The Empire State Building

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The Empire State Building is perhaps the iconic skyscraper. It has stood the test of time as a classic piece of art deco architecture, and has continued to dominate the city's skyline ever since its completion. Recently, the Empire State Building has gotten an update. There has been a new antenna put on and most notably are the new LED lights that illuminate the New York Skyline every night. So it got me thinking, what is something most people don't know about the Empire State Building. I could talk about the Astoria Hotel, which once stood where the Empire State Building sits now, the beautiful five story lobby, how a B-25 crashed into the building in 1945, that the building has been visited by numerous celebrities since 1931 including Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Pope Pius XII, Fidel Castro and Queen Elisabeth II to name a few, or that at the cornerstone laying, only one man in New York City declined to go, Walter P. Chrysler. But then I thought, I need something better and bigger. So I looked to the higher floors of the building, and did you know, when the Empire State Building was completed, it was fully equipped with a zeppelin mooring station, aka a parking spot for a blimp.

nytimes.com

The idea of making it possible for zeppelins, blimps, dirigibles or whatever you like to call them docking at the Empire State Building came in 1929. The theory came from the investors who backed the building and were, well looking for more investors and money, a 1250 foot and 2 inch building doesn't come cheap you know. They even had an image produced of the US Navy's airship Los Angeles docked on the antenna (shown above), using the 1929 version of Photoshop. Now the building itself was originally supposed to be only 1050 feet hig...

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...n in order to do something like that. But I don't think that is what stopped the venture from happening. I think it was just viewed as impractical by the airship companies and simply easier to land in a field than to risk attaching to a building. Today building engineers look back at the daring idea and see that it was possible, with a little tweaking. The idea was a grand one and is pretty sad to see that it never came to be. Today we are left with some doctored photos and some records of what could have been. The Empire State Building has always been viewed as before it's time and the idea of docking a blimp to it just adds to the buildings legacy and the allure of the Empire State Building. A mooring station would have paved the way for the city of tomorrow, well a city of tomorrow in the 1930s sense, but image the impact it would have had on the Big Apple today.

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