America From the Air: The Empire State at 103 Floors

Tim Heffernan, an Atlantic alum who has written several great pieces for the magazine, sends an agita inducing view:

This is a bit of a cheat for the series since I wasn’t actually airborne, but a few years ago I toured the Empire State Building as a journalist and got to go out on the open-air catwalk beneath the radio mast—effectively the 103rd floor. The T-shaped doohickey is a lightning rod. And that parapet is very very low, maybe knee-height on me. When I remarked on this, my guide told me to quit being such a baby; she had taken a bunch of Knicks players out there too, and the wall barely reached over their shoe-tops. On a CBS visit in 2013, they learned that the deck of the catwalk has been lowered in order to make the parapet wall higher. Here you can see how low it was when I was up there (it’s the silver-painted part of the wall).