Original subtitles

most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights

except the shadowy moving glow of the ferry boat across the sound

and as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away

until gradually i became aware of the old island here

that flowered once for dutch sailors eyes

a fresh green breast of the new world

its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers

to the last and greatest of all human dreams

for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath

in the presence of this continent

face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his

capacity for wonder f scott fitzgerald

i think new york has always been marked by

an exchange process being a port culture being founded on trade it's not just the

trade of material goods but it's a trade of ideas it's a trade of people it's a

trade of things and in that exchange process one of the

most important things the underlying undergrading

thing that's being exchanged is really desires

you have this constant striving for moving up for attaining something

and out of that process you have this kind of

constant feeling that somehow where you are

is not sufficient and you want to move up higher

well i would say that a very important part of it something i understand

completely coming as i do from brooklyn is the element of yearning

if you go to long island city if you go to brooklyn ice and look across the water

to manhattan you have a sense of a goal that may or may not be reached

by poor old you but which makes you feel this is the most important thing in the

world you see

someone said years ago that the longest journey in the world is from brooklyn to

manhattan and that's absolutely true i used to live for years on a street

called pineapple uh very near the brooklyn bridge i

worked at crooked bridge every day um even there you were full of yearning

for what lay on the other shore now that is of course the very essence

of very transcendental emotion visible almost in your hands before you get it

and the feeling there is very strong

i've never even now but i used to walk across the bridge never gotten below

in new york and walked around but i feel that i'd accompany something

extraordinary which had nothing to do with the mile or

mile and a half whatever it was it had to do with the feeling i had

entered into a different civilization and of course

manhattan is new york well queens is very lovely the bronx has a lot of real

history and it's very interesting but the action that we know about is always in

manhattan and that action is contributed to by the people who live elsewhere

they have created manhattan in a way by living outside of it

ironically now that is they have wished for something

rich and joyous in their lives and that's what they found in the world of

opportunity in the world of

accomplishment

so

all through the spring and summer of 1919 the streets of new york were filled

with parades and troops of marching men returning

from the grim battlefields of europe week after week crowds lined the streets

to cheer the regiments as they swung up fifth avenue

past the great victory arch at 23rd street

past the solemn memorial at 42nd street and up to the spectacular curtain of

jewels by the park the first to be honored was the 369th

an all-black regiment from harlem which the french had awarded their highest

military honor the quad aguer along with the nickname hell fighters

for their legendary valor under fire

there had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering

people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white

red and rose

all through the long spring days the returning soldiers

marched up the chief highway while merchants and clerks

left their bickerings and crowding to the windows

turned their white bunched faces gravely upon the passing battalions f scott

fitzgerald

to most new yorkers the horizon seemed limitless that spring

on the first of the year al smith the hero of the labor reform movement

had been sworn in as the first irish american governor in america

it was an astonishing triumph for the immigrant experience in new york

that same year the 19th amendment would take effect

after decades of passionate struggle american women

had finally won the right to vote

and at long last after nearly 300 years the oldest ethnic group in new york

after the dutch had finally found a space for themselves

in the turbulent commercial city

everything is possible a 23-year-old midwesterner named f scott fitzgerald

wrote to his fiancee zelda the day he arrived in february

i am in the land of ambition and success this was the dawn of the day of the hope

of the that this was the american century europe hadn't believed really in the

notion of what america was becoming until the first world war but we

were suddenly the great power which promised to become the supreme power

of the 20th century and i think that that was an

actual psychological transformation in us

more than most people understood the war had been a watershed

for europe for america and for the sprawling metropolis it was its capital

it's a critical moment in the city's history new york goes into

that war three billion dollars in debt it's a third world country

europeans have been investing in its stocks and bonds for years we owe them

an enormous amount of money by the time the war is over the united states

is now a creditor nation for the first time in its history it is three billion

dollars ahead of the game and consequently new york has moved to a

position where it can challenge london for the position of the center

of the world though no one could have known it by the spring of 1919

the curtain was about to rise on the most spectacular

and in the end heartbreaking act in the city's astonishing three-century history

as 130 years of relentless commercial growth now came to a tremendous climax

in the decade to come as the city and country kicked themselves free of the

past and rose into a seemingly limitless future

new york would become one of the most commercially and culturally creative

places on earth committed as never before or since to the intoxicating dreams

of capitalism before it was over a new kind of culture

a mass culture and a new kind of city a city of desires and dreams would be

brought into existence on the slender island of manhattan

as it did new york would soar upward in a frenzy of speculation

rising higher and then falling lower than it ever would again

henry ford once saying the sky's the limit

and a sense what the 20s discovered was maybe the sky wasn't the limit

uh maybe one could go right into the sky um hart crane the poet wrote about a sale

flung into april's in most day that sense that you could fling yourself into space

and it would be your friend new york is the center

of this not because it has the largest airports and the most air travel which

it does but rather because it's the place that is the skyscraper capital of the

world and also the capital of the media that

the media are centralized here the media are a way of colonizing space

so it was the center i think of this sense of air-mindedness of anything's

possible anything can be done the harbor is flourishing skyscrapers the likes of

which the world have never seen are creating a kind of image of new york city

that has stuck with us ever since but it's this period of of intense change

which really is a culmination it's such an exciting place to be

perhaps no other city in the history of the world has enjoyed

a kind of decade that new york had between the armistice day in 1918 in the

stock market crash toward the end of 11 year period an 11-year run

that was just wonderful

it is a european city no longer

it is american it is itself

imperial new york of time yet men and machines

we are all so young yet

wait and see wait and see what new york will do

sherwood anderson

the first act in many ways the strangest and most terrifying of the entire decade

began in the spring of 1919 before the troops had even finished coming home

on the evening of may 1st a night clerk at the main branch of the u.s post office

on 33rd street and 8th avenue happened to notice 16 slender identically wrapped

packages each addressed to a prominent politician or businessman

and each containing enough nitroglycerin to blow a man's head off

confirming deeply rooted american fears that sinister foreign

elements were at work in the land the revelation helped set in motion

the red scare a wave of political reaction and xenophobia

unlike anything seen in the country before or since

directed at cities with large populations of immigrants and especially new york

within months groups that had enjoyed triumphant success

only a few years before immigrant workers progressive reformers and union

organizers found themselves on the run

and there are mass roundups people are taken out put on ellis island

and if they're aliens they are slated for deportation

and of course the most famous deportee who's sent off in this period is emma

goldman and it's like a fever that grips people there's another wave in early 1920

and then it breaks it was like the fever had broken

and it's i think then that we really move into the 20s

and we've moved into a new climate the communists are going to be driven

underground the labor movement is still there but it's in serious disarray

you created a space where both globally in terms of the competitors in europe or

basket cases business in the united states and in new york in particular

is looking at fabulous possibilities for normalcy for profit making for getting

on the business

wednesday september 16 1920. dawned partly cloudy and pleasantly warm

in new york it was a good morning on the new york

stock exchange with prices rising steadily

as the lunch hour approached crowds began to spill out of the skyscrapers

which clustered around the intersection of wall street and broad

the very heart of the financial district a little before noon a horse-drawn wagon

pulled to a stop outside the imposing limestone facade of the house of morgan

right across from federal hall

then all hell broke loose

what happened was a a wagon drawn by a horse um pulled up outside of

the morgan bank at the corner as it's called of

wall and broad and a few minutes before noon um blew up the wagon was full of

dynamite unfortunately the forensic science of

explosions was not even in existence in 1920.

all they found of it was the four of the horse's hooves up by trinity church

when the rest of the horse was simply vaporized as was the wagon

and the wagon had been full of sash weights as well as explosive and cut

into chunks i mean as shrapnel the purpose of this was to kill as many

people as possible and about 40 people were killed

it was a lovely day had a bomb gone off a few minutes later

afternoon when people would have been going on their way to lunch um the death

toll probably would have been in the hundreds

the gouges that were cut into the limestone facade

by the explosion are still there you can go see them

the stigmata of capitalism so to speak and the house of morgan just carried on

business they weren't about to be you know shut down by by these people

by evening temporary lights had been strung across wall street

to allow hastily assembled work crews to repair the damage

by one in the morning the new york times reported it was evident that with most

of the necessary repair work virtually complete

wall street would go on with business as usual

the next morning to everyone's amazement the market continued its steady upward

trend with hardly a bump

the roaring 20s had begun

scott fitzgerald from saint paul minnesota felt more at home with the

organ they did in paris he loved new york because as he said

new york had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world

no one ever say anything as good as that about new york

everything is possible this is the thing possible because on summer nights

and scott fitzgerald wrote and the great gatsby you feel that some beautiful

fruit is about to be plucked you see so there's the midwestern boy coming

east first to princeton been to new york um remaking himself um studying the city

studying literature then going for serious art

and serious popular success

for months after his arrival f scott fitzgerald had tried to make a go of it

as a writer working at an advertising agency by day

and pouring out stories by night that were rejected

as swiftly as he could write them nothing came of it

then in june when his fiance zelda temporarily broke off their engagement

he went on a three-week drinking binge sobered up

and rapidly rewrote the manuscript of an already rejected novel

published in the spring of 1920 under the title this side of paradise

the book unfurled like a banner over the entire age

one man said capturing as nothing else had the reckless spirit of a whole

generation disillusioned with the past and determined to throw itself headlong

into the future come what may

fitzgerald's meteoric career was launched as the city itself

began its giddy upward climb in the years to come no one would

chronicle the ark of its dark and shining trajectory

more poignantly than he

the whole golden boom was in the air its splendid generosities its outrageous

corruptions and the torturous death struggle of the old america

there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen

america was going on the greatest gaudiest spree in history

and there was going to be plenty to tell about it

have scott fitzgerald

well honestly the thing that struck returning veterans just off the boat

as it were was prohibition and they were ticked off that what they were coming

back to was a no beer universe they also in fact we're not coming back

to economic good times we tend to forget that there was in fact a post-war

recession so for a couple of years in fact they were looking at

no beer no job but then the boom took hold the great boom

of the 20s which is organized around the mass production and the mass consumption

of commodities well the 1920s is a period that people

talk about in terms of the so-called second industrial revolution

which refers to a basic shift in the american economy

toward the production of what we call consumer goods

think about the automobile think about telephones think about

vacuum cleaners washing machines household appliances

which really in the 1920s become available on a mass basis to ordinary

people pretty much the first time and i think an important part of that shift to

consumer capitalism to producing consumer goods

is the need to make sure that you can sell those goods that you can advertise

them that you can market them in this respect new york in effect

becomes a kind of central player in the second industrial revolution because new

york is the center of image production new york is also the center of

advertising it's the center of the new mass media

and so the second industrial revolution you could you could say

really becomes marketed advertised sold largely through what's going on in new

york city

formally the task was to supply things that men wanted

the new necessity is to make men want the things which machinery must turn out

if civilization is not to perish the problem before us is not how to

produce the goods but how to produce the customers

samuel strauss for nearly 300 years the size of the

marketplace reached by new york had been steadily widening the orbit of

its influence increasing with each new advance in transportation and technology

now in little more than half a decade that reach would be extended to infinity

by the power of the new mass media concentrating in manhattan

and above all by the stunning new invention that by 1922

was already radiating invisibly from the tops of several midtown skyscrapers

the first advertisement that ever goes out on radio

is an advertisement for housing jax nights

and these guys get in they describe the glories of queens and

not so far from the city and yet it's bucolic and rural and they

are swamped they are flooded with demand for jackson heights apartments

and bills go all over new york city as a result of that one 10-minute spot they

sold about 150 000 worth of apartments so that's the

beginning of what comes to be the american system of broadcasting

the idea that the broadcasts themselves are paid for and often created by

advertisers what are the advertisers buying

they're buying a captive audience

though no one knew it modern american culture had been born

sell them their dreams them what they longed for

and hoped for and almost despaired of having

sell them this hope and you won't have to worry about selling them goods

helen landon cass i think there's a heightened sophistication in the 1920s

of how it is that we reach people certainly advertisers

in the field of radio are looking out to this new medium which can reach into

people's homes they're looking for new ways of essentially manufacturing desire

of creating needs in people and it's no accident it seems to me that all these

people are very interested in the new psychologies

of the 1920s what are the secrets for unlocking desire what are the secrets

for harnessing desire what are the secrets for changing

behavior so that people will buy a

product the standard oil company of california

is pleased to bring you this hour of great music by the master composers

every thursday evening throughout the year

are you listening this is milton j cross announcing

the importance of radio entertainment in practically every american

you will find it radio

it had to become this center this peculiar place where things could mix

where advertising which is a deeply commercial somewhat corrupt enterprise

could nevertheless be conversant with art psychoanalysis etc i

suppose it had to become a center practically as well as imaginatively of

mixed and somewhat contradictory needs drives

movements commercial and idealistic impulses

propelled by the commercial explosion in midtown

and by a thrilling sense that all the old rules had been suspended

in commerce and the arts new york would in the next half decade

finish giving birth to the most rapaciously commercial

and dizzyingly democratic culture the world had ever seen

in the decade to come as the forces of the first mass media culture in history

began to dissolve all the old ways of life in america

an immense chasm would begin to open up between the past

and future in new york city looking back americans forever after

would try to sort out what had been lost and what had been gained

the 20s for many people seems to be the moment when new york becomes

very familiar i think that the phrase the roaring 20s

can best be understood perhaps with reference to the explosion

of imagemaker the new mass media of motion pictures the new mass media of

radio broadcasting what's roaring about the 20s in other words is the tremendous

amplification intensification of image making

image selling especially through new meetings of mass media

new york's role as the place where the entertainment and the images and the

songs that the rest of the country are going to sing

even if they are set in different places they're written here this is where this

is the factory of popular entertainment this is what

this is hollywood before hollywood is around where

the national images and the national symbol and the national words are

manufactured

one of the things that's burbling up in the streets

is jazz and what's not to like is the spectacular fluorescence i mean

jazz is not a new york phenomenon but in the 20s black musicians come

pouring into parliament

you're getting to hear the most spectacularly fascinating exciting

music that the country's ever produced

this was where european when ravel came here where did he want to go and he told

george gershwin take me to harlem gresham of course took

him to harlem where he was just you know his socks were knocked off by the music

and european composers would come here and then tell the press at home

their home as well as here this is the music

this is the most exciting music being made today

by 1924 black writers poets artists and musicians from around the

country were pouring into the new black city within a city

drawn by the presence of the media by exploding opportunities in the

entertainment industry and by the siren call of harlem itself

african americans had never had a space of their own in new york city

there had been little concentrations but they were by streets and

consequently they were readily and easily moved

so you had blacks really carrying around town

from way down the lower part of the city up to greenwich village italians come in

and they carry them off to san juan hill and the tenderloin

the subway system which runs on up into harlem

opens up a new possibility an escape route and although there was terrific

reservations about this blacks were ready to move up into this territory and

they do

you see estimates ranging from 200 000 african americans pouring into mostly

harlem from 1917 to about 1925. very soon harlan became four

african-americans everywhere the chrysalis of the new negro a new

opportunity they were wildly ambitious they knew

that new york was where you really got known and they also knew new york

was the media center and that to the extent that

integration was going to benefit them practically

the publishing industry was white it was centered in new york um

musically the recording industry was centered in new york

so we attracted new york attracted this extraordinary black population and

among them were really some of the most gifted artists

of the century and new york got an amazingly

high share of them i bring this up first because this i think is the single most

important factor in new york's cultural preeminence in the 1920s

galvanized by the infusion of black culture

the most extraordinary generation of composers and lyricists in american

history including richard rogers jerome kern oscar hammerstein

cole porter and george and ira gershwin now finished forging an entirely new

kind of musical culture dedicated not to the purity of a single

style but to the exhilarating possibilities

of many cultures coming together

new york is a meeting place a rendezvous of the nations

i'd like to catch the rhythm of these interfusing peoples

to show them clashing and blending i'd like to write of the melting pot of

new york city itself with its blend of native and immigrant strains

its many kinds of music black and white

eastern and western george gershwin

80 years before watching black and irish performers

mimicking and parodying each other in minstrel shows along the bower

walt whitman had predicted they would one day give rise to a native grand

opera in america

now that opera was being born on broadway which by 1924 had become the laboratory

of a uniquely mixed and democratic musical culture

look at the melange of people and styles who created american musical theater

new york allowed them to be all of those things it allowed jerome kern you know to

listen to ub blake and to also you know listen to

classical music and to put them all on stage

it was the most attractive democratic in a way mix achievable in the world at that

moment and they documented it so when when people talk about multiculturalism

that's what they have to be talking about they have to be talking about high and

low accepting each other and loving each other despite the

unlovability of their situation and learning what the other guy knows

and presenting it in public with in an atmosphere of pleasure

you had gender comminglings of all kinds you had these black and white crossovers

in music in literature in every kind of performative art you had

an ongoing crossover of styles and exchange between

blacks and wasps between blacks and immigrant jews perhaps

most important and most important for new york

in particular was the smashing of the barrier between

high art and low art

built around often intoxicatingly lyrical songs

that combine sophisticated wordplay with common slang

and that merged the melodies and rhythms of three continents

the message of the new broadway musicals was clear

being american meant being mixed crossing over

borrowing and commingling to create new forms

the essence of america in short lay in new york

never-ending process of migration and transplantation

had been going on for more than 300 years

i'd say it's constant you know acts of miscegenation you know of

mixing of different cultures you know think of

blood as really as a metaphor you know um my blood in your veins my speech in your

mouth um you know etcetera etcetera my gestures

reinterpreted you know through your body that's what

that's what it is um what did randolph bourne call it transnational america

you know but i call it perpetual expanding um you know miss

acts of miscegenation

by 1927 new york city held sway over the culture and economy of the united states

as never before

never had the power of the metropolis extended so widely

or penetrated so deeply into the conscious and unconscious life of the

nation never before had the city's commercial and cultural forces

been so intertwined and transfused the creative ferment of places like

harlem and times square where art was aspiring to the condition of commerce

was now reaching every corner of america propelled by the explosion of media in

midtown where commerce was aspiring to the condition of art

its magazines go everywhere standardizing ideas

its slang invades the remotest recesses standardizing speech

its melodies are in every home standardizing entertainment

the very thought of broadway the main street of all america

thrills millions who are scattered far

and wide collinson owen

by 1927 new york had become not merely the capital of american culture

but the place where the very idea of what it meant to be an american

was manufactured then beamed out to the rest of the nation and the world

gazing on that image many people were attracted by what they saw

and many others frightened and appalled but few could ignore it or take their

eyes off it for long

old american music and dances the automobile magnate henry ford complained

are being rapidly swamped into oblivion by the commercially promoted jazz music

emanating from new york

and there's a larger point here that has to do with the relation between the city

and the country 1920 was the first time in which more people

lived in cities than the in the countryside

it's a marker between the colonial period when ninety-five percent of the

population was on the country and five percent in the cities and now

when it's in fact completely the opposite and it led to in fact tremendous

animosity and anxiety on the part of the country

towards this you know glittering urban phenomena in general in new york in

particular and there was a tremendous insistence in

the country that new york is an alien place it's not part of america it's full

of immigrants there's commies there's tammany hall there's corruption there's

gangsters it's not us you know and yet some of that

anxiety and anger was powered by the fact that they understood the tremendous

attractiveness of the images coming out of new york city

that their daughters were dressing up with clara bow type makeup

that they all had their ears glued to the nbc network that they were following you

know boxing matches and carnegie hall in a sense almost of helplessness that

many people felt before this tremendously powerful inundation of new

fashions and trends and ideas and attitudes about relationship between

people and men and women and sexuality and the rest of it

and yet you can't separate the city from the country because in fact

the country is also enamored of the cities enamored of what new york stands

for is enamored of modernity and possibilities

by 1927 the tempo of the city had changed sharply

the uncertainties of 1920 were drowned in a steady golden roar

and many of our friends had grown wealthy

but the restlessness of new york in 1927 approached hysteria

the parties were bigger the shows were broader

the buildings were higher the morals were looser

and the liquor was cheaper all these benefits

did not really minister to much delight young people wore out early

they were hard and languid at 21 and none of them contributed anything new

most of my friends drank too much the more they were in tune with the

times the more they drank

i've scott fitzgerald

by 1927 the decade was beginning to take its toll on scott and zelda fitzgerald

two years before his greatest novel the great gatsby

published to critical acclaim but in different sales

and captured as nothing else had the romance wonder

and heartbreaking tragedy of the metropolis he would soon call

my lost city

but zelda always unstable had begun to slide into mental illness

and fitzgerald himself woefully alcoholic was becoming increasingly

self-destructive

perhaps he had flown too high in the first wild rush of success

to ever fly so high again perhaps it was true as fitzgerald himself declared

that there were no second acts in american lives

well i suppose the parable um

what links the cultural the spiritual

and the economic is some real mismanagement um squandering wantonness

miscalculation of your resources you're obviously you're economic but you're

you're you're spiritual as well as your creative

with a lot of the artists who really were ruined by the end of that decade

they had again to use a fitzgerald expression

physically and mentally overdrawn on their accounts in some way the

experimentation had been accompanied by so much

psychic and often physical abuse you know that the system the bodies gave way

and the energy required to reconfigure to you know set a new beat

those resources weren't there for the ones who collapsed

and partly you know they really were groundbreakers they were pioneers it's

the nature of pioneers not to know in sometimes a

deeply harmful and hateful way you know not to know what the

ecological balance is if you will and that's just as true for the artist so

they tended to hurt themselves much more than anyone else

and yet if the city of ambition and success was destroying him

a few things still seemed possible asked by a reporter what his ultimate

ambition was fitzgerald said simply to stay in love with zelda and write the

greatest novel in the world well he was such a romanticist and he

was on the side of believing that everything wonderful was possible

he said in one of his writings all my girls were so young and full of promise

and and who would want something better than that and then in the great gatsby

when he says uh in his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths

among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars oh well that was what

america there it was a tiny little bit of america but we all believed it

and none of us got to long island none of us got to gatsby's place but

that was something to think about

and then as a romance gatsby had to die

in the spring of 27 something bright and alien flashed across the sky

a young minnesotan who seemed to have nothing to do with his generation

did a heroic thing and for a moment people sat down their glasses in country

clubs and speak easies and thought of their old best dreams

maybe there was a way out by flying maybe our restless blood could find frontiers

in the illimitable air but by that time we were all pretty much

committed and the jazz age continued we would all have one more

f scott fitzgerald

new york city is the most fatally fascinating thing in america

she sits like a great witch at the gate of the country

showing her allering white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet

under the folds of her wide garments

constantly enticing thousands from far within

and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no further

and all these become the victims of her caprice

some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet

others she condemns to a fate like that of gally slaves

a few she favors and fondles riding them high on bubbles of fortune

then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs

mockingly as she watches them fall

james weldon johnson

looking back some people would trace the beginning of the end

of the city's wildest and giddiest decade to the summer of 1928

when the governor of new york alfred emmanuel smith

embarked upon his historic race for the highest office in the land

the odds against him were long from the start but smith himself was sure he

could win the overwhelming choice of the democratic party to run against the

republican incumbent herbert hoover the immensely popular

leader of the most powerful state in the union

had won 20 of the 21 campaigns he had waged

and been elected to an unprecedented four terms as governor of new york

his record in albany was nothing less than dazzling

in eight years he had rationalized and restructured the state government

pushed through landmark legislation on social welfare reform

and initiated a spectacular program of public works

through his brilliant young parks commissioner robert moses

by 1928 the hard-working boy from the lower east side

had emerged as one of the most remarkable politicians in the country

i mean to see a picture of allison his face is so red you can't believe it he

has a big nose he has gold capped teeth he has this brown derby perched on the

side of his head he's always smoking the stub of the cigar sticking out

and his voice is so loud and raspy i know you you're ralph smith boy you

got me right

he would seem like a joke until he began to speak

until he began to fight

someone once said to smith his voice has trumpets in it

and this was a voice that could summon people to a cause

and al smith's cause was the cause of social welfare

he had a real dream in his heart of helping his people

the very idea had been unthinkable ten years before

an uneducated irish catholic board from the fourth ward of new york

running for the nation's highest office but there had never been anyone quite

like al smith confident he could extend new york's

immense commercial and cultural reach to the political realm he did nothing to

disguise who he was or where he came from

adopting as he had 10 years before the sidewalks of new york

as the anthem of his campaign

new york

in some ways the election of 1928 was a referendum on new york city and

the direction that the country was going in probably

no democrat could have beaten herbert hoover in 1928 given

the tremendous strength of the economy and the general satisfaction throughout

the country but smith in fact made it much worse for

himself the campaign got off to a rocky start

hoping to burnish his image as a friend of big business

smith chose as his campaign manager a prominent wall street financier

named john jacob rascon a strange little man one of smith's advisors said almost

machiavellian really who had invented a scheme for buying automobiles on credit

and helped assemble the fortunes of dupont and general motors

the strategy backfired when the well-known self-made catholic millionaire

was used to paint smith as an agent of rome and wall street

in the end however rasgov was the least of smith's problems

as the presidential campaign of 1928 rapidly descended

into one of the darkest episodes in american political history

everything that had made smith successful in new york now worked against him

out in the countryside where decades of rising animus against the city

and everything it stood for rose up like a poisonous vapor

i think that that smith although he was cosmopolitan in new york terms

was perhaps also very parochial in national terms

this is something i think people say about new york generally

that for all it's cosmopolitanists for all of its pluralism

new york is also pretty provincial and i think that smith's campaign in 1928 is

one measure of that i don't think he really was prepared or really understood

the depth of uh resentment and also the the sense to which he was such a

stranger to so many people that his strangeness was so real so

palpable to people particularly in the south and in the midwest and people in

rural areas my friends are the writers the 1928 campaign was one of the first

ones in which radio played a real part and so smith's voice which was

very much the voice of a fourth quarter a lower manhattan knights

kind of classic new york accent the only cure for the elder democracy

is more democracy that voice was heard all over the nation

and it was quite jarring quite alien quite strange to many people who heard it

and there was a way in which i think smith was turned into almost the kind of

caricature in that campaign as a kind of sort of

cartoon version of what new york was warm crowds greeted smith in new york

and in cities from boston to sacramento but in small towns and

rural places across the country the jaunty ambassador of the city of

walt whitman and emma lazarus was shocked by the tide of hatred he

encountered for what one man called the foreign populated city of new york

ridiculed for his city slicker suits and strong new york accent

he was savagely attacked for his opposition to prohibition for his

liberal views and his links to tammany hall but it was the virulence of the

anti-catholic hatred in the countryside that shocked and hurt him most a

campaign of bigotry almost unbelievable in its intensity one advisor remembered

it would be his daughter emily later said the deepest shadow in his life

the greatest sorrow that ever came to him on the stump in kansas farmers greeted

smith's speeches within stony silence in oklahoma ku klux klansman placed

burning crosses along the root of his campaign train

across the country protestant religious leaders attacked him from the pulpit

insisting one minister said that no subject of the pope should be president

as ambassador of god it is my duty to defy the forces of hell

al smith and the rest of them his male supporters are damnable whiskey

politicians bootleggers crooks pimps

and businessmen who deal with them his female supporters are street walkers

the reverend billy sunday

smith kept silent as long as he could then

in an eloquent speech in oklahoma city on september 20th

struck back imploring his audience to reject all bigotry as unchristian

and un-american we have our

apas and our kkk

we've had it inflicted upon us uh about as strong a shower of

18 carats as any country in the world

the hostility of the crowd was so palpable that smith's advisors feared

for his safety

but what's remarkable is to look at so much of the vilification

so many of the attacks so much of the hatred directed

at smith by newspapers politicos people all over the country i don't

think you can read that as anything else but an attack on new york city that

is smith uh comes to be sort of the symbol the

emblem of new york and therefore becomes the

um the object of all these these attacks and and you know thinly veiled

these attacks are also attacks on catholics attacks on jews

attacks on the cosmopolitan culture of new york and

that i think is really what's going on in that election

on election night november 6 1928 smith sat stoically with his supporters

in the armory on park avenue an unlit cigar in his mouth watching the

returns come in he had done surprisingly well in major

urban areas across the country but by 9 30 it was clear that herbert

hoover was on his way to one of the biggest landslides in american history

in the end the new yorker lost almost every state in the union

including new york itself where upstate voters

had turned out in droves against him

in a cruel twist of fate smith's aristocratic colleague 46 year old

franklin roosevelt running well ahead of the national

ticket squeaked into the governor's seat smith had vacated

by the slenderist of margins around 10 o'clock smith drove to the

biltmore to concede defeat and speak to a crowd of his loyal supporters

it's god's will his wife katie said with tears in her eyes

but we'll see more of you now his chin was up

and his indomitable heart was high at the sight of his jaundice and defeat

men and women workers burst into tears deeply touched

smith barked out a few words of thanks to hide his own mounting emotions

clasped hands and was gone perhaps never in political history was

there so much distress amongst the rank-and-file of the party

as there was over his defeat

james farley

it's hard to see how smith could have won how anybody could have won against

hoover uh in the flush times um but i think what

sometimes people miss or forget is that although he lost pretty badly to hoover

smith did carry the 12 largest cities in the united states and therefore

provided a kind of harbinger for the new deal coalition to come

what smith did was essentially cement the big city

urban vote for the democratic party for the foreseeable future

oscar hanlon the great historian has said of all the major political figures in

the united states alfred e smith is the most forgotten

he is forgotten but he shouldn't be

you know when roosevelt was at the very height of the new deal

he said privately because he personally hated smith

he said you know everything we've done in the new deal

is something that al smith started in new york

everything that we think of today as social welfare reform

in the weeks after the election smith tried to put a brave face on the

crushing defeat but it was clear that his long political career was over

in december he attended a banquet at the lotus club in new york

where for the first time in years he was not the guest of honor

watching the new governor elect franklin roosevelt basking in the spotlight

the reality of the disaster began to settle over

as the banquet wore on smith slipped out of the hall

and down to the men's room with his close friend eddie dowling

a prominent broadway producer washing his hands before the gleaming

marbled mirror dowling remembered smith worried aloud about the bleakness

of his prospects when a soft voice spoke up behind them

unbeknownst to the two men john jacob raskob

had silently followed the two men in and now stood listening intently

to smith's lament don't worry al the financier now said

i'm going to build a new skyscraper the biggest in the world

and you're going to be the president of

the company

the two dizzying dramas that brought the 1920s to a close

the stock market rise and the great skyscraper wars

would be like nothing ever seen before in new york

and in the end john jacob raskop would have a hand in both

for almost two years the stock market had been spiraling upward

shattering records month by month only a few years before analysts had

been stunned when for the first time two million

shares had been traded in a single day now five million share days had become

routine herbert hoover's landslide had triggered

a buying spree that topped seven million and brokers on the new york stock

exchange often fell to the floor in exhaustion

following the three o'clock gone by the end of the twenties you had a standard

phenomenon cyclical phenomena of the business cycle which is

at the beginning of a boom capital goes into uh the production of commodities the

commodities are sold you reap your profits and you

pile them back into more production by the end of the 20s you were running into

trouble automobile sales for instance had peaked

by 1926 1927. increasingly it made less sense to continue to pour money

into the production of commodities and when that happens

usually capital goes in two directions one

paper speculation and indeed it fueled this tremendous surge

of speculation driving up stock prices uh on the market at the end of the 20s and

real estate and you get a surge of capital into

far more office space than in fact is warranted by

any rational calculation of expanding businesses

but once you start on that dynamic it's in fact almost impossible to stop

by 1929 a culture of pure speculation had taken hold in new york

in the august issue of the ladies home journal john jacob raskop unveiled a

startling new investment scheme based on the stunning proposition that

everyone ought to be rich the trick was simple just as people of

modest means could now buy cars on credit so even the smallest investors should be

able to buy stocks on credit using money that wall street bankers would lend them

if stock prices fell of course the investor would be ruined

but that rascal argued was no longer a real possibility

in my opinion the wealth of the country is bound to increase

at a very rapid rate the rapidity of the rate

will be determined by the increase of consumption

and under wise investment plans the consumption will steadily

increase john jacob raskob by the end of august brokers were

routinely lending small investors more than two-thirds of the face value

of the stocks they were buying over eight and a half billion dollars

was already out on low more than the entire amount of currency

circulating through the entire united states

the skyline meanwhile was soaring to even more dizzying heights

for 16 years the 60-story woolworth building

had reigned supreme as the tallest building in the world

now the race was on to top it and everyone seemed to be breathing

the same thin cold intoxicating air

the height of a building is nothing at all the architect raymond hood declared

insisting it was now possible to send towers soaring a mile and a half into

the sky the elevator companies are ready he said

in the spring of 1929 the race into the skies reached fever pitch

when the automobile magnate walter chrysler unveiled plans for a massive

new skyscraper at the corner of 42nd street and lexington avenue

with instructions to the architect william van allen

to make it the tallest in the world

van ellen had scarcely broken ground when his one-time partner

and now bitter enemy h craig severance set to work on a rival structure 80

blocks to the south for the bank of the manhattan company on wall street

and the race was on month after month the two builders vied for preeminence

each altering his plans again and again in mid-construction to stay ahead of the

other on clear days workers in each of the two tall towers

could track the progress of their rivals four miles away

when the bank of the manhattan company finally topped out in the fall of 1929

most were sure it had won the war severance had added first a lantern then

10 new penthouse floors and finally a 50-foot flagpole to beat out his rival

once and for all but the chrysler building had one more

trick up its sleeve

severance is thinking his building is the tallest van allen builds a steel or

monel spike monel is a kind of early form of stainless steel

a spike is created in the top of the building

and then at the last minute is literally pushed

up to create the crowning feature at the top of the building

taller than his former partner

on october 16 1929 the 185 foot long spire

assembled in secret in the building's tower emerged from its chrome cocoon

and was bolted triumphantly into place the gleaming silvery spike raised the

chrysler building's overall height to 1048 feet 121 feet taller

than its downtown rival

with its gothic eaves hubcap freezes and stainless steel gargoyles shaped

like the hood ornaments of a 1929 chrysler

the majestic 77-story tower was now taller than the woolworth building

taller than the bank of the manhattan company taller than the eiffel tower

indisputably the tallest structure in the world

for now

within weeks of the chrysler building's triumph that fall

two awesome events would overtake new york city at virtually the same time

the first would send it plunging into the deepest and darkest abyss

of its tumultuous history and bring the giddy decade of speculation

to a swift and horrifying end the other would send its soaring against

all odds higher than it had ever gone before an ensign in the sky that would

commemorate perhaps for all time the city's insatiable will

to rise

that sense of there is no limit and that all this this expansion this success

this elan um we're not really gonna have to pay for it now

of course that didn't turn out to be true you could see the crash

why do you think they called it the crash i mean it's really an

airborne collapse metaphor you can't crash if you never left the ground

and it's not like a crack up where you're on the ground and you collide

into something else

rather it's you know the plane fell

the 20s had been so prosperous in so many places not in the countryside the

farming industry was in very bad shape in the

1920s but certainly in the cities it was very prosperous people were making

fortunes on the stock market and then all of a sudden poof it went i

mean people economists very serious economists had been saying that we'd

reached a new level a new plateau of prosperity in this country and we

you know we were never going to go back and then the crash happened

all through the summer of 1929 there had been ominous rumblings

for months unemployment had been rising automobile sales and department store

revenues had fallen off sharply across the south and west farms were

failing in record numbers and still on wall street the delirious

optimism continued undimmed on august 27

1929 the dow jones average reached its all-time peak

as an army of frenzied buyers descended on new york

desperate not to miss a single day's trading swamping the hotels

camping out on the street in front of the stock exchange

and in the tiny graveyard of trinity church on broadway

where alexander hamilton lay buried

what caused the crash of 29 was excess speculation

what had happened was that the american economy as a whole

had begun to cool in starting in 1928 and the wall street economy disconnected

from the underlying real economy and became a speculative bubble

and this fueled the speculation that just took off and took off and took off

until again one day somebody woke up and said this has gone too far there's

an old story about bernard baruch that he had his shoes shined every

morning by the same shoeshine boy and one morning the shoeshine boy gave

him a stock tip and baruch went to his office called up

his broker and said sell me out when shoeshine boys are giving stock

tips it's time to get out as summer turned to fall the mood

changed as the stock market dipped then roads then lurched downwards again

investors grew increasingly uneasy in september an economist named roger babson

sent a wave of fear rippling through wall street when he warned that sooner

or later a crash is coming and it may be terrific

but most experts brushed away any concerns

stock prices one man declared have reached what looks like a permanently

high plateau

and then the bottom fell out

on wednesday october 23 1929 the first waves of panicky selling began

to drive down the price of blue chip stocks

like westinghouse and general electric the following morning the fear turned to

panic and brokers began unloading margin accounts at record speed

stock prices plummeted sickening across the board

spurring the rush of sell orders from terrified speculators still more as

anguished shrieks rose up from the floor of the new york stock exchange

the visitors gallery was cleared in less than two hours nearly 10 billion

dollars invested in stocks was simply wiped out

outside on the street crowds massed six deep in front of the stock exchange

while hundreds more stood in shocked silence on the steps of federal hall

newspapers would later try to describe the uncanny murmuring

sound that echoed off the stone facades of the financial district that morning

it was a collective moan of horror and grief and

stunned disbelief rising up from thousands of ruined frightened men

the biggest crowds gathered outside the house of morton

desperately hoping for a miracle cheers broke out

when word came that a consortium of bankers that agreed to pump hundreds of

millions of dollars into the stock exchange to shore up the faltering market

word spread that once again the day had been saved by the house of morgan

but the day had not been saved on friday with the market apparently

stabilized the banks withdrew their funds

the following tuesday october 29 1929 known for forever after as black tuesday

another tidal wave of selling hit the exchange

and this time no one came to the rescue

nothing could stop it and just people wanted out and this was in the fall most

crashes tend to be in the fall and i think again it's human psychology

you tend to be more cautious in the fall i mean

the speculations of summer that seem so brilliant and suddenly when the chill

winds of october come you wonder if there's such a good idea and you try to

get out you know too many people do that at once that

it causes the market to drop which causes more people to want to get out

and suddenly you know the snowball rolls down the hill

hour after hour the market continued its descent into chaos

and pandemonium as stock prices simply collapsed under the torrent of panicked

selling and desperate brokers fought and screamed and trampled one another

to get out 16 million shares traded that day

which seems like nothing today because we trade 60 million shares in the first

five seconds of the business day but the the trading record set on the day of the

crash the 16 million shares was not bested

until 1969. it was 40 years before the new york stock exchange traded more

shares than it traded on the day of the crash

the tax tickers did not stop running until quarter of eight

when the market had closed at 3 30 i guess

in the worst single day in the history of the new york stock exchange

the market lost 14 billion dollars in value

bringing the weeks lost to more than 30 billion dollars

10 times more than the entire annual budget of the federal government

and far more than the united states had spent during all of world war one

worst hit in the short run with the thousands of small investors

who believing that everyone could be rich had bought stock on margin

sometimes borrowing as much as 90 percent of its book value

a matter of hours in some cases minutes they had lost everything

their life savings their houses

and their dreams

financiers who had not been wiped out tried to put a brave face on things

insisting there was no cause for alarm prudent investors are now buying stocks

in huge quantities john jacob raskop told the new york

times and will profit handsomely when this hysteria is over

wednesday october 30th 1929 mr ascot was asked if he believed that

the decline in the stock market would have great effects on business

he answered that he did not believe the effects would be other than temporary

lasting probably two or three months and he did not believe that the effects

would be drastic in other than luxury industries the new york times

but others feared the worst the present week one newspaper editor declared has

witnessed the greatest stock market catastrophe

of all times it would take a decade and a half for the american economy to fully

recover

i think the reason the crash lives on in the in the american folk memory although

there aren't many people alive today who were adults when the crash happened in um

almost 70 years ago now but what followed the crash the the great depression

um which permanently scarred the american psyche

and they remember the crash as the beginning of the great depression

although in fact the two had nothing to do with each other or very little

but that's why i think the crash became such a benchmark

because it it was this very sharp line between

the prosperity of the giddy cocktail party of the 1920s and the awful

depression of the 1930s and the bread lines and the apple cellars and

the bonus riots and what have you scott fitzgerald was somewhere in north

africa when the end came and thought he heard a dull distant

crash echoing to the farthest wastes of the desert zelda's condition

was worsening

when he finally returned to what he called my lost city

he knew instantly that everything had changed

i can only cry out that i have lost my splendid mirage

come back come back

oh glittering and white

have scott fitzgerald

it was the building that should never have been built rising in the wrong place

at the wrong time propelled skyward by the same speculative impulse

that had just been so severely chastised on wall street

and yet up it went in the deafening silence that followed the crash

and when it was through though no one could tell whether it had been a success

or failure everyone knew it was the purest and most glorious expression

of everything the city stood for

long before the night of his fateful promise to al smith in the lotus club

john jacob raskob had been burning to build a tower

that would soar above the rest

all through the spring and summer of the great boom year he had marshaled his

forces in total secrecy by may he had settled on a daring site well

south of the midtown business district at the corner of 34th street and fifth

avenue where the old waldorf astoria still stood

before the year was out the financing was in place

along with the legendary construction firm starrett brothers and eagan

and an architect william lam to whom rascal put a simple

breathtaking question bill how high can you make it so it won't fall down

the builder of the building actually was commissioned by raskoff to do some

studies to find out what was the maximum building that could be built

and the report came back that 65 stories would be ideal

and 85 stories was the absolute upper limit of technology as it existed

by settling on 34th street which is actually off the beaten track

he's gambling a bit and he needs a bold and dramatic gesture

to in fact win tenants to that uh space and he does it of course by opting to

build the tallest building in the world

on august 29 1929 just two days after the stock market hit its all-time peak

news of the staggering project was dramatically unveiled

by new york's famous favorite son al smith

good to his word rascom had made the ex-governor president

and chief spokesman of what was now officially called

the empire state building

it is a spectacular gesture if the owners are right

they might fix the center of the metropolis

if they are wrong they will have the hooting of the experts in their ears

for the rest of their lives fortune magazine

the northwood march of progress the growth and development of the city

makes it necessary that this historic structure

known around the world be removed to make room

for the largest office building in the world towering into the air

more than 80 stories high now gentlemen stand back while i start the real work

of demolition

in october 1929 the very month the stock market began its tremendous downward

spiral work on the empire state building began with the demolition of the waldorf

astoria one month later as the economic crisis worsened

al smith called another news conference far from scaling back his plans

raskob had decided to add a massive 200-foot tall tower

to the top of his 85-story building the stunning spire itself as tall as a

17-story building would raise the final height of the

structure to an insuperable 1250 feet a full 202 feet higher than the chrysler

building its gleaming rival 10 blocks to the north

even more astonishing than the tower itself was its proposed function

it would serve smith solemnly explained as a giant mooring mast

for transatlantic irritables arriving from europe

allowing passengers to dock a quarter of a mile in the sky over midtown manhattan

experts dismissed the scheme at once but nobody seemed to care

the vision of the city's tallest tower serving as a port of call for

airships from around the world fired the public imagination as nothing else had

seven weeks later on january 22 1930 work on the foundations of the mighty

building began the empire state building is not only an incredible icon

it also has the ironic role in this story of coming really after the crash of the

stock market being the kind of like the guest who arrives too late at the party

nobody had a job suddenly there were no more skyscrapers construction was almost

nothing they had a budget they had to build a building as quickly as possible

in the hopes of getting some tenants in

as the months wore on and the anticipated upturn in the stock market

failed to materialize the economic situation began to

deteriorate across the country

and yet even as the worst depression in american history

began to settle around new yorkers were greeted by an astounding sight

as the bare steel girders of smith and raskob's building

began to rise like an immense metal phoenix in the middle of manhattan island

the symbol of hope in the darkest of times

and a defiant declaration that the city and country would survive

a hundred years before dewitt clinton had flung the erie canal across the

empire state colonizing the hinterlands of america

and filling out the grid plan of the city now another generation of new yorkers

was colonizing space itself turning the grid on in and projecting it

straight up into the sky as the empire state building

it's incredible today and it's an irrepeatable achievement

but the way that it was engineered in terms of the organization of the work

was the the genius really of the project of the empire state building

and it was the general contractors starrett brothers and eakin

who had long been known for their large-scale projects

these projects were always organized in with the greatest efficiency

and with a kind of of military genius and in fact

uh william starrett one of the stara brothers wrote

that building skyscrapers is the nearest peacetime equivalent of war

half a century of expertise in building skyscrapers on the island of manhattan

would go into the construction of the empire state building

a heroic feat of engineering and workmanship by any measure

at any time let alone in the dark winter

of 1930

at the peak of construction in august 3 439 men were employed on the building

whose 50 000 massive steel beams and columns

each weighing more than a ton and milled to tolerances of less than an eighth of

an inch thick were being assembled like a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle

ordered to exact specification from steel mills in pittsburgh

shipped by train to new jersey barged across the hudson

and tropped along precisely choreographed routes in manhattan

to the building sited 34th and 5th where just 18 hours after leaving the mill in

pennsylvania nine massive derricks lifted them in place and workmen

fitted them together some of the steel that was erected was

still warm from the fabrication the steel was reaching the job uh some

15 or 18 or 20 hours after fabrication uh and was still hot to the touch uh

that's pretty unique in an age that had perfected the

assembly line for manufacturing cars and consumer goods

the starrett brothers had perfected the first assembly line for manufacturing

skyscrapers the work progressed so rapidly that

people could scarcely believe their eyes the building seeming to leap into the

sky as workmen added four to five new stories a week

and sometimes as much as a floor a day in one extraordinary 22-day period 22

new floors were erected also because of the depression there was

almost an infinite supply of willing men to work

and there was a fear among those men that they would be laid off there'd be

10 other guys waiting down on the street to take their place

so therefore individual production rates actually climbed

with respect to bricklayers and other workmen that were gauged by their by

piecework by the number of pieces they did a day

even though those men knew with the with with

direct certainty that when their job was over they were going to either the

unemployment line or very likely the breadline

by mid-summer all eyes were bent upon the majestically rising structure

now clearly visible from every part of the city for the crowds of onlookers that

gathered each day on the streets far below

and for the teams of photographers and newsmen that eagerly followed every

detail of the operation the real heroes were the gangs of

riveters hundreds of men working in teams of four

laboriously joining the steel framework together

piece by piece hanging from beams a thousand feet in the sky

the gangs perform their dangerous tasks at high speed

with clockwork precision heating tossing catching and driving home the

red-hot rivets of steel 400 rivets for each eight-hour day at 1.92 an hour

with a half hour off for lunch these guys worked together played

together ate together if any one member of the riveting gang didn't show up for

work because of illness or for some other reason the whole gang didn't go up

that day you simply just didn't substitute people

around there was a great deal of trust involved with handling um 800 degree

rivets flying through the air the rivets are heated to their red hot

they are then taken by tongs and they are literally thrown

some distance sometimes as much as 50 or 60 feet

they are then caught by someone who has a bucket with a conical head almost like

a funnel at the top so that it gave the catcher as he used to be called a little

bit more leeway to uh to get these things before they

would drop that back down to the deck and actually burn through something

a splattering of fiery particles cascades down from the torches

that the steel workers use for cutting

10 10

girders in half and for lighting their cigarettes

there is a good deal of strolling on the thin edge of nothingness

the new york times

week after week the photographer louis hine captured the heart-stopping work in

progress in some of the greatest images ever taken of new york

these are classical heroes in the flesh

outwardly prosaic incredibly nonchalant

crawling climbing walking swinging swooping on gigantic steel

frames hairy chested huskies strapping youths

clean limbed and clear-eyed

fusing the iron of their nerves with the steel of the girders they build

into modern cities the london daily herald

they are really wonderful kind of documentations of what seems to me

almost a promethean uh conquest of of nature of gravity itself

in the way uh suspended in the sky you know very much

like icarus challenging the gods really are these workers these iron workers

ordinary iron workers sitting on these beams

having their lunch you know 80 stories above new york

i grew up looking at one particular one of a young bear chester worker

hanging from a guy wire high up on the empire state building which lewis hine

had given to my mother and it always seemed to capture the

magic of new york to me

all through the summer and fall of 1930 the work went on

by october the steel frame of the building's 85 story main

shaft was complete

and work had begun on the mooring mast

in january 1931 the soaring tower's uppermost beams were riveted into place

a quarter of a mile in the sky despite howling north winds

freezing rain and blinding fog

at exactly 5 42 p.m on the afternoon of march 18

1931 the completed mooring mast was topped off

a few weeks later the last of the interior finishing work was complete

in the end john jacob raskob and al smith had triumphed conjuring from the

dwindling oxygen of the extraordinary decade the tallest building in the world

a distinction it would proudly hold for more than 40 years

and despite other taller structures to come never seem to lose

in all six men had died during the construction of the empire state building

two laborers an iron worker and three carpenters

57 000 tons of structural steel almost three times the total used in the

chrysler building had been hoisted into place not only higher

but faster than anyone had ever dreamed possible from start to finish from the

commencement of work on the foundations to the last piece of interior work on

the gleaming marble lobby it had taken the heroic team of

engineers and workmen just 13 months to erect the tallest building in the world

one of the greatest feats of construction since buildings began

if you're talking about from the time that the steel started

which is generally the benchmark that we give these buildings in terms of of its

actual construction you're talking about 13 or 14 months

working through the winter and that winter was was pretty severe

the winter of 30 into 31 was pretty severe it was an absolutely amazing

construction timetable but the people that have come after them me and others

who practice at the art of building use that building as an example of uh

whether the building was a financial success or not

whether the building is handsome or not that building was certainly from a

building art a triumph in every way in every possible way

um something to to study something to look at

something to teach not to be so not to be afraid of innovation

opening day may 1st 1931 dawned bright and clear we are about to

officially open the empire state building the largest and most beautiful office

building in the world al smith the building's official greeter

presided over the gala event held on the brand new observation deck

on the 86th floor attended by john jacob rascon mayor jimmy walker

and governor franklin d roosevelt in the world today

that can be reached from a building designed

fashioned built by the brains the brawn the ingenuity and the muscle of mankind

i am very happy to take part in this very auspicious occasion with my old

friend governor smith when i came up in the elevator i went so

high that i expected to get above snow level that evening as a brilliantly clear

twilight descended on new york president herbert hoover turned a key in

the white house and the great building was illuminated for the first time

empire state seemed almost to float like an enchanted fairy tower over new

york an edifice so lofty so serene

so marvelously simple so luminously beautiful

had never before been imagined one could look back on a dream well

planned

well what do you think of the site of greater new york from the 86th floor of

the empire state building i think it's a marvelous site on a clear day you can

see all the way down to sandy hook in the south the longest vision from any

building i'd probably think in the world well i said much the highest i've ever

been up highest for me too probably as high as i've ever been

and so the roaring twenties the haunting poetic decade of vaulting ambition

and furious dreams came to an end

yes which one

governor the to come to the empire state

al smith never got over his bitter defeat in the campaign of 1928

in the years to come convinced franklin roosevelt had stolen his thunder

the once happy warrior would repudiate the new deal

for which his own state programs had been the model and to drift away from

the democratic party entirely

though john jacob raskob ii had touched the sky

his beloved tower never lived up to his great expectations

all the high spirits of opening day could not disguise the fact

that from the very start the empire state building was a commercial failure

and an increasing embarrassment to its principal owner

the skeptics who had issued dire warnings about the building's risky location

were proved right by opening day raskob and his partners had managed to

rent less than 30 percent of the building's office space and 56 floors

remained completely vacant people soon took to calling it the empty

state building when it was finished in 1931

there was a tremendous supply of office space

coming onto the market at the same time and the empire state building was

located in an area which was not particularly competitive it wasn't around

the transportation nexus of of grand central it wasn't in the

center of the financial district it stood alone and so it didn't have the magnetic

capacity to draw in new tenants then the building didn't become profitable until

1950 20 years after its completion

within a year of opening what was to have been a symbol of the might of

american finance seemed to many to have become a monument

to the excesses of the 1920s

after two unsuccessful attempts to adopt dirigibles from the top of the empire

state building the mooring mast was abandoned

the empire state a lonely dinosaur

grows sadly at midtown

highest tower tallest mountain

longest road king kong's erie

meant to more airships alas

vincent scully

and yet despite all the disappointments new yorkers fell in love with the

soaring structure at once and almost overnight the empire state

building became the most romantic and widely recognizable symbol of the city

visitors from around the country and around the world were soon thronging to

its thrilling observation deck which in its first year of operation

took in over a million dollars as much as its owners made in rent that year

the mooring mast unsuitable for airships soon found its real vocation as a mighty

wand for casting radio and then television signals out over the airwaves

though the building never made 34th street the center of gravity in manhattan

even that failure would eventually come to seem a kind of triumph

the simple soaring tower forever standing in its splendid isolation

magnificent proud visible from afar and incomparable

well the empire state building is my favorite building in the world and

um and i think a lot of people hold it close

like that it presents its image from any direction

as this beacon that you see it marks the center of the island you see it from the

airport when you come in you you fix it from new jersey it lights

up at night to show you the way everything about it i think evokes

an emotional reaction from people the empire state building is the

greatest skyscraper of the pure type ever it's unsung in many quarters it has

for going forward a number of things that are fantastic one of which is its sight

because even today it rises virtually unsurrounded by anything high

so the sheer height of it and then the beautiful

massing of the building symmetrical on every elevation

but stepping back at great scale to the top and then it has this magic

terrace where you can look out in the city as though you're almost on a deck

of a dirichlet and then beyond that it has this uh

illuminated lantern of a vertical proportion phallic-like

if you will a witch was supposed to be a landing master territorial who knows

what they really had in mind but what a great culmination a lantern

it's the great lighthouse for the city i mean the ancient world of egypt or

greece you had these great lanterns in the harbor the statue of liberty

was a great lantern or a lighthouse i lift my light

beside the golden door here was the lighthouse of commerce

in the middle of midtown where all the buildings were low

never again would anything be built quite like it

summoned from the earth at the end of the 1920s by commercial and cultural

forces that had been building since the erie canal

the empire state building was perhaps the supreme expression

of the city's unparalleled power to shape its own destiny

rising as the city and country sank into the worst depression

of their history it marked a mighty culmination

and crucial turning point in the life of new york city

never again would there be such boundless faith in the future

or in the unbridled forces of commerce and capitals

never again would the city hold such unrivaled sway

over the culture and commerce of the united states

nor would the gleaming metropolis ever feel quite so indisputably

like the center of the world new forces were abroad in the land

unleashed in part by the city's very power and in part by its breathtaking

profligacy and in the decades to come those forces would dramatically transform

the relation of the city and the country

no one sensed those changes more poignantly or expressed them more

lyrically than the city's brilliant fallen angel f scott fitzgerald

whose own career was already descending into darkness

two years after the crash in what he called the dark autumn of 1931

he returned to new york for the first time in nearly three years

a lifetime before he had come to a place where everything seemed possible

now everything had changed and in a piercing

clear-eyed melancholy essay called my lost city

he struggled to put into words exactly what that was

from the ruins lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx

rose the empire state building

and just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the plaza roof

to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could reach

so now i went to the roof of the last

and most magnificent of towers

then i understood everything was explained

i had discovered the crowning error of the city it's pandora's box

full of vaunting pride the new yorker had climbed here

and seen with dismay what he had never

suspected that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he

had supposed but that it had limits fading out into the country on all sides

into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless

and with the awful realization that new york was a city

after all and not a universe the whole shining edifice that he had

reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground

that was the gift of alfred smith to the citizens of new york

f scott fitzgerald

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