New York Times: A View Inside King Kong’s Perch
”A View Inside King Kong’s Perch”
But this exhibition on the 80th floor does something else. It is safe to say that visitors to the Empire State Building don’t really come to see the building. They come to see the city around it. This show, whose curator is Carol Willis, the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum, redirects attention from what the building lets us see, to what we see in the building, which is considerable. On its opening on May 1, 1931, we are told, the Empire State “had broken every record in the book in terms of both size and speed of construction.”
The windows on the 80th floor do not look out on the cityscape; there is time for that upstairs. Instead they are covered with enlarged, semi-translucent photographs taken during the building’s construction in 1930. In one pair of windows we seem to be looking east, toward the river and the rival Chrysler building, finished just months before and doomed to have its height record surpassed. Another window gives us a glimpse of men riveting steel on the 86th floor. A third shows the setting of steel columns in the open air on another nearby floor. ……