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The completion of the 102-story Empire State Building on May 1, 1931, was the culmination of the first architectural race for the clouds that had begun forty-six years earlier in Chicago with the building in 1885 of the world's first skyscraper: the ten-story, 138-foot Home Insurance Building. But while Chicago may have been the birthplace of the skyscraper, and had the initial lead in the race for the skies, New York City quickly caught up with its smaller rival, and took the honor of having the world's tallest building by 1895, with the completion of the 26-story, 306-foot American Surety Building - an honor the city would keep for the next seventy-nine years. By the start of the 1930's, technological advances, increasing prosperity, and ambitious imagination put the skyscraper race into high gear, and became so heated, it even featured secret plans by competing architects, including the famous hidden spire used to spring the Chrysler Building ahead of its competition. The spire, constructed in secret inside the Chrysler Building, was one day lifted from the interior of the building, raising the building’s height overnight by 121 feet, suddenly laying claim to the title of world's tallest building, to the amazement of stunned rivals at the Manhattan Company Bank Building (now known as the Trump Building) and startled New Yorkers everywhere. By the time the construction boom ended in 1933, New York had built the world's five tallest buildings in the span of three years, each alone a wonder equal or superior to the Eiffel Tower. And, not one of those buildings would be surpassed until the year man first set foot on the moon: 1969, when the 100-story John Hancock Building was completed in Chicago. New York lived up to its state motto, "Excelsior" ('ever higher') as literally as anyone ever has.
Thus it was that in 1970 everyone knew the world's most famous building stood at the center of New York City, as it had for nearly forty years. Its spire fittingly crowned, at a quarter of a mile, a skyline that boasted fully thirty-five of the world's fifty tallest buildings (70%, or over twice as much as all other cities of the world combined!), and two-thirds of the top one hundred. A colossal collection of monumental emblems of the city's power and centrality to world civilization, the Manhattan skyline was (and still is) the world's most massive architectural and engineering feat. Never has a city loomed so much larger than all its contemporary rivals, except maybe ancient Rome. So, when one stood atop the Empire State Building, the greatest building of the greatest city the world had ever seen, there was no doubt one was standing at the center of the world - literally the physical apex of human civilization.
But soon the center of the world would begin to dissipate. A few miles across town, on that gray, twenty-first day of October, workers were busily arranging glass, steel and concrete into orderly lines and planes that would eventually rise 1,368 feet by the end of the year. With the completion of the north tower of the World Trade Center in 1972, the crown title of New York officially moved from the center of the city to its edge, as if it was about to depart. And, soon it did.
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