80 Years Ago Today: A Plane Smashes Into The Empire State Building

On July 28, 1945, a U.S. B-25 bomber accidentally smashed into the Empire State Building, killing 14 people and injuring another 24 (the headline above says 13 dead, but another body was found the next day). This event once stood out as a famous freak accident story about New York history, before our timeline became even weirder and more grotesque over the ensuing decades.

In fact, on the morning of September 11, this previous tragedy was the first thing myself and many of my colleagues at the New-York Historical Society were thinking of when we first heard the news about a plane striking the World Trade Center. Remembering that we did so will always be a lesson to me about drawing analogies between past events and current ones. In the early minutes on 9/11 people were scrambling, speculating about what the heck was going on. And remembering the Empire State Building accident did provide certain insights. For example, the earlier tragedy had happened in the fog — a complete accident. Whereas September 11, 2001 was the clearest morning anyone could remember. We knew right away there was no way it could have been an accident, unless, say, the cockpit crew were incapacitated somehow. So that was worrying.

But the earlier tragedy also provided false hope. For example — obviously, the Empire State Building still stands, so we assumed that the World Trade Center would do the same. How shocking it was when both those building fell. The collapses were due to myriad factors that weren’t present in the Empire State disaster. Jet planes contain a lot more fuel, so there was much more fire on September 11. The twin towers were built differently from the much older building, with a tube-like steel structure with supports only at the center of the building and the outer walls, meaning it was more easily compromised. Lacking the Empire State Building’s thick concrete, WTC’s steel beams were dangerously exposed to the fires once the impact had knocked the thin coating of fireproofing off of them. And the other factor? The Empire State Building event had happened on a Saturday, so very few people were in the building at the time. 9/11 had happened on a Tuesday, hence there were 200 times more deaths.

This is a massive digression of course, but it’s an illustration of how we often see parallels in events that are very different from one another. Of course the Empire State Building crash came at the tail end of a much bigger disaster than the terrorist attack, World War Two. 9/11 has often been compared to Pearl Harbor, which was similar in scale to loss of life, but millions died in the war itself, as compared with the 3,000 or so on 9/11. Just to put things in perspective. A war is like 10,000 plane crashes all at the same time. Ironically, at the time of the Empire State Building crash, the War in Europe was already over, and the War in Asia would be ending a couple of weeks later, thanks to two atomic bombs, which, again, killed about 100 times the number of people who died at WTC on 9/11. This is not to minimize any tragedy or disaster by the comparison. But to point out how interesting it is that somehow society is okay with their leaders decided to CAUSE disasters on a massive scale, whatever the reasoning. It’s happening right now.

The Empire State Building crash was shocking enough in its time. After all, it happened right in midtown Manhattan. Three of the dead were on the plane, the other 11 were in the building. The most astounding story concerns an elevator operator named Betty Lou Oliver. She had been thrown out of an elevator on the 80th floor and badly burned. Rescuers placed her in the next elevator to send to her to the lobby on the ground floor, but the cables were compromised. The elevator car fell all 80 floors to the ground, but miraculously Oliver survived. An air pocket underneath the car had cushioned her fall, though many bones were broken. To this day, it is a record. Unsurprisingly, no one has fallen from a greater height on an elevator and survived. Another record: the Empire State Building fire is the highest structural fire ever conquered by FDNY firefighters. Located between the 78th and 80th floors, they had it out in 40 minutes.

The event brings other stuff to mind. All those bi-planes flying around the Empire State Building in King Kong for example. And the fact that the Empire State Building was equipped with a mast that allowed dirigibles to dock atop the building. Theoretically it was possible for airships to let off and pick up passengers there. It was tried only once, in 1933. The experience was deemed far too harrowing and never attempted again. Four years later, the 1937 Hindenburg disaster put paid to airship passenger ship service entirely, else there might have been a similar accident over the streets of Manhattan at some point.

And: closer to our time, a similar story. Back in the ’60s and ’70s there used to be a helipad atop the Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building), just north of Grand Central Station. A local airline provided helicopter shuttle service from Manhattan to local airports. That all ended when a chopper crashed there on May 16, 1977, resulting in five fatalities. Again, we’re pulled back to 9/11. Many wondered why helicopter rescues were not attempted from the WTC roofs on September 11. Crashes like the one atop the Pan Am Building were the reason.