Empire State Building
Dan Snow's History Hit
00:00
The Evolution of the Empire State Building
The original Empire State Building design was actually meant to be smaller than it ended up being. It had been originally designed to about 50 stories. The project evolved from a very utilitarian loft building as a first scheme to imagine a building for a site in order to convince a banker to give you money. This mechanism really explains the boom of the late 1920s. So many buildings being built at the same time, because so few people were risking their fortunes.
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