The Empire State Building

The Empire state building is a very popular building and it is included in the list of the modern wonders. The inclusion of Empire state building in this list was decided by American Society of Civil Engineers. Harold Helmsley is the owner of this building. Empire state building is considered to be a historic landmark of National importance.  

The site of the building was marked in the end of the 18th century and was developed by John Thomson farm. A hotel for the elite class was built there and it was a frequently visited hotel by the elite class of New York at that time.  Later on the same site was used to build this massive structure of Empire state building. The building was designed by the firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon and Gregory Johnson was the most important architect involved in the designing of Empire state building. The firm was too quick in producing the first draft of the design. It was produced by the firm in only two weeks time. This was a really speedy work and some other tower to be constructed in Carolina was used as a source to design this building. The designing was actually done from the top towards the bottom. All the financing of this project was done by John J. Raskob. Alfred Smith was the chairman of the construction company. Alfred was former governor of the city of New York and was deeply interested in the construction of Empire state building.

The height of this building is more than twelve hundreds and fifty feet. If you include the pinnacles in the height of the building, it becomes fourteen hundreds and fifty three feet tall. 85 storeys of the building are being used for commercial purpose while 16 storeys act as the tower of Art Deco. The top of the building is occupied by an observatory. This building is also popular because of the fact that this was the first building which crossed the limit of 100 storeys.  With 73 elevators in place and 6,500 windows in all, the building has 1,860 steps if you start off form the street level and try to reach the 102nd floor.

New York is a very well connected city with the rest of the world. You can take the aerial route to reach New York if you plan to visit the Empire state building and if you are coming from some other continent. If you are from the same continent, taking the by road route or a train may be a really good idea.