A story

Manhattan going up

The Brooklyn Bridge opened in May 1883 as the longest suspension span on earth. Fifty years later an airplane looked down on a skyline that included the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center.

Manhattan from the Air, 1931. This government aerial was taken in October 1931, months after the Empire State Building opened. — Manhattan from the Air, 1931

May 1883, the long way across

The Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24, 1883. John A. Roebling had designed it. He died of an injury before the work was done, and his son Washington Roebling finished it from a room in Brooklyn Heights after caisson disease left him unable to go to the site. Emily Warren Roebling carried the engineering back and forth and learned enough of it to be the bridge's practical messenger. When it opened it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Currier & Ives published a celebratory print, the one in the shop, the East River spanned, the cities of New York and Brooklyn still legally separate, the bridge already a picture people wanted on a wall.

A year later, on May 17, 1884, P.T. Barnum walked twenty-one elephants across, Jumbo among them, to answer anyone still afraid the span would fall. The elephants are not in the Currier print. The print is the opening. The walk is the sequel people tell. Hang the lithograph as the nineteenth-century fact: a stone tower, a web of cable, a river that had been a ferry and was now a stroll.

A secret spire, and a city in the air

The race upward in the late 1920s was a newspaper sport. William Van Alen hid the Chrysler Building's stainless-steel spire inside the building and raised it in about ninety minutes on October 23, 1929, taking the height record from the Bank of the Manhattan Company. The photograph in the shop is 1932, so the spire is already a fact in the sky, a bright needle over midtown. The Empire State Building, opened May 1, 1931, had by then taken the record onward. Chrysler's picture is the loser of that race, which is a strange thing to say about a building that still looks like it won.

Lewis Hine's Icarus, 1930, is the worker's view of the winner while it was still a frame. Hine documented the Empire State construction for the company. The Metropolitan Museum print shows a steelworker out on a cable, the city under him, the title borrowed from the myth because the height had become the subject. The aerial photograph from the National Archives, file 68145778, is October 1931, months after the Empire State opened. From the air the island is a machine of streets, the new tower in the mass, the harbor around it. During the Depression the building filled slowly enough to pick up the nickname Empty State Building. The October picture is the tower present, the offices still learning how to be full.

Rockefeller Center, December 1933

Rockefeller Center went up through the worst of the Depression and put a very large number of people to work. The figure often given is on the order of forty thousand jobs across the project. Construction workers raised the first Christmas tree on the site in 1931, a small tree and a payday. The photograph in the shop is December 1933, the complex far enough along to read as a city inside the city, verticals in a row, the streets of midtown reoriented around a private plan. It is a picture of work that found a way to continue.

Five pictures, fifty years. Currier & Ives in 1883, the bridge that taught New York a span could be a monument. Hine in 1930, a man on a cable. The Archives aerial in October 1931, the island from above. Chrysler in 1932, a spire that had been a secret. Rockefeller Center in December 1933, a project big enough to be its own district. The aerial is the right hero, because it holds more than one building and still has room for the river. The others are the chapters. Manhattan going up is a true title. The files are the proof, and the sources below are the files.