got along. When you talk about president ial timber, smith might have had a scrawny tree that grew in the back yard of brooklyn. They simply didnt get along. But the building that was planned in the boom of the 1920s, opened in the bust of the 1930s. They could not rent the space for retail purposes on fifth avenue, so they put photographs in the space. They went so far as to light the building at night, creating the illusion that something was going on. The truth was nothing was going on. There was only Elevator Service from the first to the 25th floor, and no service to the 80th. They would run around turning on the lights at night. Im going to skip through some of these. Im going to come to this. I think that Fran Rosenfeld described one World Trade Center admirably. This was the recent cover of the new yorker. I can only surmise that their emotions are the result of the fact that they are a children and have a skewed perspective on life. I know that you might say that i take a skewed perspective, but when they grow up, im convinced they will come to realize the fact that he should have been the happy one and she the unhappy one. This is the building. [applause] thank you. Thank you so much. We invite everyone upstairs now for a reception and book signing. If you have questions, john would be happy to answer them when he is situated with a drink. Thank you so much. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] with live coverage of the u. S. House on cspan and the senate on cspan2, on cspan3 we show you the most relevant congressional hearings and Public Affairs events. On weekends, cspan3 is the home to American History tv with programs that tell our nation story, including six series. The civil wars 150th anniversary, visiting battlefields and key events. American artifacts touring sites, history book show, with the best history writers, the presidency, looking at the legacies of our nations commanders in chief, top professors delving into americas past, and reel america, featuring films from the 1930s through the 1970s. Cspan3, created by the cable tv industry and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. Today on American History tv we are bringing you live coverage of a seminar on the closing of the civil war that took place 150 years ago this spring to participants are currently at lunch and should be back in about 10 minutes. In the meantime, we join our cities to work on the road as they tour as they explore the history of cities across the country. We are looking at the earliest rented version prin ted version of the gettysburg address that was printed in a pamphlet form. The actual speeches that were made were made on november 19, 1863, at gettysburg. There were newspaper reporters who took down president lincolns address, which was only about two minutes. It was not considered a very important comment at the time. Edward everett was a famous speaker and he circulated copies of his twohour speech to different papers around the country. He got massive coverage. That day, the fact that the president was there was important. What people initially remembered is there was this long, ornate flowery speech by Edward Everett , who talked for an hour and a half or two hours about the events and how important they were to history. Everett was an important political figure at the time. He had been a congressman, senator, secretary of state, and was considered one of the best speakers in the country. He had to uphold his reputation with this long speech that was to be the keystone of the dedication of gettysburg cemetery. This is the opening page. It was printed in washington d. C. , right after the speech. If i can get the paper to turn it starts off with a description of how greek heroes were treated. He starts in ancient athens with people who fought nobly for a good cause and how they were treated, honored in death and burial. He is starting off 2000 years ago and working his way back up to the United States civil war. The pamphlet was printed by washington chronicle after the speeches were given. This was the first booklet form, official version, of the gettysburg address. I thought it was interesting that when you look over to eve retts speech goes on and on, and i did not see applause very often, but when you look at the short speech that many of us had to learn as schoolchildren, the speech lincoln gave, on the last page, you see where they put all of it right here, they put [a pplause] in brackets. This was recorded by a couple of newspaper people as well as various handwritten versions. There are several and there is controversy about, did he say this word or that word that might be different from the way it is written . It was not remarked at the time as a terrifically powerful piece of oratory. It was only later as years went by that the grace of his simple language, as opposed to the ornate, flowery language of the famous or eight or orator, faded away. Most people would not even know who Edward Everett was. Everyone would know lincoln was there. He had a very graceful, eloquent speech. He said everything that needed to be said. Lincoln was not well that day. He was not feeling well and his delivery was not very forceful. He went back to washington and he had all the tribulations because he was coming on the next year of the election. He had a lot of politics to deal with. This was one little thing that came along in a busy schedule for him. Everett only lived a year and a half after the speech was given. It was at the end of his life and he spent a lot of that time trying to polish this speech and get it printed. It was printed in 1864 in a small booklet with other speeches. Lincolns remarks were in there too. This was done by the washington chronicle newspaper. There may be as many as five copies still around today. We have this one, which has been in our collection since we opened in 1921. My best guess is it came from the papers of one of the politicians, somebody like ta are nelson t. A. R. Nelson. Anyway, we have had this in the collection. Here it was until the Lincoln Library asked for it. It is not what we catalogued it as. I saw this one for sale and the writeup said there were only two or three copies of this around. I realized it was valuable and really quite rare. We give it special treatment now. It has its own special place when it is not on display. We are back now to American History tvs live coverage of the seminar on the closing of the American Civil War 150 years ago this spring. Both received excellent reviews. Today, she will talk on legacies of appomattox, lees surrender. Pre please welcome professor varon. Elizabeth thank you. Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to share the stage with these scholars. I am grateful to patrick for having included me. You gained great insight into the Appomattox Campaign and the surrender seen. I would like to turn our attention now to the immediate