Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.

Fun fact, the Empire State Building was a major financial flop,

as in, maybe we ought to dynamite at level financial flop.

Prior to its opening, the highest building in the United States was the 927 foot Bank of

Manhattan. The Empire State Building dwarfed it. It dwarfed everything. Its roof height is 1,250 feet, that's 102 floors, plus the antenna on top.

Construction began in 1930, which was a bad time to open up a building with 2.8 million

square feet of choice office space. The country was reeling from the stock market

crash of 1929 which heralded the Great Depression. In its first year, the Empire State

Building only rented 23% of its space.

Three quarters of it was vacant, and it would remain half vacant through the decade.

Locals took to calling it the empty state building, and its owners resorted to publicity stunts and desperate hopes of filling it.

In 1932, they held a seance on the 82nd floor to try to contact the ghost of Thomas Edison.

Workers were instructed to leave all the lights on at night to give it the appearance of actually containing people and businesses. It was originally designed to have a Zeppelin port on the roof. It came that way, with the idea that it would be its own little airport, but unfortunately, Zeppelin's became far less popular

after the Hindenburg incident, and even if that hadn't happened, trying to dock at the top of the

Empire State Building with a blimp, and High Wins is a challenging

proposition.

I believe it only happened one time.

And of course, there's that infamous episode with King Kong. That didn't help.

Nobody wants to work in a building that attracts giant apes.

That and commute times are the two biggest gripes of American workers.

Mostly though, problems arose from the Great Depression. Companies weren't starting up and people couldn't afford expensive office rent.

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