#24: The Building Process of the Empire State Building, 1930s

It may seem like I’m obsessing over the Empire State Building in this article. Still, there’s something about this particular building that makes it somewhat of a symbol for the Twentieth Century and all that was good about the United States of America – the pretty face of human progress and ingenuity.

That’s particularly apparent in this series of photographs illustrating how quickly the Empire State Building was built. If you can’t quite make it out, the captions at the top read dates from June to November 1930. The whole thing was constructed in under a year and under budget, an extremely rare occurrence today.