Brooklyn Bridge
- Built 1869-1883
- Length: almost 6,000 ft (1.8 km)
- Tower height above high water: 276 ft (84 m)
- Foundation depth below high water: Brooklyn – 44 ft (13 m), Manhattan – 78 ft (24 m)
- Supports 6 lanes of vehicles and a shared pedestrian and bicycle path.
- Construction cost was $15.5 million
- 27 people died during construction
- A total of 150,300 people crossed the bridge on opening day. Price: one cent to cross.
- A total of 1,800 vehicles crossed on the first day. Vehicles were charged five cents to cross.
- As of 2018, an average of 116,000 vehicles, 30,000 pedestrians and 3,000 cyclists travel over the Brooklyn Bridge each day.
Statue of Liberty
- Height from base to torch 151’1″ (46 m)
- Ground to tip of torch 305’1″ (93 m)
- Length of right arm 42’0″ (12.8 m)
- Length of hand 16’5″ (5 m)
- Index finger 8’0″ (2.44 m)
- Length of nose 4’6″ (1.37 m)
- Head – Chin to cranium 17’3″ (5.26m)
- Width of head 10’0″ (3.05m)
- Width of eye 2’6″ (0.76m)
- The total weight of copper in the Statue is 31 tons
- Feet are 25 ft. long, US women’s shoe size 879.
- Wind Sway: 50 mph winds cause the Statue to sway up to 3″ and the torch up to 6″ .
Charging Bull
- Built: 1987
- Sculptor: Arturo Di Modica
- Weight: 7,000 pounds (3.5 tons)
- Cost: $360,000
“CIVIC FAME” atop Manhattan Municipal Building
- Sculptor: Adolph Alexander Weinman
- Built: 1913
- At 25 feet (7.6 m) it is the second-largest statue in Manhattan after the Statue of Liberty.
The Grand Central Terminal
- 750,000 visitors pass through daily – this is more than the population of Alaska!
- An estimated 10,000 people come into Grand Central every day to eat or drink.
- In 1947, over 65 million people (40% of the US population!) traveled through Grand Central.
- The staff at the information booth responds to around 1,000 questions an hour.
- The main concourse has the height of a 13 story building
- The celestial ceiling of the main concourse has 2,500 stars
- GCT is the largest train station in the world by the number of platforms. It has 44 platforms and 67 tracks
Rockefeller Center
- Created: 1933-1939
- It is a complex of 19 interconnected buildings — 14 of them being the original from the 1930s
- The construction of Rockefeller Center employed over 40,000 people
- 30 Rockefeller Plaza has 70 stories
- The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree measures 60 to 100 ft (18-30 meters) high and 45 ft (14 m) wide.
- The tree is decorated by 50,000 lights
- The star has 3 million Swarovski crystals across 70 triangular spikes.
- The star weighs 900 pounds!
Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge
- Built 1959 – 1964
- It is the longest suspension bridge in the US
- At the time of opening, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world
- Total length 13,700 ft (4,176 m)
- Carries 13 lanes of traffic
- The height of the towers 693 ft (211 m)
- The distance between the towers 4,260 ft (1,298 m)
- The towers are not parallel to each other, but are 1+5⁄8 farther apart at their tops than at their bases to account for the curvature of the Earth.
- The towers contain more than three times of metal used in the Empire State Building.
The Empire State Building
- Height: 1,250 ft (381 m)
- Total Height: 1,454 ft (443.2m) to top of lightning rod
- Floors: 102/103
- Steps: 1,872 from street level to the 103rd floor
- Windows: 6,514
- Elevators: 73, including six freight elevators
- The Empire State Building took only one year and 45 days to build (410 days)
- The Empire State Building Run-Up is an annual race up the stairs to the 86th floor (1,576 steps)
- There are observatories on both the 86th and 102nd floors. They attract around 4 million visitors annually.
Central Park
- Perimeter: 6 miles
- Dimensions: 2.5 m (4k) North to South, 0.5 m (0.8k) East to West.
- Central Park contains 58 miles (92.8 k) of pedestrian paths
- Size 843 acres
- Benches: 9,000, 7 miles laid end-to-end.
- Cost of “adopting” a bench: $7,500 to $25,000.
- 42 million annual visitors
- There are more than 20,000 trees in Central Park
- Created: 1857 – 1873
MetLife Tower
- Architect: Pierre LeBrun of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons
- Date: 1909
- Height: 700′
- Floors: 50
- The clocks measure 26.5 feet (8 m) (Kremlin clock – 6.12 m, and London’s Big Ben – 6.9 m)
- Each minute hand weighs half a ton
One World Trade Center
- 104 Stories
- 1,776 ft – a reference to the year when the United States Declaration of Independence was signed.
- Opened 2014
- It cost $4 billion and took eight years to build
- Elevator ride takes 47 seconds, while traveling 23 miles (37 kilometers) per hour
- WTC complex consists of 5 skyscrapers, 9/11 Memorial and Museum, Oculus and the Center for Performing Arts
The Twin Towers
- The North Tower stood over a quarter-mile tall at 1,368 ft (417 m).
- The South Tower stood over a quarter-mile tall at 1,362 ft (415 m).
- Each of the Twin Towers had 110 floors.
- Each tower’s footprint and floors were approximately an acre in size.
- On windy days, each tower could sway up to almost 12 inches side to side.
- There were 43,600 windows in the Twin Towers, equating to more than 600,000 square feet of glass. It took 20 days to wash them all.
- There were 198 elevators in the Twin Towers and 15 miles of elevator shafts.
Sources: www1.nyc.gov/, http://www.history.com/, http://www.nycroads.com/, guinnessworldrecords.com, http://www.wikipedia.com, http://www.britannica.com/, http://www.nps.gov
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