NYC’s Tallest Building--Again

For the first time in a generation, the Empire State Building is this city’s tallest building. And that distinction made at least one visitor more than a little jittery as he stood on the 86th-floor observation deck Saturday, the day the Art Deco icon reopened after the terrorist attack.

On a beautiful, warm late-summer day, Andrew Kelly of Manchester, England, could walk clockwise around the deck with blue-sky views of the Hudson River, Central Park, the Chrysler Building and United Nations, the Brooklyn Bridge--and the smoking ruin of the World Trade Center.

“It’s a little scary,” Kelly, 22, said as he gazed south at the dirty white plumes. “With [this] being the tallest building now, in the back of your mind is what happened on Tuesday.

“It could happen again. It’s unlikely, but . . . .”

At 102 stories, the aluminum- and limestone-clad office building was New York’s tallest building for four decades after its construction in 1931. Even after the 110-story World Trade towers usurped that title in 1973, the structure’s stately facade and conical spire remained the city’s signature office landmark, drawing about 35,000 visitors daily.

Now, by tragic default, it is the giant of the skyline once again, and that’s an unsettling fact in an edifice that has suffered both an air crash, in 1945 when a military bomber plowed into its upper floors, and terrorist attack, in 1997 when a Palestinian gunman opened fire on sightseers. The building was evacuated Wednesday night for a bomb scare.

As a precaution, building management moved the metal detectors used at the second-floor tourist elevators to the building’s polished marble lobby, where tenants also must be searched. Accountant Leon Berg, who said he’s rented space in the edifice since 1950, took comfort in the measures, as well as the building’s sheer mass, estimated to weigh 360,000 tons. “This is a good building,” he said. “This building would never fall down.”

Building management beefed up its private security force for Saturday’s observation deck reopening, which it announced on its Web site. The New York Police Department also increased its presence from two to 12 officers--stationing them on the deck, at the Fifth Avenue entrance, in the marble lobby and outside on foot patrol.

But the most telling sign of official nervousness came when building management suddenly shut down the deck at 1 p.m., after only three hours. Normal deck hours are 9 a.m. to midnight. A spokesman said it was a prudent move to allow management to study Saturday’s opening as a test of its security measures. “There were no threats,” said spokesman Steven Rubenstein. “There were no problems.”

The closure is indefinite.

Rubenstein acknowledged, however, that tourist turnout had been light. The 1,344 people who went through observatory turnstiles were far fewer than would usually line up on such a lovely day.

Up top, cashier Nieves Rivera bemoaned the silence at souvenir counters, usually mob scenes on a typical weekend. “I think the people are scared to come upstairs,” said Rivera, 32, who admitted to some apprehension herself. She was working Tuesday, when one of the rogue jets flew close by the building before crashing into the World Trade Center.

Visibility was 25 miles on Saturday, but most visitors were transfixed by the plumes rising from the fallen buildings a few miles to the south. They snapped pictures, hugged and conversed in Japanese, German, Spanish and French, and in British accents.

Five Tewksbury, Mass., firefighters viewed the scene where they had picked through the rubble earlier in the week. “We wanted to see it from a different angle. Just unbelievable,” said one, who declined to be named.

Buffalo city employee James Maiarana came to the deck as an emotional balm for 9-year-old son Jimmy, who peered off to the belching void. “We couldn’t really get him to open up and talk about it,” said Maiarana.

Long Island nursing home executive Erik Anderson hugged his girlfriend Jeanne McNeely, a medical secretary, and cried. Neither had lost loved ones in the attack but felt duty-bound to look and weep for themselves.

“I guess it’s just made it more real,” said Anderson, 40. “Seeing it on TV and the pictures in the paper, it’s like the movies. But to see it right here, right now . . . ,” he said, before his eyes watered and his voiced trailed off.

Indeed, the sight was even enough to get a New York cop choked up. “It’s still a beautiful view, but it’s not what it used to be,” said Officer Jim Howard, a 13-year veteran of the Empire State Building beat. “It’s like a beautiful woman who got her teeth knocked out.”