It's in heavy use these days.

True, I suppose it will be in pretty heavy use until Freedom Tower tops out and can share the broadcasting load.

^
Good analysis. After the WTC's North Tower's antennae came down with the complex, more networks turned to transmitting from ESB's tower.

^ Correct. Both the ESB antenna and the extended antenna on the Conde Nast tower (built after 9/11) are serving now and will continue to serve as backup once the Freedom Tower is built.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/02282008...show_99599.htm

BEAST IN SHOW
KONG STILL KING ON HIS 75TH B-DAY

By LOU LUMENICK
February 28, 2008


NEW York's most famous tourist of all time is turning 75 on Sunday.

We're talking about King Kong, the 50-foot ape from the South Seas who tore down a piece of the old Sixth Avenue elevated subway line and perished at the foot of the Empire State Building after being shot down by Army planes.

All for the love of a blond actress played by Fay Wray.

When "King Kong" opened on March 2, 1933, the city was mired in the depths of the Great Depression. Things were so dire - 25 percent of the population was out of work - that the governor closed all of New York's besieged banks a day earlier.

The film had its world premiere at Radio City Music Hall, and - in an unprecedented move - the long-gone RKO Roxy, a block south on Sixth Avenue at 49th Street. The two huge theaters, with a combined seating capacity of 10,000 seats, both showed "King Kong" with elaborate stage shows that the ads claimed featured "500 singers, dancers, entertainers."

Despite mixed reviews - a critic for The Post wrote that "as a wild-eyed and occasionally cock-eyed spectacle, 'King Kong' is not as effective as it should have been" - there were lines around the block for sold-out shows.

"No money . . . yet New York dug up $89,932 in four days . . . to see 'King Kong,' setting a new all-time word's record for attendance of any indoor attraction," RKO, which was rescued from bankruptcy, boasted in another newspaper ad a few days later.

The story was the same across Depression-scarred America, with "King Kong" becoming the year's most successful film, taking in just under $2 million on a $672,000 investment. The film had several successful reissues, the last major one in 1956 - after its much-watched debut on TV.

"King Kong," which received no Oscar nominations, remains a staple while the film that won Best Picture for that year ("Cavalcade") has long been forgotten. It has been remade twice (in 1976, with the climax moved to the World Trade Center, and, more faithfully, by Peter Jackson in 2005), but it's the 1933 original that lingers in our collective memory.

Fay Wray, whose career went back to the silents, was distressed to find herself typecast in horror movies - while her "King Kong" screams were recycled for the benefit of other actresses with less vigorous lungs.

"I feel so sorry for Kong," she told The Post in 2000, four years before her death at age 96. "I thought he was so touching. Oh, my goodness, I didn't want him to be shot down. He had never done anything to hurt me."

Film Forum (filmforum.org) is celebrating the anniversary Sunday with two showings of the film. A "Fay Wray scream-alike contest" will follow the 1 p.m. screening.

More at
blogs.nypost.com/movies

When "King Kong" premiered in 1933, an ad in The Post boasted of its size,
also noting that "smoking permitted."

http://www.nypost.com/seven/02282008/photos/ent056.jpg

It's strange. My instructor from my college said that when he was traveling along the Interstate 10 in L.A. County, he saw a movie set. He drove by to get a glimpse and clue of what it was going to be.

Well guess what?! The curtain said "King Kong"!
I guess they're doing yet another remake. But it puzzles me. Since the shooting was in SoCal, does that mean that they're coming up with a whole different setting althogether?

Could be a sequel, don't know. But it doesn't matter, I'd see it.

http://www.amny.com/news/local/am-ki...,5516514.story

'King Kong' still roars over New York

http://www.newsday.com/media/photo/2008-02/36190813.jpg

A scene from the 1933 blockbuster film "King Kong." The Film Forum will be showing the classic flim at 1pm on Sunday March 2, 2008.

By David Freedlander
February 28, 2008


Seventy-five years ago this Sunday, New Yorkers for the first time saw what panic in the city looked like.

The occasion? A love-struck giant ape breaks free of his chains and climbs to the top of the Empire State Building, the city's newly built highest spire. As pandemonium ensues on the screen, audiences at Radio City Music Hall and the now-demolished RKO New Roxy howled with delight.

"Needless to say this picture was received by many a giggle to cover up the fright," said a review in the New York Times one day after "King Kong" debuted on March 2, 1933. "Constant exclamations issued from the Radio City Music Hall yesterday."

The film quickly became one of the first quintessentially New York movies. "It is such a New York movie because no matter who builds what elsewhere, there is nothing like the Empire State Building," said David Brin, author of "King Kong is Back: An Unauthorized Look at One Humongous Ape."

"The Eiffel Tower is just as iconic, but the French would be too blase, and the Sears Tower just wouldn't give you that uniquely New York perspective of an Empire State and a city of immigrants. I mean talk about cognitive dissonance."

On Sunday, the Film Forum will host two showings of the film, and host a Fay Wray "scream-alike" contest in between. Wray played the object of Kong's affection, who enjoys an unscheduled trip with him up the Empire State Building.

Film critic Elliot Stein, 80, is one of the few New Yorkers who can claim to have been at Radio City to witness Kong's introduction to the world. Though he says it is now his favorite film, Stein remembers feeling fear after the premiere that the BMT subway line wouldn't be there to take him and his father back to Brooklyn.

"It's a film in a way about such cockeyed American optimism, with the Empire State Building this central symbol of doing something extraordinary at the start of the Depression."

Though the Empire State Building is the star of the show, the rest of the city plays a supporting role. It opens on the waterfront across the river, with the skyline gleaming in the background. After Kong is captured and brought to New York, he is displayed for the masses at a Madison Square Garden-style venue. But panic in the streets soon erupts when the great ape escapes, and the huge metropolitan police force tries in vain to capture him. Those scenes capture a piece of the American experience that is only true to Gotham in the 30s.

"In New York it was much easier to create a sense of panic, because it's so crowded, and because there is no other place to go," said Claude Samton, an architect and photographer who was 5 when the film came out. "Growing up in New York you become conscious of buildings in a way that you don't elsewhere, and seeing them all film is the beginning of that love affair with the city."

The film has lived on in New Yorkers imaginations, helped by continual showings decades ago on WOR/Channel 9 as part of the "Million Dollar Movie," and with annual screenings on the former RKO station on Thanksgiving Day.

"This is not only how we got to see King Kong but how we got to become familiar with it in a modern way, where you watch it over and over and get to know it frame by frame,"said Bruce Goldstein, director of programming at Film Forum.

"For my generation, it's hard to look at tall buildings in the city now without imagining him up there," Goldstein said.

http://www.newsday.com/media/photo/2008-02/36190818.jpg


http://www.newsday.com/media/photo/2008-02/36190687.jpg

That movie is a classic!:D

All they needed was to feed him a huge :banana: to make him happy! :haha:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/ny...l?ref=nyregion

Bid to Jump Off 86th Floor Was Illegal, Court Rules


By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
March 5, 2008

New Yorkers may not jump off the Empire State Building, even with a parachute, after all, an appellate court in Manhattan ruled on Tuesday.

The four-judge panel overturned a lower court decision that had found that Jeb Corliss, a professional skydiver who tried to leap from the 86th-floor observation deck in April 2006 did not violate any laws because, among other things, he was experienced and had carefully planned the jump.

The judges, however, reduced the charge in the indictment from a felony charge of reckless endangerment with depraved indifference to life to a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment.

They said the Manhattan district attorney had conceded that the prosecutor in the case used an outdated standard in instructing the grand jury on the meaning of depraved indifference to life. The new standard, they said, requires a state of mind in which the defendant showed “an utter disregard for the value of human life,” and a willingness to act “because one simply doesn’t care” whether somebody is hurt.

As a result, they said, the grand jury’s consideration of the charge was “impaired.” The judges said they were not expressing an opinion as to whether a “depraved” charge would have been appropriate if it had been properly presented. But the judges rejected as “specious” the contention by Mr. Corliss’s lawyer, Mark Jay Heller, that nothing in the penal law prohibits jumping off tall buildings, saying that such conduct “is clearly encompassed within the reckless endangerment statutes.”

They said that the lower court ruling had improperly relied on Mr. Corliss’s statements to police about his training and planning to decide that he was capable of making the jump without hurting anyone, when those statements had not been presented to the grand jury as evidence.

Why block all attempts to do it even with a parachute?:shrug:

Parachute or not, you still have to land somewhere. Manhattan isn't known for its wide open, empty streets.

Is landing on one of the roofs illegal?

:previous: Trespassing?

Are all buildings surround the ESB protected?

You planning a jump soon?...

^

:jester:

No thank you. My life's going great!:D

In less than four weeks I'll be there in the 63 story. I can't wait !:cool:

I know the Empire State Bldg is 102 stories but I always wished they could raise it atleast 10 or more stories higher and make it's presence even more dominating on the skyline. If your not making the Freedom Tower but 1,368' high, Then atleast add some 20 floors to the ESB with this money and make it the third tallest in the world once BD and CS is completed.