Late in 1929, before construction had begun, John Jacob Raskob watched the Chrysler Building going up and grew concerned that his building would not be tall enough. He demanded that the designers add a "hat" to the building - a 200-foot mooring mast for [G 06 / dirigibles].
At the time the Empire State Building was designed, dirigibles were a fairly [L3 410 / common sight]. The Graf Zeppelin was making transatlantic flights. Visionaries of the era imagined that one day the skies would be filled with these "giant gleaming sausages". Raskob and [L3 411 / Smith] imagined that their building would one day serve as a point of debarkation for
[L3 412 / adventuresome travelers].
There were two dirigible connections a few months after the building opened. On September 5, 1931, a privately-owned dirigible tied up - in a 40-mile wind - for three [L3 413 / precarious moments].
Two weeks later a Navy blimp, the Columbia, idled overhead. However, the stiff winds nearly upended the blimp and almost swept away the celebrities who attended the historic affair. To steady the blimp, the captain released some of the water ballast which drenched pedestrians several blocks away. Finally it dropped bundles of a newspaper, the New York Evening Journal, which were retrieved by a workman held at the ankles by John Jacob Raskob himself. The next day the Times reported: "Blimp Lands Papers on Empire State Mast." Shortly after this near-disaster, the idea of using the mast for dirigibles was abandoned and the space was converted into an observation deck.
In 1937 the crash of the dirigible Hindenburg effectively put an end to the use of such craft for air travel.
