Empire State Building

On July twenty-eighth, nineteen forty-five, a B-25 Mitchell bomber flew into the seventy-eighth floor of this building. Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith Jr. was flying from Massachusetts to Newark in dense fog. He was warned of zero visibility but kept going. He passed the Chrysler Building and turned right instead of left. The plane hit the north side at roughly two hundred miles per hour, punching an eighteen-by-twenty-foot hole into the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council.

Fourteen people died — three crew and eleven in the building. An engine shot through the building and landed on a penthouse roof a block away. The other engine severed the cables of an elevator shaft. Inside that shaft, elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver fell seventy-five stories to the basement. She survived. It remains the longest survived elevator fall in history.

The building itself barely flinched. It had been built to withstand hurricane-force winds, and the structural damage was minimal. It reopened two days later. The crash did, however, lead directly to the passage of the Federal Tort Claims Act in nineteen forty-six, which for the first time allowed civilians to sue the federal government.

Before all that, the building was erected in four hundred and ten days — an average of four and a half floors per week. At the time, it was the tallest building in the world.