Birthday Building

ESB, my favorite non residential building in the world, is 75 today. This week, in its honor, the lights will go all white all week long and I am sad to have missed the lighting this weekend.

Fun facts:

• Located at 350 Fifth Ave (between 33rd and 34th streets) in the city
• Total height (including the lightning rod) is 1454 feet
• Shreve, Lamb and Harmon Associates were contracted to build it. 7,000,000 manhours to construct but they came in ahead of schedule (in one year and 45 days) and costing $24,718,000 (half the expected cost because of the Great Depression) with a total cost of nearly $41 million, including the land. Only 5 people died while building it.
  
• 102 floors with 1860 steps from street level to 102nd floor. A reasonable workout
• 6500 windows is a whole lot of Windex. 57,000 tons of steel and 17 million feet of telephone wire
• ESB is mostly filled with rentable space for business as nobody lives in the building (insufficient bathing facilities). Tourists can view at the 86th or 102nd floors.
• Viewing is long. The first line is the security checkpoint and peaks before 1000 and after 1600. I would suggest getting there at 1000 or 1500. The second line is for the ticket boothwhere your minimum stay is two hours which could be beautiful based upon the weather. The Observatory is open from 0800 until 0000, with the last elevator up is at 2315 and you cannot avoid the elevator queues.Save a little time by buying your tickets online at $18 (print them out for free or have them posted to you)but you cannot bypass the other queues.