lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx,
rises the Empire State Building and,
just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city,
extending as far as the eyes could reach,
so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers.
Then I understood -everything was explained:
I had discovered the crowing error of the city, its Pandora's box.
Full of jaunty pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected,
that the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he saw for the first time
that it faded out into the country on all sides,
into a expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless.
And with the awful realization that New York was a city after and not a universe,
the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.'
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1932
On the night of May 1st, 1931, from Washington, President Hoover pushed a button that he enlighted for the first time, in New York, the Empire State Building:
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