Empire Building ARCHITECT: Kimball & Thompson DATE: 1895-98 STYLE: Skyscraper

The Empire Building is considered one of the finest of the surviving late-nineteenth-century office towers in New York City, and is also significant as one of the earliest, as well as one of the earliest extant, steel skeletal-frame curtain-wall skyscrapers set on pneumatic caissons in the city.

The building, originally 20 stories (plus basement) and clad in rusticated white granite above a polished gray granite base, features the tripartite arrangement of base-shaft-capital common to many of New York’s early skyscrapers, with a four-story base, arcaded on the long facade, a triumphal arch entrance on Broadway, a midsection ornamented by bandcourses and balconies, and an upper section with colonnaded loggias and a heavy projecting cornic