For years, I started every morning the same way. I opened my eyes in my Lower East Side apartment, rolled over, and looked straight at the Empire State Building. It stood there in the middle distance, glowing in the early light. Sometimes bathed in gold, sometimes half-hidden in fog, always magnificent. That view taught me something about this building that no history book quite captures. The Empire State Building doesn’t just define the New York City skyline. It defines New York itself.
A building born from ambition — and a race to the sky
The Empire State Building didn’t just appear. New York City willed it into existence. In the late 1920s, a fierce competition erupted between two titans. Walter Chrysler, who was building his gleaming Art Deco tower on 42nd Street, and John Jakob Raskob. A General Motors executive and financier who wanted to build something taller. Something that would stop everyone in the city cold when they looked up.
Construction on the Empire State Building began on March 17, 1930 on St. Patrick’s Day. What followed became one of the greatest construction feats in American history. Workers raised an average of four and a half floors per week. More than 3,400 laborers worked on-site each day. Many of them recent immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and the Mohawk Nation. Whose iron workers became legendary for their fearlessness at extreme heights. The building rose 102 floors — 1,454 feet from ground to the tip of its antenna — in just 410 days. It opened on May 1, 1931, and immediately claimed the title of the tallest building in the world, a record it held for 41 years.
Art Deco’s greatest achievement
Architects Shreve, Lamb & Harmon designed the building in the Art Deco style. Thus dominated New York in the 1920s and 30s — a movement that married industrial ambition with decorative elegance. Stand on Fifth Avenue and tilt your head back. Notice how the building steps back in graceful tiers as it rises. The limestone façade catching light differently at every hour of the day. The architects used Indiana limestone and granite at the base. Thus transitioning to stainless steel and aluminum near the top. Creating a surface that shimmers in the sun and glows under the building’s famous multicolored lights at night.
Those lights deserve their own paragraph. Since 1976, the Empire State Building has lit its tower in colors that mark events, seasons, and causes. In addition green and white for St. Patrick’s Day, red white and blue for the Fourth of July. Also, lavender for Pride Month, and during the World Cup this summer. You can spot the colors of competing nations lighting up the Midtown sky. On my evening walks through the city, I’ve stopped countless times to photograph the building from angles that most visitors miss — from the shadows of Koreatown on 32nd Street, from the High Line looking east, from the pedestrian lanes of the Williamsburg Bridge — always trying to capture that quality of light that makes this building feel alive.
Empire State Building climbers 2026
New York City sweltered through a summer heat wave and millions of World Cup visitors packed Midtown, Angela Nikolau and Ivan Kuznetsov — a Russian couple known globally for their death-defying rooftop climbs — breached a maintenance hatch on the 102nd floor observation deck and scaled the building’s 200-foot needle to its very tip, 1,454 feet above the street. They unfurled a black banner reading “When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace” — and then Ivan got down on one knee and proposed. The city lost its mind. Two NYPD Emergency Service Unit officers climbed four ladders to reach them, and the couple descended safely before being taken into custody. Both now face felony charges including burglary and reckless endangerment. They were arraigned Thursday and released under court supervision, due back in court August 24.
The couple, who starred in the 2024 Netflix documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story — which documented their illegal climb of Malaysia’s Merdeka 118, the world’s second-tallest building — had apparently cased the Empire State Building in advance. Investigators believe they entered through a locked maintenance hatch, something security experts called a worst-case scenario for any landmark’s safety team. Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told CNN that authorities had no choice but to pursue serious charges to deter others from attempting the same stunt.
What struck me about the whole incident was how perfectly, absurdly New York it was. Here’s a city already buzzing with World Cup crowds and a historic Knicks championship, and two daredevils decide this is the moment to climb the most iconic building on earth and get engaged at the top. The air traffic controller audio said it all: “Two geniuses climbed to the top of the Empire State Building,” one officer radioed. “He just proposed to her.” Only in New York.
Why the Empire State Building still matters
New York has added plenty of taller buildings since 1931 — One World Trade Center, 432 Park Avenue, the supertalls of Billionaires’ Row. But none of them carry the same weight in the collective imagination. The Empire State Building appears in more films than any other building on earth. It survived the Great Depression, a B-25 bomber crashing into its 79th floor in 1945, the September 11 attacks, and a century of architectural change. It transmits broadcast signals for nearly every local TV and radio station in New York. And it still draws more than two million visitors a year to its observation decks, all of them craning their necks for the same view that stopped me cold from my apartment window every single morning.
When you walk the streets of this city — really walk them, camera in hand, eyes open — the Empire State Building finds you whether you’re looking for it or not. It appears at the end of cross streets, in the gap between buildings, reflected in puddles after a rainstorm. It reminds you that New York has always been, at its core, a city that believes it can build something the world has never seen before. In 1931, they were right. Nearly a hundred years later, that needle still points straight up, daring everyone to keep reaching.
