The fearless ‘Three Jacksons,’ acrobats, Jarley Smith, Jewell Waddek, and Jimmy Kerrigan perform a balancing act on a ledge on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building in Manhattan on August 21, 1934. The act took place 1,050 feet (320m) above the pavement with no safety net.
Balancing on the edge (the ‘Three Jacksons’ recalled as being “about the width of a newspaper”), the group used no harnesses and relied purely on their pinpoint accuracy.
Perhaps the only people who can come close to understanding the rush these acrobats experienced are the men who built the Empire State Building or maybe the window cleaners.
As for the three Jacksons, the stunt brought them brief fame and they were asked to perform their routine again. They remain the only people who’ve ever been allowed to perform this kind of feat on the Empire State Building.
The idea for the Empire State Building is said to have been born of a competition between Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors, to see who could erect the taller building.
Chrysler had already begun work on the famous Chrysler Building, the gleaming 1,046-foot skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. Not to be bested, Raskob assembled a group of well-known investors, including former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith.
The group chose the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon Associates to design the building. The Art-Deco plans, said to have been based in large part on the look of a pencil, were also builder-friendly.
The entire building went up in just over a year, under budget (at $40 million) and well ahead of schedule. During certain periods of building, the frame grew to an astonishing four-and-a-half stories a week.
At the time of its completion, the Empire State Building, at 102 stories and 1,250 feet high – 381 meters (1,454 feet – 443 meters to the top of the lightning rod), was the world’s tallest skyscraper.
The Depression-era construction employed as many as 3,400 workers on any single day, most of whom received an excellent pay rate, especially given the economic conditions of the time.
The new building imbued New York City with a deep sense of pride, desperately needed in the depths of the Great Depression when many city residents were unemployed and prospects looked bleak.
The grip of the Depression on New York’s economy was still evident a year later, however, when only 25 percent of the Empire State’s offices had been rented.
In 1972, the Empire State Building lost its title as the world’s tallest building to New York’s World Trade Center, which itself was the tallest skyscraper for but a year.
(Photo credit: Library of Congres).
