Empire State Building top floor

The Empire State Building is one of the most iconic skyscrapers in nyc, a tourist stop for 3 to 4+ million visitors a-year. But as we’ve shown at Untapped Cities, also holidaymaker destinations like Grand Central Terminal and Metropolitan Museum of Art, have their secrets. Here, we recount 10 secrets (and fun facts) for the Empire State Building.

1. There’s a Decommissioned 103rd Floor Observation Deck

Moses Gates, writer of concealed Cities, managed to get section of his metropolitan exploration goal to access and boost understanding on community observance decks that have been shut to the public or changed into personal spaces. The 86th floor and 102nd floor observance decks are accessible–albeit with increasing solution rates, but you can only be accessed through building management or by breaking in, as Gates describes in his book until it had been converted into a VIP lounge. A 2012 Huffington Post article, suggests that there's a door from 102nd, an even that reopened in 2005, that leads upstairs.

What’s fun though is that Gates anticipated to be many impressed because of the views but didn’t expect “a history tutorial from the Revolution War.” While he describes, there were 16 indications (one already lacking on his visit a lot of years straight back) pinpointing geographically major moments within the Revolutionary War, such as the Battle of Brooklyn. The signs were post to commemorate the bicentennial of war in 1976 “and that in 1977 the building ended up being landmarked using indications still up.”