All language subtitles for PBS.New.York.A.Documentary.Film.5of8.x264.AAC.MVGroup.Forum

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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