Comments by "Helium Road" (@RCAvhstape) on "What Does Every Huge Antenna On The Empire State Building Do?" video.

@tncorgi92 The builders of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were competing to build the tallest building in the world and so they were keeping the mast designs secret from each other until the last minute. ESB won out and held the record for a good long time. The mast is, in fact, an airship mooring mast and there is an old airline terminal near the very top, which is now converted into a tourist area. It was always a gimmick, as it is impractical and reportedly illegal even in the 1920s to operate an aircraft like that, but they did try to dock an airship to it once. The airship captain approached a few times and aborted each attempt due to strong vertical wind gusts that made it scary dangerous to get anywhere near the building, and that was the end of that idea. But it shows up in fiction sometimes still, the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow has a scene in which the fictional "Hindenburg III" is docked to the ESB in an alternate history timeline.
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I had a great aunt who was working in the building when the B-25 crashed, on a lower floor. There was a rumor that she had a piece of the airplane from the windowsill near her desk, but she never said anything to me about it and I'm not sure it was true. Way too late to ask her about it now.
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4:59 Look at that beautiful art deco window trim. It's so high up you would never see it without binoculars and yet they spent good money to do that back in the 1920s. No modern buildings are built with that kind of love or made to be that beautiful today. Art deco forever.
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@ynptrip Yes, I've been there, it is awesome.
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