For many years, the Empire State Building was the most famous of New York’s many skyscrapers, eclipsed perhaps only since 1972 when the World Trade Center exceeded its height. The building was renowned not only for its height (1,454 feet with 102 stories) and its appearance but also for its construction. That 3,500 laborers were able to erect an average of five and a half stories a week and that not more than a year elapsed between groundbreaking ceremonies and the arrival of the first tenants in 1931 depended on the exceptional efficiencies of the architects and developers. Skillful designers of office buildings in Manhattan, the architectural firm of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon were familiar with the imperatives of design and construction that meant to maximize returns to investors by filling the building with tenants as quickly as possible. For more than a decade, contractor William Starrett had been refining a construction process that grew out of his leadership during World War I in the rapid construction of domestic military training facilities, a process that maximized the number of building operations carried out simultaneously or in overlapping sequences.