DATELINE: NEW YORK : Empire State Building to Blink at Memory of 79th-Floor Crash

A half a century later, the memories remain indelibly etched in the mind.

Harold Smith recalls the sound of the pilot gunning the engines and the sight of the bomber hurtling through the fog toward his office on the 62nd floor of the Empire State Building. Then the twin-engine plane veered upward.

Althea Silberbauer Lethbridge was a 24-year-old secretary, and it was her turn to work Saturday. She was taking dictation on the 70th floor when she heard the huge explosion.

“The fellow in the other office looked up and the whole building above us was in flames,” she said.

On Friday, the tower lights atop the Empire State Building will be turned off to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the crash of an Army Air Force B-25 bomber into the structure. Thirteen people were killed, and the world was riveted by the tragedy at one of America’s great symbols.

Over the years, skyscrapers have grown taller and air crashes deadlier. But for its time, no disaster was more spectacular than what happened in Midtown Manhattan on July 28, 1945, when Fiorello La Guardia was mayor and what was then the world’s tallest building was under siege.

The plane was on a routine flight from Bedford Field near Boston to Newark, N.J., when rain and thick fog set in. Lt. Col. William F. Smith Jr., deputy commander of the 457th bomber group, who had flown more than 500 hours of combat in Europe, asked for the weather report. The radio operator gave him permission to head for Newark, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

But he warned: “From where I’m sitting, I can’t see the top of the Empire State Building.” Neither could Smith as he flew dangerously low above Manhattan.

Harold Smith, a field director for the War Assets Administration, had just come back from service in Africa, and he knew the drone of engines.

“I saw the shadow of the plane coming through the fog,” he said. “It all happened so quickly.”

At 9:49 a.m., the bomber crashed into the north side of the 79th floor. Flames soared to the 86th floor of the 102-story landmark. Hundreds of gallons of burning fuel spilled down stairways and into halls.

One of the plane’s motors ripped completely through the building and came out the other side. It fell to the roof of a nearby structure, demolishing the penthouse. The other motor smashed into an elevator shaft, ending up 1,000 feet below in a basement. A propeller was stuck in a wall.

All three people on the plane died.

Jack Brod, now president of the Empire Diamond Corp., phoned his secretary from Pennsylvania Station. “She said the building was being bombed,” Brod recalled.

“A lot of the gasoline flowed down one elevator shaft nearby to me, and a lot of the gas was on the 78th and 79th, and that’s where people perished,” Harold Smith said. He said he ran up 17 flights from his office. On the way, he met a fire lieutenant.

“One of his men broke a door open. I saw three girls hanging out one window and four out another. They were all burned. . . . We rescued seven people. Six women lived.”

Two other women had a more spectacular rescue. They fell 75 stories in an elevator--and because automatic safety devices slowed the car sufficiently, they were badly injured but survived. Most of the dead were clerical workers in the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Conference on the 79th floor, who were caught in the flaming flood of gasoline.

Even though it is topped now in Manhattan by the World Trade Center’s 110-story towers, the limestone and granite, 1,250-foot tall Art Deco Empire State Building remains an enduring symbol of New York. Since its opening in 1931, more than 117 million people have visited the observatories.

These days, there is a much smaller procession to room 7920.

“This is where it happened. Right at the top of the window,” said Michael J. Berman, president of Retail Communications Corp., whose offices occupy the crash site. “You can see Connecticut on a clear day.”