In the spring of 1929, New York believed it could touch the sky. Stock prices climbed, skyscrapers multiplied, and two of the richest men in America, John Jacob Raskob and former Governor Al Smith, decided to build the tallest building the world had ever seen. They bought the site of the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Fifth Avenue. They had one problem.

Their rivals were building too. Down on Wall Street, 40 Wall Street was climbing, and across town, Walter Chrysler was secretly assembling a steel spire inside his own tower. It was a race to the heavens. Then, in October 1929, the stock market collapsed.

Fortunes vanished overnight. Most developers would have walked away. Raskob did the opposite. He saw an opportunity.

Labor and materials were suddenly cheap, and every day of delay meant lost rent. So the plan stayed, and it became a plan about speed. The architect, William Lamb, drew the basic design in about two weeks, borrowing ideas from earlier buildings and keeping the shape simple and the details minimal. Every shortcut in the drawings was a shortcut on the construction site.

The builders, Starrett Brothers and Eken, did not treat the project as a work of art. They treated it as a production line standing on end. In January 1930, the old hotel was torn down, and excavation began. On March 17th, the first steel columns rose from the pit.

From that day, the building began to grow at a pace New Yorkers could watch from the street week after week. The secret was logistics. Steel was fabricated at mills in Pittsburgh, loaded onto trains, and delivered to the site, sometimes within about a day of being ordered. A beam could leave a mill and be bolted into place high above Manhattan in a matter of days.

There was almost no storage. Materials arrived just as they were needed because there was no room on the crowded midtown block to stockpile anything. Inside the building, a temporary railway ran across the floors with small carts hauling supplies to wherever crews were working. Bricks were dropped down shoots to hoppers and trucked back up to the work floors.

One reporter described the rhythm as a clock running on steel. And the crews kept pace. At its peak, around 3,400 men worked on the building at the same time. Italian and Irish immigrants, Eastern Europeans, and skilled Mohawk ironworkers from Kahnawake, near Montreal, climbed the frame each morning.

They worked in gangs of four in a kind of choreography. One man heated a rivet in a small forge until it glowed. He tossed it through the air to a second man who caught it in a bucket. A third placed it in the hole and a fourth hammered it flat with a pneumatic gun.

All of this happened hundreds of feet above the street on narrow beams with no safety nets in wind and cold. They were paid well for the time, but the danger was constant. The pace became legendary. At times, the steel frame rose four and a half floors every week.

In one stretch, the crews topped out 14 floors in just 10 days. Behind the steel came the walls of Indiana limestone and brick, the windows, the pipes, the wiring. Inside, hundreds of other workers installed 70-some elevators, miles of plumbing, and thousands of windows while the floors below the steel crews were already being finished. The building was being built from the top and the bottom at once, with construction crews working one over the other like layers in a cake.

Today, the official record says five workers died during construction, which was remarkably low for the era. Some historians suspect the real toll may have been higher, since deaths from this period were not always recorded with care. What is certain is that every man on that frame understood the risk. Many of them had come through Ellis Island with nothing, and in the middle of the Great Depression a job like this was not something you gave up easily.

On April 11th, 1931, construction was complete, a total of 410 days after the steel began to rise. It stood 102 floors tall, about 1,250 feet to the roof, and when the antenna was added over 1,450 feet. It had used roughly 57,000 tons of steel and about 10 million bricks. It was also finished under budget at around 24 million dollars, less than half of what had been expected, because the depression had made everything cheaper.

On May 1st, 1931, President Herbert Hoover pressed a button in Washington and the lights of the building came on. It was the tallest building in the world, and it would remain so for nearly 40 years. But the irony was cruel. The tenants who were supposed to fill the offices never came.

In the depths of the depression much of the building stood empty, and New Yorkers mockingly called it the empty state building. It took years and eventually a world war before it became profitable. Still, the lesson of those 13 months has never faded. The Empire State Building was not built by magic.

It was built by planning, by precision, and by thousands of ordinary people doing dangerous work in the worst of times. And in a city that was losing hope, it rose floor by floor as proof that something great could still be finished.