The building had a deadline before it had a drawing.
The owners’ requirements for their new office tower on Fifth Avenue fit in one sentence. William Lamb, chief designer at the architects Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, set them out in Architectural Forum in January 1931: a fixed budget, no office space more than 28 feet from window to corridor, as many stories of that space as possible, an exterior of limestone, and completion by May 1, 1931, “which meant a year and six months from the beginning of sketches.”
The date wasn’t arbitrary. May 1 was the traditional day for signing new commercial leases in New York City, which made it, as the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission later put it, “of crucial importance in the economic planning of a speculative office building.”
So the end shaped everything that came before it. According to Lamb’s own account, the basic scheme came together in two hours, on the evening before a meeting of the owners’ corporation. An all-night session produced five or six of the essential plans, an elevation, a perspective and a fairly accurate count of rentable area by the next day. The plan followed the 28-foot rule: a core of elevators, toilets and shafts in the middle, ringed by offices 28 feet deep. The elevator contractor and the builders, Starrett Brothers and Eken, were each asked separately to work out how tall the building could economically go. Each arrived at 80 stories of offices plus five more for executive offices.
Even the windows were designed backward from the date. Shreve explained that setting the windows forward of the stone wall, with metal panels between them, made most of the stonework simple, repetitive and quick to cut. The stone could go up without waiting for the windows. That, he wrote, had been “of the utmost importance” in shortening the time between sketches and construction.
The whole project took twenty months from the first architectural contract in September 1929. Construction took 410 days. The building opened formally on May 1, 1931, the date written into the program before the sketches began.
The building opened into the Depression. In its first uncertain years, the half-tenanted tower was nicknamed “Smith’s Folly” or the “Empty State Building,” after Al Smith, the former New York governor who was its public face. As midtown kept moving north, the prime corporate tenants the financier John Raskob had hoped to attract went to buildings above 42nd Street. Only later, filled largely by firms from the nearby garment district, did the Empire State become a successful office building.