John Tauranac > Quotes

“Following this formula, John Jacob Astor, who arrived in America the classic penniless immigrant in 1792, rose to become the “landlord of New York” and the richest man in America by the time he died in 1848.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Smith was the ultimate New Yorker, the ideal candidate for the job of president of the building that would become the very icon of the city. The city was in his bones. He could point out every landmark in town and talk affectionately and knowledgeably about the city and its people.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The core of the building would be used to house the requisite utilities; the rentable office space, assured of light, would surround the core.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“John J. Raskob was the money man. Born in Lockport, New York, in 1879, when he was twenty-one he found himself working for Pierre S. du Pont as a bookkeeper. Raskob had a quick and agile mind, and soon became du Pont’s secretary.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The first major lightning bolts to hit the building were reported in August 1931. One particularly fierce bolt that was accompanied by “detonations” produced a great flash of fire seen as far as a mile away.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Du Pont bought the leases on the Waldorf-Astoria from the Boldt estate in 1918 and created the Waldorf-Astoria Realty Corporation to operate the hotel.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Their working arrangement was the ideal professional relationship, one with the qualities of yin and yang. Shreve’s proclivities were organizational—his was the genius that solved the operational and administrative problems that had the Empire State Building completed in one year. Lamb’s proclivities rested more naturally in the design field. Each assumed responsibility in his chosen field, but neither abdicated responsibility in the other.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The building, scheduled to open May 1, 1931, could have opened in April. To commemorate the completion of the building, about sixty subcontractors tendered a dinner on April 16 “to celebrate the completion of an enduring monument, a towering milestone on the road of human progress.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“there was hardly any economic justification for going much higher than the originally planned fifty-five or sixty-five stories on the Empire State site. And Shreve knew that. Raskob, however, wanted something taller still. A proposed building of seventy, even eighty stories would make news and bring his project publicity,”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Opening day, May 1, 1931, was a cool day with a slight haze, but the chill and less-than-ideal visibility did little to restrain Al Smith’s exuberance for the consecration of the house.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Just as New York’s Armory Show synthesized modern art in 1913, the Paris show on decorative arts in 1925 synthesized another kind of modernity and influenced commercial and decorative art, popularizing it to the point where industrial designers became household names. Art Deco, like many movements in the design field, began as a movement in furniture and decorative arts, but its influence in one form or another extended beyond interiors and magazine covers and the figures of Erté, to the design of automobiles and even locomotives.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“A force of two hundred cleaners—160 women, and forty men—reported to Brown. There were cleaners on duty twenty-four hours a day, but the bulk of the janitorial work was done after normal business hours. All the floors were cleaned at least once a day.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The steel frame and great thick walls proved so staunchly built that before the Waldorf-Astoria was finally razed and the last broken fragments of its wall had been removed, $900,000 had been spent.3 Demolition was a risky business, not only for the workers but for passing pedestrians as well, and insurance on a job like the Waldorf-Astoria accounted for about 35 percent of the total cost.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The idea that finally turned the tide for the architects, the notion that made everything fall in place, was to set the elevators in a central core, which would allow the Empire State Building to provide rentable space that was well lit. From that point forward, they were home free—the solutions were at hand.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Raskob, the son of an Irish mother and a cigar-maker father of Alsatian descent, was a Roman Catholic from a large family, and he would remain a devout Roman Catholic all his life. In 1928 he was a member of the Knights of Malta and a Knight of St. Gregory, and he was generous to the Church. One”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“John J. Raskob was likewise floundering. Although he had enough money to do nothing more than laze about in the Palm Beach sun, he was not happy unless his time was fully occupied.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“business of New York in the twenties was real estate. Business was booming, and developers and realtors had every reason for continued optimism. Real estate values, they said, rested on the firm bedrock of population, and New York City—world metropolis, center of finance, industry, and art—had new people locating there all the time. With its limited supply of space and an ever-increasing demand, realtors believed that New York property values would always be rising.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“The reason for the greater number of crosstown streets than up- and downtown avenues was self-evident to planners of the early nineteenth century but might not be so obvious to us today—intra-Manhattan commerce flowed east and west. In the days before railroads, dirigibles, and airplanes, the preeminent form of long-distance transportation and hauling was by water, and the piers and wharves along the East River had to link up with those along the Hudson if commerce was to flourish.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“To the Home Insurance Building, built in 1885, goes the honor of being the first of all skyscrapers.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“In September 1929, the Empire State Building Corporation rented space for its executive offices at 200 Madison Avenue. The building, on the west side of Madison”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“There are 10 million bricks in the building, 27 miles of main and counterweight rails used for the tracks of the elevators, about 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone, and 6,400 windows. The completed building contains 37 million cubic feet. The 210 columns at the base support the entire weight of the building.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Born in Chicago, Harmon studied at the Art Institute and graduated in 1901 from Columbia University’s School of Architecture”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Four of the directors were there to perform more mundane tasks. Kaufman, Earle, Raskob, and du Pont would supply the requisite start-up funds, but not even those millionaires were willing to put up the cost of the entire undertaking. The issuance of stock was not deemed suitable. They needed a $27.5 million loan. They”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Du Pont had acquired only the rights to the hotel; in 1925 he bought the property from the Astors and promptly replaced some non-revenue-producing spaces with seventeen shops configured so that their entrances fronted on Fifth Avenue or Thirty-fourth Street, their back entrances on Peacock Alley.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“With his partner gone, Hastings lost his momentum. In 1920, he retired as an active member of the firm.1 The beneficiaries were Shreve and Lamb.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“When asked how long they thought the Empire State job would take to build, Paul Starrett said that they could tear down the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and finish the new building in eighteen months. He also said that their fee for all this would be insignificant compared with the amount of money the corporation would save by having the construction completed in such a short time.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“In September 1929, just as the architects were getting down to work on this unprecedented building program, management set a date that seemed unrealistically early—May 1, 1931. That date gave the architects a year and nine months in which to design the building and to oversee its construction.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“A few days later, workmen standing 1,050 feet above the sidewalks of New York raised a large Stars and Stripes—the “flag of triumph,” said Times man Poore—to celebrate the topping out of the steelwork a few days before. The workers had placed steel at the record rate of twenty-four hundred tons a week, they had completed their end of the contract in six months—twenty-three days ahead of the appointed date—and raising the flag atop the eighty-fifth floor was as powerful a symbol to them as the raising of the flag over Iwo Jima’s Mount Surabachi would be to a later generation of marines. They had won a major battle, and a score of workers waved their hats from their slender perch on the roof beams to celebrate. As one newspaper said, “You should have heard those workmen cheer.”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“firm of Shreve & Lamb had been retained as the architects of the Empire State on September 9, 1929, by a vote of the board,”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark

“Raskob decided to enter the world of New York real estate and give his pal a job as the head of the undertaking. Raskob convinced some of his wealthy friends, including Pierre S. du Pont, to join him in a syndicate, and they negotiated with Chatham Phenix for the Waldorf-Astoria site. They were the mysterious prospective buyers whose interest in the site had been floated. By all accounts, they got the property for a song—$16 or $17 million. On August 29, 1929, the same day the city announced that Second Avenue would be the site for the next subway line, former governor Al Smith lived up to a promise made months before to newspaper reporters to announce his business plans. From his suite in the Hotel Biltmore, surrounded by trappings of his former office, Smith announced the creation of a company that would build a thousand-foot-high eighty-”
― John Tauranac, The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark