All You Need to Know

The Empire State Building has 102 floors, with world-famous observation decks on the 86th and 102nd Floors. The open-air 86th Floor Observation Deck offers 360-degree views of New York City, while the enclosed 102nd Floor Observation Deck is the highest point included in the Observation Deck experience.

The Empire State Building is a working office building. About 2.8 million square feet is leased to companies like LinkedIn, Shutterstock and JCDecaux, with two observation decks and a museum above those floors and shops and restaurants at street level. The tower also carries an antenna that was enlarged in 1950 so more broadcast stations could use it.

No, nobody lives in the Empire State Building. The floors are leased as offices, with the observation decks and the museum above them and shops and restaurants at street level. It’s one of the largest office buildings in the world, not an apartment building.

The Empire State Building weighs approximately 365,000 tons.

Its exterior includes Indiana limestone, granite, brick, aluminum, and stainless steel, all part of the Art Deco architecture that has made the building a New York City icon since 1931.

The Empire State Building has 6,514 windows. Every one of them was replaced during the energy retrofit that began in 2009, in the biggest window replacement the Landmarks Preservation Commission has ever authorized, with the frames put back in the building’s original red.

The Empire State Building has 73 Otis elevators. They’re the reason almost nobody has to face the 1,860 steps between street level and the 102nd Floor Observation Deck. New ones arrived with the $65 million modernization program that also replaced the building’s 6,514 windows.

Yes, the Empire State Building has its own ZIP code, 10118. A ZIP code normally covers a whole neighborhood rather than one address, so a single building holding one is unusual. The code covers the offices, the shops at street level and the observation decks above them.

The Empire State Building is famous for opening in 1931 as the world’s tallest building and for the Art Deco design that made it New York’s most famous building. Cornell researchers named it the most photographed building in the world in 2011, and more than 2.5 million visitors still come to see it every year.