During construction of the Empire State Building, a worker who had been fired from the project threw himself down an open elevator shaft and died. He was the building's first suicide victim.
Eighteen months after the Empire State opened, in December 1932, a nervous, fidgety man rode the elevator to the 102nd floor. When the door opened, he hurdled an iron gate and ran up a staircase leading to an open platform at the 103rd story, which had once served as the landing dock for [G 06 / dirigible] passengers. Before anyone could stop him, he jumped. His body smashed into a setback at the 87th floor and rolled on to the roof of the 86th. He was identified as Friedrich Eckert, aged 33, a shopkeeper from Queens.
Another suicide occurred in 1933 when Irma Eberhardt took the plunge. The headline in the Mirror newspaper read: "Pretty Irma, she leaped for love from the world's highest building."
In 1947 William Lamb designed and installed suicide-prevention rails around the observation decks, but not before a total of 16 people had taken their lives. Today the stone wall has a wire mesh topped with [V 003 / inward-curving steel spikes] seven feet off the floor. Even so, [L3 212 / determined self-killers] can get over the barricades.
