One of my favourite urban myths is the story about the mast at the top of the Empire State Building. Legend has it, the mast was built as a mooring post for zeppelins, so wealthy transatlantic travellers could disembark right into the heart of the Big Apple.
Guides to the building still refer to it as 'the mooring mast' because of this wonderful story. Unfortunately, it's not true. The origins of the story have been traced to this postcard, which shows passengers walking straight out of an airship onto the tower's observation deck.
It’s a lovely idea, just not true, or practical. The wind hitting the Empire state would wreck any airship.
At the bottom of the postcard, you'll see some text 'winches anchor dirigible to mast'. This is what betrays the whole mooring mast idea, & the postcard, as fiction. If you go inside that section of the building, there's no room for any bulky machinery. It was never there; it was never even planned to be there. The mast was there for one reason - to make the Empire State taller than its nearest rival, the Chrysler building.
Beautiful, but relatively speaking, not that tall.
It was a cheap trick, but it worked, and the Empire State won its place in history as the tallest building in the world. Of course, taller buildings were built. I think the Empire State is only the 25th tallest now, but the story of the 'mooring' mast lives on.