Empire State Building

Where it sits. The tower occupies the block of Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets in Midtown South, on the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria hotel, which was demolished to clear it. Its position matters as much as its height: it stands well south of the Rockefeller Center cluster and well north of the financial district, so from its decks both skylines are laid out as objects rather than as walls, with Central Park closing the view north and the harbour opening to the south.

The story behind it. Shreve, Lamb and Harmon produced a design of extraordinary economy — a steel frame, limestone and granite cladding, aluminium and nickel spandrels, and setbacks that satisfied the zoning code while giving the shaft its taper. Excavation began in January 1930 and the building opened on 1 May 1931, put up in roughly 410 days at a peak rate of four and a half floors a week by a workforce that included Mohawk ironworkers from Kahnawake. It reached 1,250 feet at the 102nd floor, with a mooring mast for airships on top that proved unusable because of the updrafts around the tower; the antenna added later brings the total to 1,454 feet. It was the tallest building in the world from 1931 until 1970, and it opened into the Depression so empty that New Yorkers called it the Empty State Building. On 28 July 1945 a B-25 bomber lost in fog struck the 79th floor, killing fourteen people; the building was open for business two days later.

On screen. The building's own operators count more than 250 films containing it, and three of them established what it means:

• King Kong (1933) put the ape on the mast two years after the tower opened. Nothing was shot here: the climb was created with stop-motion miniatures and a full-scale bust and arm on the RKO lot in Culver City. The 1976 remake moved the climax to the World Trade Center; Peter Jackson's 2005 version brought it back.
• An Affair to Remember (1957) has Nickie and Terry agree to meet on the observation deck in six months, and she is struck by a car crossing the street to get there. Leo McCarey shot the deck on stages at Twentieth Century Fox in Los Angeles, not on 34th Street.
• Sleepless in Seattle (1993) was built deliberately on top of that film, and its closing meeting was filmed at the building itself, with the tower lit as a heart.

Beyond those: Independence Day (1996) destroys it, Elf (2003) makes it an office, the Doctor Who episode Daleks in Manhattan (2007) sets its plot on the unfinished mast, and Andy Warhol's Empire (1964) consists of eight hours and five minutes of a single fixed shot of the tower filmed from the Time-Life Building, now preserved in the National Film Registry.

What you actually see today. The Fifth Avenue lobby has been restored to its 1931 condition, with the celebrated aluminium relief of the building against a sunburst on the wall behind the desk. A museum on the second floor covers construction, the wartime crash and the film history. The 86th-floor observatory is open air on all four sides at 1,050 feet, with the original railings and mesh; the 102nd-floor observatory, glazed and much smaller, sits 200 feet higher and gives a genuinely different sense of the city as terrain. The exterior lighting, in use since 1976 and converted to programmable LEDs in 2012, changes nightly for holidays, causes and sports results.

Getting there and timing. The B, D, F, M, N, Q, R and W stop at 34th Street–Herald Square, two blocks west; the 6 stops at 33rd Street on Park Avenue. Tickets are timed and considerably cheaper booked ahead than at the desk; the express option is expensive and only worth it in peak season. The first slot of the morning and the two hours before closing are the quietest. Visibility, not weather, is what determines whether the trip is worthwhile: crisp autumn days after a cold front carry twenty-five miles or more, while summer haze can reduce the view to a few blocks. Winds on the 86th floor are strong enough to make a hat a bad idea.

What to combine it with. The New York Public Library's main building and Bryant Park are eight blocks north, Koreatown's 32nd Street restaurants are one block west, and Madison Square Park and the Flatiron Building are a ten-minute walk south. The Run-Up, a foot race of 1,576 steps to the 86th floor held annually since 1978, is worth timing a visit around for anyone who likes watching people suffer at altitude.